Modest U.S. Victory Over Iraq May End Up a Messy Draw

WASHINGTON — At first glance, the United States can chalk up a modest victory in forcing Iraq to back down after a three-week standoff over United Nations weapons inspections that was pushing the two nations toward armed confrontation.

But in the long run, the outcome may look more like a messy, unsatisfying draw.

The U.N. inspectors are returning to Iraq, but Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime is unshaken--and free to continue its relentless campaign to undermine international sanctions that were imposed to prevent Iraq from building weapons of mass destruction and waging war on its neighbors.

“The good news is that we achieved our basic objective and that the coalition has survived to struggle another day,” said Richard Haass, a former official in the Bush administration. “The bad news is that Saddam Hussein hasn’t paid a price for . . . refusing to meet his obligations.”

Clinton administration officials disagreed, arguing that Hussein has suffered a significant diplomatic setback. But even they used only modest terms to describe what had been achieved by their diplomacy and buildup of military power in the Persian Gulf.

Hussein has done “a very good job of reuniting the international community around the proposition that we ought to continue a vigorous effort to get at his weapons of mass destruction,” said Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, President Clinton’s national security advisor.

As a result of the U.S. effort over the last three weeks, he added, “the most pervasive sanctions regime in the history of mankind, which has been imposed on him since the Gulf War, remains intact. I have a hard time computing that as anything except a setback for him.”

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But in the end, a senior official acknowledged, the United States must still struggle to maintain the existing U.N. sanctions against Iraq--even as Russia and France step up their efforts to lift some of the embargoes.

“As long as Saddam is there, as long as we have a policy of containment, he’s going to have a potential to challenge that,” the official said. “His ultimate aim is to break out of the sanctions regime.”

The aim of U.S. policy, by the same token, has become to maintain the sanctions and, thus, to prevent Hussein from threatening other countries. The aim of deposing Hussein, which Presidents Clinton and Bush once espoused, has been quietly shelved since August 1996, when Hussein’s forces routed CIA-supported insurgents in northern Iraq.

“American policy for the last six years has been to contain him,” the senior official said. “That policy’s been quite successful. A policy that had a different objective would require a commitment of human and material resources that would be quite overwhelming.”

Administration officials say they are not worried about other countries’ attempts to ease sanctions, because the United States can veto any such move in the U.N. Security Council. But over time, the coalition’s resolve to maintain sanctions has frayed--and, despite its unity over the last three weeks, it could fray even more.

“There are going to be more challenges from Saddam,” Haass said. “This crisis signals that the United States has a lot of work to do to shore up the coalition to meet those inevitable future challenges. . . . It held up enough to weather this storm. But this ought to serve as a warning to the administration that it had better invest more in the coalition.

“One lesson of this episode is the diffusion of diplomatic power since the end of the Cold War,” he said. “Yes, there is American primacy in the world, but primacy should not be confused with hegemony. We can’t always have our way.”

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Administration officials said they were not sure why Hussein backed down--but they said the coalition’s resolve appeared to take the Iraqi regime by surprise.

One possibility is that Hussein “thought he could divide the coalition . . . and escape from the sanctions regime. Perhaps he thought he could isolate us,” the senior official said, noting: “In each of those instances, the international community has stood together.

“The Security Council is more united today than it was” before the crisis, he added. “A Security Council that may have had a little ‘Iraq fatigue’ just got a shot of adrenalin.”

The administration’s next step is to ensure that the weapons inspections resume without further interference by Iraqi officials--and then assess whether the inspections were set back seriously by Hussein’s actions.

Inspections have been suspended since Nov. 3, and U.N. officials say Iraq took advantage of the break to disable monitoring cameras and hide equipment and records.

U.N. officials believe that the inspections were suspended just as they were on the verge of discovering sites where Iraq was making and storing biological weapons using anthrax, a deadly bacterium.

“What have we lost here? . . . We don’t know,” a senior U.S. official acknowledged. “It’s too early to tell how much diversion there might have been.”