Anatomy of a farce.

• Author: Garfinkle, Adam
• Position: US' policy on the Iraq crisis

America sees farther because America stands taller. . . . We are the indispensable nation.

- Madeleine Albright, Feb. 18, 1998

How is it that the indispensable nation had to rely twice in the space of four months on the likes of Yevgeny Primakov and Kofi Annan to save itself from serious embarrassment at the hands of the error-prone dictator of a middle-sized country? It took some doing. From October 29 to March 2, the Clinton administration's management of the most recent phase of the Iraq crisis fluctuated between mediocre and abysmal. Virtually no rule of diplomatic prudence and good sense escaped violation, including, one fears, the rule holding that the strategic misjudgments of great powers rarely go unpunished.

This did not have to happen. Being the only superpower does bring certain inescapable burdens, such as having to deal with the free-riding, envy, special pleadings, and financial entreaties of various states. But no law decrees that such burdens must in short order turn a position of substantial strength in a key region of the world into one of foundering weakness. Yet that is precisely what the Clinton administration has managed to do.

The administration, of course, does not see things this way. Nor does it seem to recognize the potential for serious damage that its fumbling has created. Aside from the consequences of letting Baathi Iraq escape the most inclusive non-proliferation regime ever created, the advent of even a rudimentary Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction capability will make the U.S. deterrent function in the oil-rich Persian Gulf far more costly and difficult in every way. It may render that function so politically fragile in the region's host countries as to be unsustainable in the long run. Given that the balance of interests and attention often trumps the raw balance of power, it may not be so clear even a year hence just who is deterring whom in the Gulf - with all that implies for the vitality of the present liberal international order.

Recent U.S. policy toward Iraq may be summed up in one word: disconnected. With six years of supine behavior, the Clinton administration disconnected itself from its own allies and emboldened the Iraqi leadership. Then this past autumn came the serial mishandling of the Iraqi portfolio. As the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) got close - much too close for Baghdad's purposes - to deciphering Iraq's means of concealment, the administration should have expected another Iraqi gambit to upset the process. But it wasn't paying attention. The administration's near simultaneous hesitancy to implement the D'Amato sanctions legislation against the Franco-Russian-Malaysian Total S.A. deal with Iran led Saddam to suppose that, if the United States were reluctant to contain Iran, then a deft push from Baghdad might weaken strictures against Iraq too. Then came a maladroit American maneuver in the Security Council: when a U.S. proposal to add symbolic sanctions against Iraq because of its uncooperative behavior toward UNSCOM revealed fissures in the Gulf War coalition, Saddam saw an opportunity to deepen those fissures and end the...