You can’t fault the Bush Administration for trying to time the
completion of the U.N. business with the end of the military
buildup for the action to oust Saddam. But the sound of the gears
grinding against each other reminds me of the time I learned to
drive an MGB. That old British gearbox wasn’t synchronized for
first gear, so getting going was the hard part. Once you got past
first, it was easy. But pushing past France to get NATO to do its
job was easy compared to what’s coming in the U.N.
By patiently arguing and cajoling (with the help of a canny
Scot, NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson) the President
succeeded in getting NATO to do what its members signed up to do.
In one beautiful weekend, NATO pushed France aside, made Germany
cave in, and agreed to deploy AWACS aircraft, Patriot missiles and
chem/bio detection gear to help Turkey protect itself. Turkey — a
NATO member — had invoked the treaty and asked for help, but the
French-German Axis of Weasels said they’d block NATO action because
helping Turkey defend itself could look like an endorsement of Mr.
Bush’s plan to take out Saddam.
It may be that the President thinks this victory can be repeated
in the U.N. That seems to be the only credible explanation for his
decision to return there this week for the umpteenth resolution
telling Saddam he really, really, really has to disarm. The
President may hope he can save the U.N. from itself, and is
spending precious time trying to do that. But the diplomatic
victory in NATO is no cause to think that the U.N. will ever be
better than it was when Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it a theater
of the absurd. The President is subjecting us to this — again —
as a favor to Britain’s Tony Blair, whose political needs require
it.
It’s possible — about a one-in-a-billion shot — that the
French will cave in, and not veto the new Security Council
resolution we, the Brits and the Spanish proposed. If that happens,
George Bush should go down in history as the greatest manipulator
of nations since Metternich. The President will have performed the
greatest feat of coalition-herding since Ike kept the Allies
together from D-Day to the fall of Berlin. But it won’t happen,
because Jacques Chirac and his ilk believe France will glow in
fortune and glory if it can prove itself powerful at our expense.
France and the others will stall, and more defectors — such as Mr.
Bush’s pal Vicente
Fox of Mexico, whose Security Council vote went south on us
last week — will line up against us before the new resolution is
voted on. It’s more likely that we’ll waste another month at the
U.N. and then pull the resolution off the agenda because we won’t
have enough support to risk a French veto.
It’s possible that U.N. action will take less than the eight
weeks the Security Council took to pass Resolution 1441 last fall.
But it’s not bloody likely. Now that we’ve asked for U.N. action,
we will have to be willing to do something Mr. Bush has threatened
for months. He will have to tell the U.N. that its time has passed,
and our coalition will act on our own schedule, and not tell them
what it is.
By the next time Hans Blix reports to the Security Council on
March 7, the Security Council will have had our new resolution for
more than a week. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has said that our
forces can act now, or any time the President orders them to do so.
By March 7 everything will be in place. We need to stick with the
schedule British Foreign Minister Jack Straw set, and finish the
U.N. action within two weeks. Any longer, and the risks we will
have to face will become much greater. To understand how we are
dealing with those risks now, and how serious are the threats we
face, you have to look at some unconventional weapons we’re
developing.
Some of our most effective underwater sentries — our fastest,
stealthiest swimmers — are about to be sent to the Persian Gulf in
waterlogged cages. On the long ride from California, their
commanders will be with them, hosing them down and tossing them an
occasional small fish. A bunch of sea lions — trained to detect
and attach nylon cables to unauthorized divers and sunken
explosives — are about to join the forces guarding naval vessels
in ports in the Middle East. I can just hear the animal rights
people screaming about the indignities the sea lions will suffer,
and how we shouldn’t expose them to danger. But these normally
funny critters may save a lot of lives.
Using animals in war is nothing new. In WW2, some contemporary
of Wernher von Braun (who, for reasons that will quickly be
obvious, wasn’t chosen for ol’ Wernher’s team) tried to create a
smart bomb using cats. He thought that cats could guide bombs to
targets near bodies of water. (Cats always land on their feet,
right? Cats hate water, right?) So a couple of kitties were rigged
with parachute harnesses that guided the bomb to where kitty tried
to put his feet. After a few tries, someone figured out cats like
flying less than they like water, and lost consciousness
immediately upon being thrown out of an aircraft in flight.
Fortunately, the kamikaze kitty idea was shelved. We now have
bombs that are much smarter than cats. And we also have the KFC.
With no apology to the Colonel, many of our combat vehicles and
infantry units are being outfitted to carry the Kuwait Field
Chicken, and it’s nothing to laugh about.
The dangers of chemical weapons are magnified a hundred times by
the fact that it’s very hard to tell you’re under attack until
someone keels over. A century ago, miners took caged canaries down
into the coal mines because the natural gas — which could explode
as well as poison — killed the birds before people started
toppling. Operation KFC puts caged chickens on Humvees, trucks,
tanks and among the troops to help detect chemical attacks. PETA
may not like it, but it seems a good idea.
On the other hand, PETA may like it less that we are keeping all
those chickens caged while we wait for the battle to begin. Will
PETA demand the war begin sooner to make the animals suffer less?
Maybe they should take it up with France. Saddam delendus
est.
