The Great Gamble

As of this writing, there are reports that the Americans have found a dual-use chemical facility south of Baghdad that might have been making chemical weapons. At the same time, the reports in local and Russian media outlets are strongly negative, while Ukrainian public opinion is overwhelming against the American action. As was the case during the intervention in the former Yugoslavia, all the old Soviet-era anti- American stereotypes are being reinforced: America is an aggressor out to take over the world, and, as the Russians would have it, only a strong Russia can defend international order against America’s evil designs.

The bottom line is not the morality of Russia accepting large amounts of US aid (only Israel and Egypt get more from the US taxpayer), then scouring the world in hopes of putting together some sort of coalition, as during President Putin’s tour of China and India not so long ago, that might be able to contain the interests of the country from which it so freely takes money, or even the obvious pride with which Russia’s Channel One and NTV World simultaneously display the ballots of the Chechnya referendum, where the voters seem to have a box to vote yes but nothing to mark in order to vote no. It is the fact that the country of which I am a citizen has started a war without being able to convince most of the world that the weapons of mass destruction it claims to be protecting the world from are actually in the possession of Iraq. “We haven’t found them yet, but we certainly will,” say the US commanders, and then the war will be justified after the fact. Meanwhile, Russian military intelligence says on television that Iraq does not possess such weapons.

Who will be proven right? Nobody really seems to know. Has anyone in the American establishment really calculated the damage to America’s reputation should it not find the weapons it says were so dangerous that it had to go to war? This will certainly give Ukraine, a country still on the edge of moving toward Europe or Eurasia, a major push toward a center of gravity that, for all its willingness to accept American largess, is unlikely to ever be America’s friend or ever evolve a socioeconomic or political system compatible with Western standards. Russia’s President Putin has called America’s move against Saddam Hussein a major political mistake, and in such a case he would certainly be proven right. In this part of the world the consequences would indeed be catastrophic. This makes one wonder. Did anyone in Washington really understand just how high the stakes are in its Iraq gamble?