WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, Americans have been told by officials of three administrations that ending the deadly and unique threat that Iraq’s Baathist regime poses to U.S. interests was not urgent. This was never true. Iraq is America’s most important unfinished business abroad.
President Bush’s recognition of a reality that so many worked so hard for so long to obscure has rallied his own officials to a still evolving policy of regime change in Iraq. No longer are we told by Colin Powell and others that Saddam Hussein is "in a box." Now we are told that the Iraqi dictator must be ousted through diplomatic, political or military means.
There may be less immediate change than meets the eye. In the weeks and months just ahead, both Washington and Baghdad will engage in set pieces of posturing and playing for time during a period of phony war, phony peace. If you get confused by plans to "smarten" economic sanctions on Iraq, implied promises to renew weapons inspections there or Iraqi officials’ ostentatiously paying court to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, then you will have been paying attention. Much of this is dust in the eyes.
But there are key points on which to focus as premature war whoops from hawks and equally uninformed warnings of disaster from doves compete for your attention. Here are my top five:
Bush’s new and determined focus on Iraq strips away much of the evasion and creative fiction deployed to justify inaction by officials in his father’s administration after Operation Desert Storm, by Bill Clinton &Co. throughout eight disgraceful years and by Bush’s own team in the first seven months of this presidency.
Progress came last week when the State Department dropped the pretense that Syria and other states could be persuaded to police their borders and halt lucrative, sanctions-breaking smuggling with Iraq. Poorly advised on his first trip to the Middle East last year, Powell originally trumpeted Syrian promises to that effect. The secretary of state also now seems not to be pushing his sanctions-streamlining effort as a way to stall or deflect military action against Iraq, but to set the stage for it.
Saddam Hussein recently published his first novel. But fiction seems to be going out of style in Washington, at least on the subject of the Iraqi dictator. Time for him to face the truth — and the music.
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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