Powell is a long way away from victory

A Chinese proverb puts it bluntly: One picture is worth 10,000 words. This time around, this could not be truer than the day after a smiling President George W. Bush was photographed with his Secretary of State Colin Powell at the White House Rose Garden following the unanimous UN Security Council resolution on Iraq.

Absent from the photograph published last Friday on the front pages of most American newspapers was the administration's key hawks - Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and sometime hawk, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to name a few.

There is no doubt that Secretary Powell had played his hand well on the domestic and the international fronts. His commendable success in securing the unanimous vote served to re-establish him as the country's number one foreign policy adviser, a position that was being challenged by many others within the Bush team.

Bush, who was said to be weary of the United Nations, praised him for his "leadership, good work and his determination."

But Powell's personal success at the United Nations was not a "triumph" that the Bush administration could claim for itself, as some attempted here. After all, it was the policy of this administration - "regime change" and acting unilaterally against Iraq - which was shelved.

Most significantly, the Security Council resolution denied any sanctioned automatic response by the U.S. should Iraq falter. The United States was forced to agree to review any Iraqi violations within the Security Council, and not to resort to military action.

In fact, it was the Bush administration that backtracked from its declared single-minded approach, thanks to the concerted efforts of the other veto-wielding members of the Security Council, particularly France and Russia, and the other Third World members like Syria and Mexico.

If anything, the unanimous vote was a great victory for the United Nations and the central role that this body played and must continue to play in world affairs. The decade-old impasse over Iraq, coupled with misguided policies in Washington and London, had to date diminished the international body's standing.

What was not made clear in the Security Council decision was the timing for the lifting of the sanctions against Iraq. There was no guarantee that should Iraq comply with the resolutions, including full disarmament, the sanctions will be automatically ended.

Although the support of the 22 Arab foreign ministers at their meeting in Cairo last meeting for the Security Council decision received front-page attention here, not all issues raised in their eight-point statement won endorsement or praise.

The Arabs insisted that the UN inspectors include Arabs in the team that will be going there shortly. They also asked that Israel be similarly ordered as Iraq to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction because they "constitute a serious threat to Arab and international peace and security."

Syria's unexpected endorsement of the UN resolution was said by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal to come about as a result of a reassuring letter from Secretary of State Powell to his Syrian counterpart, Farouk Sharaa.

The Secretary reportedly stressed that "there is nothing in the resolution to allow it to be used a pretext to launch a war on Iraq and that if the U.S. administration had any intention of resorting to military action, this resolution wouldn't have taken seven weeks."

But despite the seemingly positive turnaround, there are many voices who are not certain of Washington's intentions, especially as the threats continued coming from administration officials, and the press was rife with reports about war plans.

Former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has once again sharply criticised Bush's intention to attack Iraq. "I don't fear Iraq, but I fear U.S. policy toward Iraq," he said in an interview in the upcoming Globes weekend supplement.

In another part of the interview, he added: "I am bothered by the U.S. interpretation of the resolution. I am convinced that the Bush administration is determined on regime change in Iraq, and they see the Security Council resolution as a tool that will lead to a military blow. I fear that the administration will use the inspectors as an excuse to go to war."

Helen Thomas, the veteran Lebanese-American journalist who has covered the White House since President Kennedy was in the White House until two years ago, had this pithy observation in a talk to an enthusiastic audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war. Bush's policy of pre-emptive war is immoral - such a policy would legitimise Pearl Harbor. It's as if they learned none of the lessons from Vietnam."

Secretary Powell, the former soldier, is a long way away from victory.