Financial Times
President George W. Bush this week in effect issued two ultimatums: one to Saddam Hussein and the other to the United Nations. Mr Bush told the UN General Assembly on Thursday the Security Council had failed in its obligation to enforce the dis-armament of Iraq, as much as the Baghdad regime had refused to meet its obligations by serially flouting council resolutions.
The international authority that arose out of the ruins of the second world war and the wreckage of the League of Nations faced a "difficult and defining moment", he said. "Are Security Council resolutions to be honoured and enforced, or cast aside without consequence?"
Mr Hussein, for his part, would have to "immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction" if he wished to avert war and save his regime.
It was a clever speech, in which the administration forswore its unilateralist instincts and channelled its desire to settle the Iraq issue through the UN, challenging its more-multi- lateralist-than-thou allies to come up with the goods. It also addressed legitimate and pressing concerns that have to be met.
The way to do that is through a robust Security Council resolution requiring Baghdad to re-admit UN teams to carry out weapons inspections without any conditions, backed up by the credible threat of military action. But the president implied rather than stated this was the way forward. Beyond cataloguing the crimes of Mr Hussein's regime, moreover, and the Iraqi dictator's ambitions to continue to develop and acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Mr Bush told us little we did not already know.
Bush's case
Speaking one day after the emotional commemoration of September 11, he elided Iraq into the "war" on terrorism, saying: "Our greatest fear is that the terrorists will find a short cut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale." Yet he did not make a clear and compelling case for war, based on new evidence.
The best available evidence was marshalled this week by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). It concluded Iraq probably had dangerous, residual WMD capabilities in chemical and above all biological arms. But its overall capability was "severely diminished" in comparison with the period just before the 1991 Gulf war - by the destruction of that war, subsequent bombing campaigns and, above all, the weapons uncovered and destroyed by UN inspectors before they were forced out in 1998. Nuclear weapons, the IISS judged, "seem the furthest from Iraq's grasp", unless it were to come by fissile material on the black market.
The US document on Iraq, released just before Mr Bush's speech, is a flimsier affair. Rather startlingly, there has been no "national intelligence estimate" or cross-agency judgment on Iraq's WMD capability since the Clinton administration.
The long-promised British dossier on Iraq is still awaited. But it is unlikely to take the case further than the sober IISS study, whose conclusions are mostly in the form of questions. But while a "killer fact" is unlikely to emerge, there will be a steady drumbeat of rhetoric and headlines. It is thus of paramount importance to keep the focus on the goal of disarmament.
Dubious contention
Mr Bush's contention, for example, that Iraq is the most likely state to furnish terrorists with some form of WMD is dubious. Nothing in Mr Hussein's infamous career suggests he would surrender to freelances any portion of the power, control and mystique he believes these weapons confer. He has all but staked his country on retaining some of his arsenal, believing it ensures his survival. There is arguably greater risk of such weapons falling into rogue hands in US-backed Pakistan, where domestic and regional instability threatens a military regime that has backed Islamist brigades in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
There can be no certainties; September 11 banished that. Nor, if inspections resumed in Iraq, would the results necessarily satisfy the US. All the more reason for Washington's allies to emphasise those of Mr Bush's words that touched on disarmament.
But if there is a new inspection regime, all Security Council members must back it to the hilt, without the divisive backsliding that undermined the 1991-98 campaign and so emboldened Baghdad to play cheat-and-retreat.
It is certainly a last chance for Mr Hussein. But in this last chance for the UN, the US, its most powerful member, must show good faith in giving it a real chance. It would be a big prize if concerted action short of war could draw the fangs of the Iraqi dictator and restore the authority and legitimacy of the UN - and save it from the fate of the League of Nations, destroyed by unilateral actions.
