America's Iraq policy carries too much baggage

With all the anxious talk about Iraq over the past few days here at the World Economic Forum, it was striking that I didn't hear a single person attempt to defend Saddam Hussain: Not one anguished Arab leader; not one tut-tutting European politician; not one hand-wringing global thinker.

That should remind us of a basic reality of Iraq, which is getting lost in the "Iraq debate." Saddam Hussain is history, and the Arab world knows it. He's a torturer and a deadly dictator who exemplifies the nightmare from which the Arabs are trying to awake. Indeed, many Arab leaders admit privately that they would welcome a change of regime in Iraq, so long as it doesn't throw the region into turmoil.

This is where the debate should start, with the fact that Saddam is an international outlaw. His own people hate him (at least, the ones who are allowed to talk openly), and his neighbours share the sentiment. He has flouted the United Nations for more than a decade and continues (even by French accounts) to lie about his weapons programmes.

Yet, somehow, it's the United States that is on the defensive here at Davos and in other international forums. That may strike the Bush administration as crazy, but it's a fact. And making snide remarks about the irrelevance of "old Europe," as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did the other day, isn't making things any better.

The question for President Bush is how to get the debate back on track - so that the issue is Saddam's arrogance, rather than that of the United States. To put it bluntly, the challenge is how to remove Saddam Hussain from power without shooting ourselves in the foot.

To succeed, the Bush administration needs to get back to basics. It embraced a UN strategy last October - wisely in my view, for that strategy produced a 15-0 vote in the Security Council that found Saddam in violation of previous UN disarmament resolutions and demanded that he comply.

The UN's chief inspector, Hans Blix, reported Monday that "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it." He also cited possible chemical and biological weapons risks.

Having embraced the UN approach, the United States should stick with it a while longer. Granting Blix and his inspectors another month is harmless - it amounts to giving Saddam more rope with which to hang himself. And it will allow the Bush administration more time to sell its Iraq policy to a sceptical world. Even at home, the administration has not yet made a persuasive case for war.

A strategy of getting back to basics on Iraq means shelving, for the moment, some of the more grandiose visions of postwar Iraqi democracy that idealistic pundits (like me) have been preaching.

Democracy in the Arab world is a great idea, but it should happen on its own timetable, rather than at the point of an American gun. And we should dispense with ideas about "shock therapy" for the Arabs. That's a matter for psychoanalysis, not foreign policy.

"Democracy should be pursued in the Arab world not because America wants it, but because it's the right thing to do,'' argued Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher here Sunday.

What's enfeebling U.S. Iraq policy now is that it's carrying too much baggage. For neo-conservatives, it's a test of America's willingness to act unilaterally to achieve its global goals - and thereby create the structure of what amounts to American empire.

That unilateralist argument is wrong, in my view. American power remains rooted in the global institutions that the United States created after 1945, especially the United Nations. America cannot weaken those institutions without also weakening itself. The "soft power" of American economic, cultural and political life remains as important as our "hard" military power - and a lot less expensive.

There was a poignant moment at the end of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech here Sunday when I thought I saw him brush a tear from his eye. He had been asked what September 11 had meant for him. Powell said that after 35 years as a soldier, he felt that he was going to war again. There would be moments when the world would have to make hard choices, he said, and now one of those painful moments was upon us.

Powell's is a voice the world leaders gathered here understood - that of the reluctant warrior who knows the face of battle and fights only when he must. If President Bush in his State of the Union address speaks in that same restrained but determined voice on Iraq, there is still a good chance the world will follow him.

The writer is a novelist and former associate editor of The Post. His comments on the international scene will appear twice a week.