/ 22 September 2002

Bush steps up Iraq campaign on all fronts

From the corridors of the United Nations to the halls of Congress, the Bush administration is stepping its campaign against Iraq, putting its political, diplomatic and military muscle on the line.

The coming days and weeks will be crucial for President George Bush as he waits to see whether the UN Security Council will pass a new, tougher resolution to force Iraq to comply with its disarmament commitments and whether Congress will give him the green light to use force if necessary to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Bush himself has raised the bar, warning that Washington and its allies will act unilaterally if the world community fails to ensure that Iraq is clear of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

”If the United Nations Security Council won’t deal with the problem, the United States and some of our friends will,” Bush said. ”If you want to keep the peace you’ve got to have the authorisation to use force.”

Passage of the congressional resolution on Iraq sought by Bush would give him more ammunition in the upcoming tough international negotiations on Iraq and would make the threat of a military intervention more credible.

”It would be important for all of us to speak as a nation, and as a country to give this powerful signal to our diplomatic efforts,” said Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The vote will be ”a signal not just to both the United Nations and (Iraqi President Saddam Hussein), but also to others in the Middle East and to our European allies,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, of the Brookings Institution, a leading think tank here.

White House officials said they hoped the resolution would be adopted in early October before lawmakers break to campaign for the November 5 mid-term legislative elections.

The Democrats, while loath to close ranks around a Republican president so close to elections, have little choice but to support Bush’s resolution, if only to shift the focus to other issues in November.

Politics aside, the resolution drafted by the White House would enable Bush to fold a military strike against Iraq into the framework of the war against terrorism.

”The administration want to use the momentum of the Afghan campaign” said Sonnenfeldt, who was a diplomatic adviser to the late US president Richard Nixon.

Bush would like to capitalise on the legitimacy of that campaign and use it wherever a threat to the United States is perceived, Sonnenfeldt said,

With the UN Security Council split over the new resolution in the wake of Baghdad’s surprise decision to accept a resumption of UN weapons inspections without conditions, Bush may have more convincing to do.

The Iraqi move ”definitely creates a counterweight. It helps change the momentum,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a foreign relations expert at the Carnegie Endowment here.

Bush now must convince the world community of what he sees as Iraq’s bad faith in light of its poor record of compliance with past UN disarmament resolutions.

Washington is pressing for passage of a new, tough Security Council resolution, which would spell out specific reprisals if Baghdad fails to comply.

”The US still has a lot of legwork to do,” Wolfsthal said, pointing to opposition or reservations by China, Russia and France.

China has come out against a new resolution, while Russia appeared to soften its opposition after Bush spoke by telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday and met with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov at the White House.

France, after casting doubt on the necessity of a new resolution, said it was not against one so long as it was limited to disarmament and arrangements for arms inspections.

Washington must also convince its wary Middle Eastern allies, particularly those hosting bases which would be crucial to a US military intervention in Iraq. – Sapa-AFP