Stardate 20030214.1912

(Captain's log): Bluffing is dangerous. If you threaten someone with dire consequences he may back down. But if he thinks you're bluffing and refuses to do so, then you are faced either with following through or yourself backing down. Simply repeating the threat, or increasing the apparent severity of it at a certain point becomes counterproductive; it leads to the presumption by your opponent that you talk big because you act little. After you reach that point, the greater your threats, the more bold your opponent becomes.

We saw this sorry pattern in Yugoslavia during the 1990's, with the UN and Europeans making demands and demonstrations and uttering awful threats, and then, when they were ignored, doing nothing. And the US was complicit in this, too. The ultimate tragedy was the Srebrenica "safe zone", a place of refuge for Muslims supposedly guaranteed by the UN. But when hostile troops showed up, in the end, and made clear by their actions that they didn't believe that the UN troops there would really be willing to defend it, they were proved right. The Dutch troops on the spot stood back and did nothing while the Serbs proceeded to slaughter thousands of Muslim males that the Dutch and the UN had promised to defend. Had the troops been from almost any other European nation, the result would have been the same. They were there not because they were ready to fight if need be, but because they desperately hoped that they would not be asked to. When they finally faced that eventuality, they backed down, and 7500 Muslim men and boys paid the ultimate price for that failure.

For the awful logic of a called bluff is that if you threaten a small hostile action and refuse to follow through, you may induce your opponent to greater evil and then you yourself may be forced to commit greater evil or face complete defeat. The situation in Yugoslavia, with years of empty threats and demands and rising levels of violence was only resolved by several weeks of bombing. More resolute action earlier might have prevented the need for the US to seriously devastate Serbia's infrastructure or kill hundreds of Serb civilians. A willingness to resist on the ground might have caused internecine violence in Yugoslavia to end earlier, saving thousands of lives in the region. A failure of will by Europe and the US early led to increasing contempt by the Serbian government of Yugoslavia and by irregular Serb groups in Bosnia and elsewhere, and ultimately to years of pain and slaughter and tragedy, which was ended by one true demonstration of resolve.

And at the same time we saw ten years of equally empty threats against Iraq. In this case the government there had actually promised to cooperate in destruction of its WMDs and delivery systems in exchange for an armistice which ended the Gulf War.

Saddam's will was never in it, though; he agreed only because if he didn't he feared his rule might end in weeks. But with the immediate threat removed by a false promise to disarm, almost immediately there was resistance and obstruction, and as the world's response via the UN was nothing more than sixteen successive UNSC resolutions backed by nothing more than dire threats, Saddam became more and more bold and eventually stopped cooperating with the inspections entirely. With the inspectors confined to Baghdad, they left, and for four years there were no inspections at all. We do not know what may have happened in Iraq's relentless quest for WMDs during that period but it surely cannot have been good for us.

Finally one nation summoned the will to do more than just make threats. But the US was convinced to attempt to work through the UN, and to give Saddam one last chance to change his mind and to truly give up his ambition to gain WMDs for use in creating a new pan-Arabian state ruled from Baghdad. He was given hard deadlines. The resolution said that nothing less that full cooperation would be accepted. He was required to fully declare what he had, leaving out nothing, on December 8 of 2002. Nothing would be accepted except total cooperation and complete capitulation. "Inspectors" were to be sent in, but not to try to find what had been hidden. They were there only to confirm the location and destruction of what had been declared by the government of Iraq in its total and unconditional cooperation with the process of disarmament. And there was in the wording no doubt whatever that failure to comply would lead to dire consequences.

But Saddam knew that he need not fear the UNSC; after sixteen previous resolutions demanding cooperation, which he had ignored and had not suffered for, he did not fear the seventeenth. The UNSC thus was in a box of its own making: having stated as clearly as it could that the seventeenth resolution truly would be the last one, if that too were ignored, then it would be forced to really act, and to crush Saddam. For if it did not, it would stand revealed as a paper tiger whose demands could be ignored with impunity.

Saddam did call that bluff. His December 8 report was a joke. He claimed he could not declare any current weapons because he denied that he had any. He stood strong, and the UNSC proved that it was indeed a paper tiger. Instead of facing the reality of the crisis, its most vocal members have attempted to convert the process of confirmation of declared weapons back into a search for those which were being concealed. The real point of Res 1441 was not to get inspectors back into Iraq, but to make Saddam g