Inching toward war

The UN inspectors’ report to the Security Council, if anything, only lends support to the position adopted by France, Germany, Russia and China. The International Atomic Energy Agency has categorically reaffirmed that Iraq has no nuclear weapons programme and that the aluminium tubes it imported are not meant for enrichment of uranium to make nuclear bombs. Iraq’s 150-km range Al-Samoud-2 ballistic missiles, originally permitted by UN but which technically may exceed the specified range, are being destroyed. Chief UN inspector, Hans Blix, has also clearly told the Security Council that Iraq has been co-operating and given some months — not weeks, or years — of further strengthened inspections, Iraq would be rid of any doubt about chemical and biological weapons. While Iraq was expected to comply with UN resolutions and some aspects of its WMD policies remain unexplained, there is little evidence to justify recourse to war.

On the one hand, the position of France, Germany, and Russia, inevitably, has stiffened by these conclusions. The US position, on the other hand, has also hardened with President George Bush declaring that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq poses a direct threat to the USA, and hence he must use force to remove that threat. Disarmament continues to be the mantra, but “regime change” for total disarmament remains the central US goal. But larger issues no doubt drive immediate policy choices. Historically, it has always been extremely difficult for great powers to reverse a policy of the use of force once it crosses the Rubicon of publicly demonstrated use or threat of use of such force; and the US crossed that some weeks ago.

What has complicated matters is the nature of the evolving relations between the great powers. The increasing polarisation among them, where almost all great powers appear to be on one side, seeking the UN as the source of legitimacy for dealing the problem, and the world’s solitary super power and the UK on the other, who had decided for a variety of reasons to place its faith in unilateralism, needs careful understanding. Of greater concern is the question of the consequences for the innocent Iraqi. For us in India, the challenge is that the principles that we have traditionally upheld have come into some tension with our key interests. It is necessary to reassert these principles, like the importance of peaceful resolution of the Iraqi situation, and the critical need for UN legitimacy of any action. But we also must weigh the implications for our future interests not so much in terms of the post-war benefits, but of the nature of great power relations that would continue to affect us in the coming years.