The Unreality Of Imminent War

by Jim Lobe

On the one hand, there is a general assumption that the United States is going to invade Iraq -- perhaps with UN Security Council approval, perhaps not -- no later than mid- to late-March, and possibly as early as next month.

On the other hand, there seems to be almost no effort to build already-soft public support for war with Iraq. On the contrary, the ongoing and patently more-dangerous crisis over North Korea's nuclear program has forced Iraq off the front pages, while a growing number of mainstream commentators and politicians -- not to mention U.S. allies -- are asking why containing Iraq is not a better option than invading it.

The build-up to war is inescapable. Top officials, including President George W. Bush himself, visit military bases and warn that Washington is ready for war. The television is virtually filled every day with pictures of worried embraces between soldiers and their families as, in the tens of thousands, troops, marines, pilots, and sailors set off for the Gulf.

At the current rate, the United States should have close to 200,000 military personnel in the immediate vicinity of Iraq by the first week of February.

Adding to the impression of inevitability are confident declarations by people outside government who are in a position to know what the top war-planners are thinking. Richard Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and an intimate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputy Paul Wolfowitz, tells reporters that he has no doubt Bush will go to war by March, with or without Security Council backing.

Similarly, the slightly less-hawkish, more-multilateralist former secretary of state, George Shultz, a confidant and adviser of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, tells the Washington Times that the UN inspection team's failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will not deter Bush from going to war, and that he is confident other countries will follow.

And there is logic to this sense of inevitability of an invasion, sooner, rather than later. As neo-conservative hawks like Perle have repeatedly pointed out, Bush has breathed so long and so heavily about "regime change" in Iraq that to back off now would create a possibly lethal loss of credibility in the international arena.

Moreover, Washington has no desire to bear the costs of keeping the 200,000 or more military personnel now on the way to or already deployed around Iraq in the field for months on end.

But the other hand is also a gnawing reality.

First, the eruption of the nuclear crisis over North Korea has eclipsed Iraq as the most "clear and present danger" at the moment.

While Iraq indeed may have weapons of mass destruction and may even be working on a nuclear arms program (evidence for which has yet to be uncovered), U.S. intelligence agencies believe Pyongyang has one or two bombs already and is capable of manufacturing half a dozen more within a few months of re-starting its Yongbyon nuclear reactor. And, unlike Iraq, North Korea has medium- to long-range missiles to deliver its weapons, not only to Seoul, just 60 kilometers away, but to Japan and possibly even to Hawaii and Alaska as well.

North Korea's defiance and the danger it creates are raising awkward questions in the public's mind.

Earlier this week, former Representative Jack Kemp, a very prominent right-wing Republican close to many neo-conservative hawks and the party's vice-presidential candidate in 1996, wrote in the Washington Times: "There seems to be a growing belief by some in Washington that even though Iraq appears to be cooperating with UN weapons inspectors, the diplomatic options in Iraq are rapidly dwindling and war is inevitable. But why must war be inevitable?"

"There also seems to be a consensus that unless North Korea does something outrageous, like attacking one of its neighbors, we should pursue non-military options. Why is that very reasonable approach to North Korea not also applicable to Iraq?"

The administration thus far is doing a very poor job of answering these questions from people, like Kemp, who are not known for their "dovish" views. And, while it tried to defuse the crisis this week by agreeing, under pressure from allies Japan and South Korea, to "talk" but not "negotiate" with Pyongyang, it appears that Kim Jong Il's style of brinkmanship will not permit Bush to change the subject back to Iraq.

While no major new public opinion polls on Iraq have been conducted since before Christmas, experts with access to private polling say that support for invasion has, if anything, declined over the past month, partly due to the North Korean crisis. For most of the past year, polls have shown about two-thirds of the public support invading Iraq, but only if authorized by the Security Council or backed by major U.S. allies. Less than 30 percent of the public have said they support unilateral action.

Support for war may even have dropped as UN inspectors have fanned out, unimpeded, across Iraq over the last few weeks. Indeed, a central element of Bush's case against Iraq -- that Baghdad's order for thousands of special aluminum tubes offered proof that it was building centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs -- was substantially undermined Thursday when the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said he found Iraq's claim that the tubes were for making rockets to be credible..

So, faced with all of these obstacles to building a convincing argument for war with Iraq, why is the administration not trying harder to rally public opinion?

Stephen Kull, director of the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) has a theory: "Either, they (the administration) don't have a card to play (to prove Saddam has WMD in order to win public opinion and Security Council support), so they're trying to create a sense of momentum or inevitability with all these deployments -- in which case there's no evidence that it's working."

"Or, they do have a big card to play and they're waiting for the right moment to play it."

That theory contradicts senior intelligence officials, who for months have been telling reporters that they do not have a "smoking gun."