Drumbeat on Iraq covers confused military aims

`How", asked Karl Kraus, "is the world ruled and led to war? When diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print". Judged by this benchmark, the US and Britain are heading fast for a military confrontation with Iraq.

The drumbeat of background briefings talking up Iraq's capacity to manufacture and deliver chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction can be seen plainly in some of the main British and US newspapers. They include a further crucial assumption: that such a capacity leads inexorably to the use of such weapons against neighbouring states.

If this is so, there is all the more reason to prevent them; an Iraqi refusal to allow UN inspectors must signify active preparations for war. And it is necessary to discredit Russian and French attempts to find a diplomatic solution by heavily underlining their special interests in trading with Iraq, having debts repaid after sanctions are lifted, or revealing selective information about how Moscow has underwritten the Iraqi war machine.

The propaganda drumbeat was accompanied by the sound of the US NATO allies coming on board to back the military initiative, often after broad hints that it would be very much in their interests to do so. Presumably, Germany still favours the enlargement of NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary? Each of these states are claimed to be supporting the US stance. Spain and Portugal say they will allow US military bases to be used.

Ireland has supported diplomacy as pursued by France and Russia in the absence of a Security Council resolution. But diplomats here are fully aware of how crucial the British and US governments are for the Northern Ireland peace process.

So far, the line-up is conspicuously western and northern but still quite selectively so. The French refusal to go along with a military strike has made a common position among the EU states impossible, even if there was a capacity to deliver on such a consensus.

The US has had only limited success in reconstructing support in the Middle East, notably failing to convince the Saudis to allow air strikes from bases in that kingdom. Matters are certainly not helped by the precarious state of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, as pointed references are made to Israel's lack of compliance with successive Security Council resolutions.

Those tempted to dismiss Boris Yeltsin's warnings of the danger that a world war could arise from this conflict should pay attention to Israel's reported threats that it would use nuclear weapons in retaliation for any Iraqi attack.

The Russians have said repeatedly that they have basic interests at stake. Their foreign minister, Mr Primakov, yesterday called for the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, to go to Baghdad and negotiate a diplomatic solution. Russian diplomats took his decision to call off a Middle East trip this week as a sign of him being pressurised by the Anglo-American coalition.

A similar suspicion was voiced by his predecessor, Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in an interview with this newspaper. The UN, he said, is not a kind of tribunal, it is a "purely political order . . . What is in the Charter regarding the independence of the Secretary General unfortunately doesn't correspond to reality because member-states use the UN for their own purposes."

Crucially, the UN has no intelligence service and cannot be sure that top civil servants will not provide information to or act on behalf of their own governments.

It follows that the kind of compromise being floated this week by the Arab League, the French and Russians - involving a combination of UN inspections and diplomats from the Security Council and having access to at least eight sites previously denied to them - is itself subject to purely political scrutiny. This is dangerous insofar as the British and US governments have so upped the conditions in preparation for a military strike.

It is an essential part of the functioning of this political order that diplomacy should be accompanied by credible threats to use force. French diplomats have been careful to insist that Iraq must comply with the UN resolutions, which call for the dismantling of Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, hinting that their apparent opposition to a military strike may change if insufficient progress is made towards that goal. But there has been sufficient evidence of movement to encourage them. Much revolves around the answer to two large questions: What are Saddam Hussein's intentions with such weapons? And what would be the objectives of a military strike?

If it is true, as the AngloAmerican propaganda has it, that the Iraqi dictator is best interpreted as a totalitarian leader bent on putting these weapons to use against neighbouring states then a maximalist response, designed to remove him from power or at least to cripple his military capacity, would seem to be most appropriate.

But the signals are confusing as Mr Clinton resists maximalist calls for the use of ground troops, or the kind of force that would get rid of Saddam Hussein, in favour of the proposition that these are intended to be threats designed to keep him under notice not to develop or use such weapons.

In a revealing article published in the International Herald Tri- bune on Thursday, based on accounts from three people who have been talking to Mr Clinton, Jim Hoagland reports the president is veering between options ranging from "a spine-breaking aerial assault that would inevitably produce heavy civilian casualties and an essentially cosmetic attack that would minimise Arab and European criticism of American actions".

He says the civilian casualties and Arab criticism loom largest in the president's mind; it is his aides who bring up the threats that Saddam's continued survival represent.

Hoagland expects a typical Clinton compromise down the middle which will do no great harm to either him or Saddam. This disappoints him for it guarantees that the Clintonites "will get neither effective diplomacy nor effective military action". His indecision and his preoccupation with the Lewinski affair, have, according to this account, prevented the kind of determination which allowed George Bush and James Baker to project power in 1990-1991.

However, the circumstances are surely very different. On this occasion, Iraq has not invaded Kuwait but is merely suspected of harbouring, developing and being determined to use weapons of mass destruction. It is dangerous to contemplate military action based only on such suspicions. Not surprisingly, it shows in the confused war aims being canvassed diplomatically as this crisis comes to a head.