The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

It feels like the Falklands. During the weeks it took London's strike force to reach the South Atlantic in 1982, a flurry of diplomatic activity failed to avert war. Like George Bush in the current crisis, Britain's Margaret Thatcher refused to reward Argentina's aggression with a face-saving compromise, and Argentine President Leopoldo Galtieri compounded his original miscalculation by insisting that "the British won't fight."

; "An interesting analogy," says a Bush Administration official. "Like Galtieri, Saddam seems to think we are too soft to fight unless he invades Saudi Arabia. He figures we'll eventually tire of sitting in the desert and his occupation of Kuwait will become just another of the world's sore spots that remain unresolved for decades. He's wrong -- but fewer and fewer of us believe he will learn that lesson short of war."

As Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell concede, the deployment of U.S. forces to the gulf has been less than flawless. But it will be completed shortly, and a decision to wage war will probably follow. Most if not all of the serious diplomacy of recent weeks has concerned preparedness, not peace. And the latest from the mullahs in Tehran supports the view that the economic embargo, if it could ever squeeze Saddam sufficiently to cause his unilateral withdrawal from Kuwait, would take well over a year to do so -- a period too long to sustain the support of the world's anti-Iraq coalition.

But staying power is the least of it. As pessimism about the embargo's long- term effectiveness leads logically to battle, so the Administration's goal of crippling the worst of Saddam's war-fighting capacity appears unattainable without resort to force. The President has danced around this objective for weeks, but the evidence grows that merely restoring the status quo ante will not yield "security and stability" in the gulf, one of Bush's publicly stated goals. As he told Congress last week, America wants "to curb the proliferation of chemical, biological, ballistic-missile and, above all, nuclear technologies."

Can the neutering of Iraq's capabilities in these areas be negotiated? "In theory, yes," says a State Department official. "An overall Middle East arms-reduction agreement might be created, but that's the longest of shots. The fact is that if we are serious about going beyond getting Saddam out of Kuwait, and we are damn serious about it, then war is just about inevitable."

Assuming this analysis prevails, what is left for the Administration is to fine-tune the run-up to hostilities. The question now being debated concerns provocation: What Iraqi action could credibly justify a fight? Is the invasion of Kuwait in itself adequate? Some in the Administration argue that it is, but "the longer war is delayed, the more contrived such a pretext would appear," says an American intelligence-community planner. "We've been bedeviled by the pretext thing for weeks, but we were greatly heartened by the Iraqi raid of foreign embassies" in Kuwait last Friday. "That kind of stupidity shows that Saddam is capable of providing a provocation at any time, even though everyone has assumed he is too smart for that."

Whatever the pretext, some will always complain. But if the will to battle is there, as it now seems to be, some pretext will be offered. And as always with war, in the end the only justification that will stick is victory.