There will be war in Iraq. Barring a stunning, last-minute reversal -- a complete coup in Baghdad that ousts not just Saddam Hussein but his entire loathsome regime -- the United States and a coalition of allies will disarm Iraq by force. This outcome is nigh-inevitable; the question is no longer why war or if war, but when war.
But how the war against Saddam Hussein will be conducted still remains in limbo. The question mark is the United Nations -- will the Security Council finally back its words with action and enforce the decade's worth of disarmament resolutions that Iraq currently flaunts? Attempts at enforcement through economic and diplomatic means have failed; the only solution left is a military one.
Most of the international community recognizes this unpleasant fact and awaits a U.S.-led strike to remove Saddam Hussein and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. At last count, the nations pledging support for military action include Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. That is an impressive list -- an impressive coalition.
Yet one obstacle remains: Franco-German obstruction on the U.N. Security Council. Germany has vowed not to support an invasion even if the Security Council calls for one. Even as mountains of evidence that Iraq continues to produce and conceal weapons of mass destruction pile up, France continues to stall. Both nations (and, to a lesser degree, Russia and China, who seem content to sit on the fence while the Franco-German block runs interference) continue to repeat the same demand: inspections need to be given more time to work.
This begs the question: how much more time? Inspectors have had more than a decade. The first resolution calling on Iraq to disarm passed the Security Council 12 years ago. Iraq ejected the inspection teams back in 1998. It has been three months since Security Council resolution 1441 sent inspectors to Iraq yet again, and still Baghdad refuses to cooperate. Saddam has run out of time.
Besides, the idea that inspectors can resolve the current crisis is founded upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the inspection process. The role of inspections is not to send U.N. scientists on a scavenger hunt across Iraq, looking for hidden weapons -- the process that is occurring now. All it takes to conceal massive weapons stockpiles from such a process is a mobile lab, a dual-use plant or the vast Iraqi desert and a shovel. Utilizing this farcical hide-and-seek approach, thousands of inspectors with all the time in the world might never find a thing, and all the while Saddam could continue to cook up biological, chemical and -- eventually -- nuclear weapons. But this was never the way inspections were intended to work.
Resolution 1441 -- along with many others before it -- ordered Iraq to declare to the Security Council the location and condition of all its weapons programs and then to destroy the prohibited materials. The purpose of inspections is to go to the sites Iraq declared and verify that the weapons have been destroyed, that Saddam has disarmed. Yet Iraq's weapons declaration -- all 10,000-plus-pages of it -- denies that Baghdad has any weapons at all. This claim is utterly false -- the U.N.'s own reports detail a shopping list of prohibited items Saddam is known to have possessed, and inspectors have already turned up dozens of illegal munitions and missiles that -- according to the Iraqi declaration -- don't exist. Thus, by lying in his weapons declaration, Saddam Hussein has defeated the entire point of inspections, placed Iraq in material breach of yet another U.N. resolution and, in doing so, forfeited his final chance to avoid forcible regime change. The fact that head weapons inspector Hans Blix has repeatedly told the Security Council that Iraq is uncooperative with inspection teams and refuses to allow open interviews with weapons scientists just completes the picture.
So what is the Franco-German alternative to military intervention? Right now, there is none. France has floated the idea of sending Blix thousands of new inspectors and sending U.N. troops to back-up the inspection teams. This plan seems rather odd, given that Blix has not asked for more inspectors. Likely it would only cause Iraq to complain that it cannot cooperate with so many inspectors at once and provide another chance for Saddam to stall. Besides, Iraq's falsified declaration has defeated the original purpose of inspections anyway.
And how would the inspectors and their escorts disarm Iraq? They would need to remain in the country for years, to call-in frequent airstrikes against suspected weapons sites, to impose stringent controls on transportation and industry. The inspectors would become a police force. The result would be a quasi-occupation of Iraq, with all the economic cost, civilian casualties and human risk of a war, but without any guarantee of disarming Iraq and at the price of leaving Saddam Hussein snugly in power. Such a solution is worse than the outcome it is intended to avoid.
The solution to the Iraqi crisis is no longer inspections, because Baghdad has denied the inspectors the opportunity to do their jobs. It is not the inspectors' responsibility to find Saddam's weapons; it is Saddam's obligation to produce them. He has refused; now he must go. And he will -- it is only a question of when and how. Ideally, unambiguous U.N. approval in the form of a new resolution would precede a strike. But resolution 1441 already permits the use of force, and if France and Germany continue to balk, then they will be left isolated as international troops move on Baghdad. Allons-y!
