Time to Get Organized

By Bruce W. Nelan

Saddam Hussein was the ghost at the banquets last week, diverting the attention of both the old Administration and the new. All the galas in Washington could not blot out the uninvited presence of the defiant Iraqi dictator. For the millions watching it all on television, images of Saddam and the U.S. air strikes in Iraq mixed with those of George Bush and Bill Clinton in rapid sequence, as if part of the same show.

Before dawn on Inauguration Day, Brent Scowcroft, the outgoing National Security Adviser, strode up the stairs to Blair House to deliver his final briefing to the President-elect. It focused, naturally, on Iraq. At the Pentagon, General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a similar presentation to incoming Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. The sessions amounted to a formal hand-off; what to do about Iraq is up to Clinton and the national-security team he is assembling.

Two years after Operation Desert Storm, Saddam is still the bogeyman who will not go away. The new Administration will be examining him with fresh as well as relatively inexperienced eyes. None of Clinton's key foreign policy people -- Aspin, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, CIA chief R. James Woolsey, National Security Adviser W. Anthony Lake -- are Middle East experts. When they begin their Iraq policy review, they will have to rely on the holdover Bush specialists like Dennis Ross, former director of policy planning at State, and Edward Djerejian, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.

Clinton's State and Defense departments are barely functioning yet, and Saddam will probably not allow them much start-up time. Having upstaged the outgoing U.S. President, the Iraqi leader has seized the initiative by offering Clinton a "cease-fire" in the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq that he has been challenging. It was, said the Iraqi press agency, an "expression of good intention."

Whatever its intentions, Baghdad reinforced its mercurial reputation late last week by opening fire on three U.S. warplanes on patrol in the southern no-fly zone. (All three returned safety.)

Iraq is not in a strong bargaining position. Its military was shattered by the war, and the country is still under tight economic sanctions ordered by the Security Council. But it may turn out that by goading Bush to bomb targets in Iraq, Saddam has improved his situation. He has used the attacks to show his toughness and the Western coalition's weaknesses.

For a man as callous as Saddam, the losses of a few planes and missile batteries, a factory and a total of 50 casualties are pinpricks. But they were enough to unsettle America's allies. France, Britain, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia all expressed concern.

The one thing the new President seemed to know about relations with Iraq last week was the importance of continuity. "We are going to adhere to our policy," he said. "We're going to stay with our policy. It is the American policy, and that's what we're going to stay with."

But which policy does he have in mind? If it is Saddam's overthrow, as Bush insisted, the current military options are unpromising. Saddam shrugs off small attacks, and larger ones threaten to blow up the gulf coalition and the Security Council consensus. If, on the other hand, the policy Clinton chooses < is to force Saddam to obey all the U.N. orders, the Administration will want to consider what methods might better achieve that end.

Clinton tried to depersonalize the conflict, saying that if Saddam "wants a different relationship" with the U.S. and U.N., "all he has to do is change his behavior." But when the hints that he might "normalize" relations provoked a furor, Clinton backed off, saying it was "almost inconceivable that we can have good relations with Iraq" while Saddam remains in power.

The contretemps has touched off a debate over how the new Administration should handle Iraq. Good relations are not the issue. What the U.S. demands is Iraq's compliance with all the U.N. resolutions; what Iraq wants is an end to the strangulation of sanctions. Clinton may have been right to suggest something more pragmatic. "His statement," observes Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, "was not a blunder." What might work, he says, "is persuading Saddam of what Iraq could achieve through adherence to the resolutions."

Others argue that experimentation could be in order. "For two years," says Anthony Cordesman, professor of national-security studies at Georgetown University, "Bush fixated on ousting Saddam, without defining U.S. goals in case he didn't." If compliance with the U.N. resolutions could earn Iraq some easing of the sanctions, even with Saddam still in power, he should be told so.

Such an opening might not be enough to keep him honest: he is all too likely to fall back into his old habits of obstruction and defiance. But it might help if Clinton can keep Saddam in perspective. He is more a nuisance than a threat to world peace or his neighbors, which are now more worried about Islamic fundamentalism. While insisting on full obedience to all the U.N. demands, Clinton could find that a less personal, more pragmatic approach is worth a try.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Kuwait City and Bruce van Voorst/Washington, with other bureaus