Bush Finds Tough Going With Terror War Allies

by Jim Lobe

They had hoped to focus world opinion on Iraq's submission of an allegedly deceptive and incomplete inventory of its missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to the United Nations Security Council in order to ease the way for an invasion of Iraq by mid-February.

They had also hoped to get Turkey to agree to act as a base for U.S. ground troops, so that they could attack Baghdad from the north as well as from the south via Kuwait.

They did not get either one. In fact, all they got was aggravation, complaints, and defiance -- from friends and foes alike.

The week started auspiciously enough. Hyper-eager U.S. diplomats grabbed the original Iraqi report from the Colombian chairman of the Security Council before he had a chance to have it copied.

The White House cleared the latest additions to its controversial new national security strategy: a promise to respond with "overwhelming force," meaning nuclear weapons, if WMD were used against its troops, territory or allies; and the authority to conduct "effective interdiction" and preventive strikes against states or groups that are close to acquiring WMD or the missiles needed to deliver them.

Diplomatic and military muscles thus flexed before the (presumably awestruck) world, the administration spent the rest of the week on the receiving end of a collective obscene hand gesture by countries great and small.

No sooner had the new anti-WMD policy been released then an unflagged ship that had been tracked by U.S. satellites since leaving North Korea was seized by Spanish warships in the Indian Ocean and found to be carrying Scud missiles.

"A perfect opportunity to demonstrate U.S. determination and international cooperation," thought the hawks, until Yemen, a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, claimed that it had bought the missiles fair and square, protested their seizure and demanded that they be delivered.

Washington meekly, if angrily, climbed down, managing in turn to anger the Spanish, one of its strongest supporters in the "war against terrorism," who asked why they had risked the lives of their own commandos at Washington's request for nothing.

But that was only a foretaste of what was to come -- a much more serious challenge from North Korea itself. The country's announcement that it was re-starting a nuclear power plant that had been frozen under the terms of a 1994 accord with Washington in response to the administration's decision to cut off heavy oil deliveries early next year constituted direct defiance of repeated U.S. demands over the past two months that the country dismantle all of its nuclear programmes.

By announcing that it was resuming operations in the Yangbyon plant, whose plutonium was believed to have already produced one or two nuclear bombs, the North appeared to be calling Washington's bluff, even as it restated its position that serious bilateral talks, so far rejected by Washington, could resolve all outstanding problems.

Pyongyang's move -- made more dramatic by its announcement Friday that it has asked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to remove equipment that has been monitoring 8,000 spent fuel rods whose plutonium could be used to quickly produce several more bombs -- puts administration hardliners, who have pursued the tough line on North Korea over objections from Secretary of State Colin Powell and others, between a rock and hard place.

On the one hand, the credibility of the administration's tough pre-emption policy has been challenged directly by a charter member of the "axis of evil," which, unlike Iraq, really does have nuclear weapons.

On the other, hard-liners know that a pre-emptive military strike risks not only a major conflagration on the peninsula, but also the permanent derailing of their Iraq and Mideast plans, not to mention straining ties with their closest allies in East Asia -- South Korea and Japan -- both of which have urged Washington to be more flexible toward the North.

"The alternative to getting back to the table (with North Korea) is to risk a continuing spiral of action-reaction that will lead nowhere good," said Alan Romberg, a retired State Department expert on Korea now with the Washington-based Stimson Center.

How to resume talks without both losing credibility and provoking cries of double standards in its kid-gloves treatment of a nuclear-armed North Korea and a far weaker Iraq will not be easy. For now, the White House has said Pyongyang's decision is "unacceptable."

If Yemen was the most embarrassing of the week's episodes and North Korea the most dangerous, yet another major setback revolved around Turkey and the European Union (EU).

During what one senior administration official characterized as "intense" White House talks Tuesday with the new Turkish ruling party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Bush team offered an aid package worth more than $20 billion -- twice the entire annual U.S. foreign-aid budget -- in exchange for full Turkish co-operation with Washington on a ground invasion of Iraq from Turkish soil.

Erdogan, citing overwhelming domestic opposition to the idea, reportedly declined to strike a deal, but stressed that Ankara would be much more favorably disposed if the EU agreed to launch talks on Turkey's membership in the body within the next year.

Washington, which had already been lobbying the EU hard, intensified its efforts by getting Bush personally involved, but to no avail. By the end of the week, EU members agreed only to meet again in two years to determine whether Turkey had met political and human rights conditions on membership. The decision initially provoked fury in Ankara, while in Washington, officials said they were still trying to get clarification.

European diplomats complained that Washington's pressure had, if anything, been counter-productive and raised real resentments. "The Americans acted as if we don't have real rules and conditions on EU membership," said one based here. "What would have been your reaction if we demanded that you admit Canada as a state?"

European diplomats were particularly angry with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the leader of the administration's "attack-Iraq" faction, who travelled to Brussels after meeting Erdogan and Turkish generals in Ankara last week. "He really does believe that this is the Roman Empire," said one.

The Europeans are also increasingly angry over Washington's refusal to push forward a "road map" to be put together by "The Quartet" -- the United States, EU, Russia, and the United Nations -- to achieve an independent Palestinian state within three years.

The White House, which appointed a prominent, pro-Likud neo-conservative, Elliott Abrams, to oversee its Mideast portfolio 10 days ago, has defied EU pressure to finish work on the plan this month, before Israel's elections at the end of January.

Some EU diplomats reportedly favor dropping out of the Quartet and launching their own plan given the administration's recalcitrance.