Playing Hopscotch In A Minefield

Reporters at the joint press conference with President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair - preoccupied, no doubt, with allegations of sexual hankypanky - never got around to asking the obvious question.

I confess the question hadn’t seemed obvious to me, until Tony Blair made it so with this statement:

“We had first of all to make sure that our own public opinion was properly educated as to why it is so essential that the U.N. inspectors are able to do their work. The amount of weapons that they have already uncovered in the six or seven years that they have been doing this task, and why it is therefore absolutely essential that Saddam Hussein is brought back into line with U.N. Security Council resolutions and the inspectors can go about their task unhindered.

“We ourselves, a couple of days ago in Britain, published a document where we listed precisely all the various weapon finds the inspectors have made. And when you go through that list and see all the various attempts there have been to try and prevent the inspectors’ carrying out their functions, then I think people can understand why it is so necessary, so important for us, to be prepared to take whatever action is necessary … “

The question, of course, is why, with our leaders telling us that we may be back at war with Iraq in a matter of days or weeks, haven’t we been given the chapter-and-verse rationale for such a dangerous escalation.

The British have been told, in some detail, both what the inspectors have found and what they haven’t. For instance, there’s a substance called “growth media” that is used to grow biological spores. Iraq, says the paper released by Blair’s government, is known to have produced or imported at least 17 tons more of the substance than has been accounted for - enough to make three times more of the deadly anthrax biological germ than Iraq admits.

Moreover, according to the paper, some 4,000 tons of “precursors” - components - of chemical weapons remain unaccounted for, along with 600 tons of “potential precursors” for VX nerve agent, which Iraq is known to have produced or imported.

Why hasn’t somebody leaked that document?

Of course, actually having the facts doesn’t render irresistible the case for bombing Iraq. We know, even without the information our better-informed counterparts possess, that Saddam Hussein is a bad man, that he agreed to allow the U.N. inspections as a condition for ending the multinational military siege that threatened to destroy his vaunted Republican Guard along with much of the rest of his military apparatus, and that he deserves some comeuppance for abrogating that agreement.

But what comeuppance? To say that, in the absence of the now-broken agreement, his war-making capacity would have been bombed to smithereens is not quite the same as saying that breaking the agreement justifies (in anything beyond mathematical terms) the resumption of the bombing. Resumption, years after the breach, would amount to a unilateral attack on Iraq - and not merely in the eyes of the Arab world.

But if a bombing attack as punishment doesn’t make much sense, neither does bombing as a substitute for stymied inspections. I suppose if we knew precisely where the contraband were kept and could knock them out with a minimum of “collateral” damage, that might be a reasonable thing to do. But my understanding is that the reason we need the inspections is that we don’t know precisely where the stuff is, or how frequently it is moved. What would be accomplished by bombing where anthrax used to be?

Or where it is now, for that matter. If anthrax is as deadly as we are told - for example that a couple hundred pounds of it released from a tall building into the atmosphere could kill 3 million people - how could we justify the civilian deaths that penetration bombing of the storage facilities would likely produce? One drop of the dreaded VX is said to be enough to kill a man. Would our inspectors relish returning to their work after our bombs scattered some 200 tons of the stuff?

The only remaining rationale I can think of for a serious attack on Iraq is to kill Saddam. But while it might be reasonable to wish him dead, it would be madness - dangerous madness in a society as open as ours - deliberately to kill him.

Is there some other justification for the war we’re told to get ready for? Something that would not merely put us in the moral right but also accomplish some worthwhile purpose of ours? American citizens don’t seem to know. Do you suppose the British do?

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = William Raspberry Washington Post