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Friday, November 15, 2002 06:52 p.m.

How tricky is Bush's UN Trap?

He makes several plausible suppositions:

1. Hans Blix will not be tying himself in knots to provide Bush with a UN-giftwrapped casus belli for his Iraqi adventure. Institutional bureaucratic reticence, combined with a genuine lack of will so to do will, no doubt, ensure, as Kristol suggests, that his reports are ambiguous as to both critical WMD findings and matters of cooperation (or the lack of it).

2. The French and Russians (whatever Blix reports) will find the information before them inconclusive, and have a raft of dilatory proposals designed to see off the start-date of hostilities well into the inhospitable Iraqi summer.

3. Saddam, rather than (as so often in the past) snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, will acquiesce in the offer of stalemate that 1441 extends to him; entering into the spirit of the bureaucratic paperchase, he will ensure enough cooperation to satisfy Blix's conscience, and thus secure more time for himself.

Perhaps. As usual, it's a remarkably one-dimensional view of things. It's today's equivalent of the Cold War prism through which Ho Chi Minh, for one, was so disastrously misjudged; of the maps in the New York Times Week in Review section which neatly demonstrated the precise forecast sequence of the fall of the dominoes, should World Communism not be stopped in its tracks in Vietnam. Certainty and neatness, like a schoolmarm's copy-book - where, in reality, there was and is only mess and grime.

Let's suppose for a minute that Blix does come back with the sort of curate's egg- toned report [2] that Kristol suggests: is Bush a helpless baa-lamb in the the face of his two foxy European opponents? Isn't a US President faced daily with negotiations of the same sort (but of lesser complexity) with recalcitrant Congressmen and Senators?

With Russia, the bargaining starts with oil and gas; not just the contracts that Russian companies have signed with Saddam (and the debt that resulting revenues were supposed to offset), but the question of Caspian oil, and the exploitation of Russian oil resources generally. Not only will the Russians be sensitive to the immediate effects of the war and of (no doubt limited) post-war increases in Iraqi sales on the O&G market; but they will also worry about the way in which the exploitation of Iraqi oil (#2 in reserves) in the medium term will affect such things as the viability of exploration of Siberian fields.

Their oil shopping-list, needless to say, will be much longer and more complex than that. And they will have others. For instance, Chechnya is off the table now, for 9/11 reasons. No reason why it should not be put in play, only to have it taken back off the table as part of a settlement including Russian acquiescence in a US attack on Iraq. And there's bilateral debt that might be susceptible to forgiveness in some kind of enhanced Tauscher-type deal.

It's a multidimensional chess-board of the sort that the Adminstration play on each day with the folks on the Hill.

France may be trickier. The oil question is nowhere near as pressing for France as for Russia, for starters. But the same point goes for France as for Blix: if Blix doesn't want to be the guy who provides the detonator for war, so France (Awkward Squad past mistress as she is) may be reluctant to act as point-man for a platoon of one against a general movement of support for war.

Besides, even casting aside all considerations of the Franco-American alliance in NATO, their economic ties, etc, what can she do? Put forward her own resolution opposing a US attack on Saddam? The US should have the votes to defeat that without the use of a veto, surely. And will the US be putting forward a resolution for authority to attack and thus open themselves up to a French veto? If there were a majority in the Security Council in favour of the attack, why would the Americans feel obliged to do so?

The French have won their two-stage process, it's true. But not a two-resolution process. UNSCR 1441 doesn't condition the validity of an attack on Iraq on their being an authorising resolution agreed during Stage Two. It merely offers the Council, in the report-back mechanism, an opportunity to express its further thoughts at that stage. If the US were by then in a minority of one, the legitimacy of a subsequent attack would be vulnerable not by virtue of any requirement of 1441, but because, as a matter of politics, the US would have lost the support of the Council.

It's plainly not my field. But there is certainly scope for military action (self-defence being the most obvious case) which is

1. not specifically authorised by the UNSC; but which is nevertheless
2. legal under international law.

In fact, the whole question of the requirement of UNSC authorisation cannot be a simple one. For instance, surely such authorisation of itself cannot always turn an illegal armed attack into a legal one. The tricky area of preemptive attacks springs to mind in the context.

Kristol's piece is very much in the tradition of the Yankee whining about being tricked by the wily and perfidious European. The Daniel Boone act is scarcely persuasive in these days of US foreign policy sophistication (if it was in Boone's day!), but serves as a displacement activity for the hard thinking required about such a (literally) vital topic. And (for those anti-war folk foolish enough to take the hook) gives a measure of false assurance that Uncle Sam is being kept hog-tied by the Russkies and Frogs.

Hog-tied? Hogwash!

1. There is a useful listing of all the dozens of UN Security Council Resolutions relating to Iraq (dating back to 1974!).
2. I'm assuming, for the sake of avoiding further complicating the argument, that my interpretation of SCR 1441 is incorrect.