Reuters August 20, 2002
Credibility on Line over Iraq Rhetoric
By Jonathan Wright
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On Iraq as on the future of the Palestinian leadership, Bush administration rhetoric may have gone beyond what it can achieve, putting its credibility on the line if it has to back down, analysts said on Tuesday.
By repeatedly threatening to get rid of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, President Bush has made his Iraq policy one of the standards by which his performance is likely to be judged, in elections and in history.
But the more the U.S. establishment and U.S. allies abroad think through the implications of a major war against Iraq, the more reasons they find why it might not be such a good idea.
Doubt and dissent in Republican circles have increasingly come to the surface, culminating in the prediction last week by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft that an attack on Iraq would seriously jeopardize the Bush administration's "global counter-terrorism campaign."
Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who like Scowcroft served under the first President George Bush, said on Sunday that he too did not believe that "regime change" in Iraq was a legitimate policy at this stage.
Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state and president of the Middle East Institute, said Bush advisers who favor war had tried to impose their agenda by speaking so openly about the possibility of a military campaign.
"They have been trying to tilt the playing field, trying to win in the internal debate by establishing a set of premises in the public's mind that makes it very hard for the president to walk away from it," he told Reuters.
BUSH'S REPUTATION
"They have invested so much political capital in the claim that they are going to get him (Saddam Hussein) that it does become a self-fulfilling commitment," added Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
"The real issue becomes that we would lose face. So we'll go to war, we'll slaughter however many thousands of Iraqis and put at risk however many young American men and women GIs because somebody doesn't want to lose face," she added.
Richard Perle, the Pentagon adviser who has led the campaign to overthrow Saddam, confirmed last week that President Bush's reputation was now part of the equation.
"The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism," he told the New York Times, in response to Scowcroft's remarks.
"If Mr. Bush doesn't get rid of Saddam after all this saber rattling, he will look like the biggest wimp since -- well, his father," commentator Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times on Saturday.
The Bush administration has painted itself in a similar corner with the Palestinian Authority of President Yasser Arafat, after Bush said in June that it would work for a Palestinian state only with a new leadership.
In practice, U.S. officials have resumed contacts with senior Palestinian Authority officials and have welcomed the recent progress achieved in Israeli-Palestinian talks.
The United States has continued to ostracize Arafat himself but the fiction that Palestinian leaders are separate from Arafat is increasingly difficult to maintain.
State Department spokesman Philip Reeker glossed over the apparent contradiction on Monday, saying it was Palestinian institutional change that the United States is seeking.
LIMITED ATTACK OPTION
The analysts said that in the case of Iraq the Bush administration might try to match its rhetoric by making a limited attack, short of trying to overthrow Saddam.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett implied such a possibility on Monday, saying Bush may decide "that we need to take action to minimize the threat that he now poses." John Pike, an expert on defense policy and the director of GlobalSecurity.org, said Bush may launch air strikes against suspected chemical and biological weapons plants and other military facilities as soon as late November.
But the analysts said that approach carried its own political risks for the president.
It would not satisfy the hawks who favor tougher action and who criticized former President Bill Clinton for his policy of sporadic attacks on Iraqi military facilities.
The administration would also need to explain away its earlier statements that Iraq's chemical and biological facilities are difficult to locate and destroy.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in July that many of Iraq's weapons sites were "deeply buried" and would be hard to destroy using air power alone. Iraq could have biological laboratories in indistinguishable mobile trailers, he added.
"The more they talk about the impossibility of doing a limited operation and taking care of the problem of weapons of mass destruction, the harder it will be for the president to do that," Walker said.
Intifad Qanbar, head of the Washington office of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, said he doubted the Bush administration would fall back on the limited option.
"My understanding is that the policy of the U.S. government is regime change. I don't think this administration is going to do what Clinton was doing," he told Reuters.
© Copyright 2002 Reuters
