WASHINGTON — Like war, talk of war is a blunt instrument. President Bush’s repeated promise to change Iraq’s regime ripples through the international system and American domestic politics with surprising midsummer velocity. The threat of military action is producing change months before action will come.
Iraq’s neighbors are scrambling desperately to find cover, get on board the U.S. war express or help derail it. European politicians on the campaign trail suddenly emphasize their commitments to peace rather than trans-Atlantic solidarity. At home Senate and House Democrats maneuver to avoid trapping themselves on the wrong side of a politically popular Bush war on Iraq, as many of them did in 1991.
Most of this positioning is self-protective, and much of it is premature. Bush says credibly that a decision to go to war has not been made. But that does not deter media competition for scoops on war plans that will be discarded, overhauled or out of date before strikes on Baghdad come. The hunt produces incomplete snapshots of snapshots.
This cacophony on Iraq is not unhelpful to Bush. He can let Saddam Hussein twist in the windstorm of words through the rest of the year. A well-managed war of nerves raises the pressure on the Iraqi dictator. It could even gain some of Bush’s objectives before the shooting starts.
A slow, deliberate buildup to the conflict does not bring only political disadvantages for Washington and its allies, as is widely assumed, or leave the initiative in Iraqi hands. It reshapes the terrain of the eventual battle.
Look at Iran. There the deeply divided government responds to a credible U.S. threat to strike at Baghdad by showing splits on this issue as well.
President Mohammad Khatami’s timidly reformist administration has been rocked in recent months by popular demonstrations demanding real change. War next door would bring unpredictable pressures on his failing regime. So Khatami welcomed Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Saud al Faisal, to Tehran last weekend to seek support for an appeal for Iraq "to respect the U.N. resolutions so as to remove the grounds for an attack."
But Iran’s national security and military officials who engaged in an eight-year war with Iraq (as well as conducting a secret arms-for-hostages trade with the Reagan administration) detest Saddam Hussein even more than they detest the Great Satan. They welcomed prominent members of the Iraqi opposition, including Ahmed Chalabi, the driving force of the Iraqi National Congress, to Tehran this week.
Talks about a post-Saddam Iraq were held in Tehran a few days before Chalabi and the others are due in Washington for similar talks with the Pentagon and State Department. "There is a broad and growing international consensus on the need for regime change and the role the Iraqi opposition will play in that change," Chalabi told me by telephone from Tehran on Tuesday. He also telephoned from the Iranian capital to State Department officials in Washington.
These meetings follow reports on official Iranian Web sites that Tehran has recently rejected personal appeals from Saddam Hussein to return Iraqi jet fighters flown out to safety during the Gulf War and to sell Iraq arms and other materiel to repel an imminent U.S. attack.
Turkey’s military establishment is also content to watch the Iraqi dictator twist in the windstorm. Reports from Ankara suggest that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s July visit achieved informal understandings of Turkish-U.S. military cooperation in toppling Saddam. Turkey’s politicians, wrestling their way through an economic crisis, are also positioning the nation for war next winter.
They have moved up parliamentary elections to Nov. 3 and passed an ambitious legal package of human-rights reforms that will improve the lot of Turkey’s Kurdish minority. Ankara’s relationship with the Kurds of eastern Turkey and northern Iraq was a major topic during Wolfowitz’s visit. Turkey gives every sign of having taken Wolfowitz’s assurances seriously, and having chosen sides.
Iraq’s weaker neighbors above all avoid the appearance of having chosen. Jordan’s King Abdullah is operating in full-panic mode, loudly proclaiming the United States will not be allowed to use bases in his country and arguing against an attack. The Saudis send the same message more subtly but with as much fear and trembling.
Such posturing is prudent at this point in a war of nerves. Neither Jordan nor Saudi Arabia wants to give Iraq a pretext for new aggression before the United States is ready. But if the windstorm turns into a real storm next winter, no government near the path of destruction can afford to be unresponsive to U.S. war needs and goals. That would be choosing suicide.
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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