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The Iraq spotlight shifts to London, Tuesday as Tony Blair prepares to help the Bush administration inject more urgency into the UN debate over how to handle Saddam Hussein. Blair is hard at work getting his cabinet on board, and preparing a new UN resolution that will set out strict terms and deadlines for Iraqi compliance. The centerpiece of Blair's effort, however, will be a long-awaited dossier on Saddam's nuclear program, due to be released on Tuesday. Britain's Observer newspaper reports that the dossier will offer a comprehensive account of Saddam's ongoing efforts to attain nuclear weapons — London won't suggest that Iraq actually has any strategic nuclear capability as yet, but it will offer more than enough evidence of ongoing efforts to acquire such capability to make Blair's argument that "Saddam must be stopped."
Arm-wrestling at the UN
Tuesday also sees the UN Security Council resume discussions over a new resolution on Iraq. And the UN battle looks set to be more drawn out than the Bush administration would have liked. There's little chance of a resolution authorizing force against Iraq right now, and the Permanent Five veto-empowered members of the Security Council continue to debate whether any new resolution is necessary at all — Russia continues to resist U.S. pressure to restate the terms to Baghdad, but they could conceivably be brought around. Still, the best the U.S. and Britain may get right now is a resolution restating what is required of Iraq and setting deadlines for compliance. Following the French proposal (see below), the authorization of force would have to come in a separate resolution, and only if and after the Security Council had determined that Iraq had failed to comply with the inspection resolution. And that could still take months.
Helpful Saddam
Blair and Bush got some unexpected help from Saddam Hussein at the weekend, however, when the Iraqi dictator insisted he would accept no new UN resolutions. A defiant Saddam helps the U.S. and Britain make a case for regime change; a quiescent Saddam makes it more difficult. Still, the Iraqi leader is probably reading the diplomatic tealeaves and estimating that he still has time for more defiance. As war gets closer, the same Arab regimes that persuaded him to accept the return of inspectors will, no doubt, urge him to comply with whatever the UN demands if he wants to avoid a war.
UN resolutions and Blair's dossier may also