The Washington Post Ever Faster By Jim Hoagland Sunday, January 12, 2003 President Bush does not have a poker face. He allows himself the luxury of letting his emotions show through to communicate his inner feelings to others. Study the recent news photographs and television film and you see the image of a man who knows that he will very soon have to send American forces to war in Iraq.
In truth the decision is being made for him in large part by the pace and direction of events. Think of the Bush campaign for regime change in Iraq as a crowded bus picking up speed on a straight, clear highway. There are still exit ramps that can be taken at 35 miles per hour. But they become impossible to take at speeds of 60 or higher. And that is close to the speed now attained in the buildup of diplomatic and military pressures on Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi dictator's actions are now dictated by an iron logic that leads to war as well. He verbally abuses U.N. weapons inspectors and Arab neighbors who would be useful to him in averting war. But he must maintain his bloody control at home by showing toughness in crisis. Wars start when each nation is convinced it has no choice but to continue what it is doing, because every alternative is worse. The last metaphorical exit ramp before American invasion begins would presumably be the Iraqi dictator's flight or removal by coup. But the point has come when even that event is unlikely to relieve the extreme pressures that have been focused on Iraq for the past year. Would Bush order American divisions deployed on Iraq's borders not to intervene to halt a bloodbath being carried out by Saddam Hussein's heirs against rebelling Iraqis? I don't know the answer. I suspect Bush doesn't either at this point. But it is a question that now has to be thought about seriously. Iraqis have internalized the expectation that Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime are history. So has much of the Arab world. A second failure -- repeating the one made by Bush's father in 1991 -- to fulfill that expectation while the means are at hand would be disastrous. Saddam Hussein's leading opponents are scheduled to gather in northern Iraq in a few days to shape a provisional government that would be able to work with U.S. forces as Iraqi territory is liberated. They will meet in Irbil under the protection of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani's forces as well as the U.S. and British warplanes that enforce the northern no-fly zone. Officials from the White House, State Department, Pentagon and other agencies who will attend the conference met here on Friday with Ahmed Chalabi, the guiding spirit of the Iraqi National Congress. "This conference will be held on Iraqi soil and will be attended by many of our brothers who will come from the areas occupied by Saddam's forces. His authority is collapsing internally," Chalabi said after the White House meeting. A successful, highly visible INC meeting in Irbil would raise Iraqi expectations to the boiling point and probably spur Bush and Vice President Cheney to lock in the "shock therapy" strategy for the Middle East and Persian Gulf that they have been considering for months. Change in Iraq is the leading edge of a new U.S. commitment to Middle East peacemaking and pressure for democratic change in other authoritarian regimes, as Bush and Cheney have made clear to recent visitors to the White House. Failure to disarm Saddam Hussein and change the nature of the Iraqi regime now would doom all of these ambitions, and more. There is no guarantee of success through shock therapy. But the enormous costs for Iraq's helpless civilians and for global stability of any effort to swerve the bus off the highway at this point are clear. Those costs help explain the Bush team's determination to stay focused on Iraq while keeping North Korea's latest depredations on a diplomatic and political track. Inconsistent? Only if you believe that the only answer in both cases is U.S. invasion or decades of U.S. tolerance of dangerous dictators. To govern is to choose, and to distinguish paradox from contradiction. The argument that it is hypocritical to prepare for war with Iraq while trying to avoid one with North Korea is a debater's straw man. Twelve years ago this month, the United States went to war against Iraq on Iraqi territory and incurred enormous moral obligations to the people of that nation. But in contrast to its postwar actions in Germany, Japan, Korea, Kosovo, Bosnia and elsewhere, the American government ran away as fast as it could from those obligations. They remain, and they are sufficiently important to have the United States now fulfill them.
