WASHINGTON - Each morning the little white U.N. cars appear on our TV screens tooling around Baghdad. In the afternoon, we hear from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that all is going well. Secretary of State Colin Powell, too, assures us that the inspections are going fine.
What in the world are they talking about? A tiny contingent of 12 inspectors (it will later increase to 100) is driving around Iraq - a nation the size of California - attempting to find the weapons facilities that Saddam Hussein has spent two decades carefully concealing. This is a farce. Everyone knows that he has these weapons. Why else did he kick out the last U.N. inspection team? And everyone also knows that the United Nations has no incentive to say so.
Take Hans Blix, the leader of the inspection team. Mr. Blix was selected for this task over his predecessor, Richard Butler, precisely because the French and Russians felt confident he would be a softie.
Security Council Resolution 1441 requires that Mr. Blix report any Iraqi noncompliance to the United Nations. But as Robert Kagan and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard ask: "What are the chances that Mr. Blix will want to blow the whistle on Saddam - knowing that he may thereby signal the start of a war that he and his backers at the Security Council want to avoid?"
Liberals and international diplomats (a distinction without a difference) have notorious difficulty understanding how to deal with totalitarian regimes. Just as Bill Clinton did not understand that the only way to get an honest account out of Juan Gonzalez (Elian's father) would be to offer asylum to his entire family, the U.N. weapons inspectors will not take the necessary steps to protect Iraqi scientists and their families from retribution by the regime.
There has been talk that Mr. Blix and company might take some Iraqi scientists out of the country to question them about Iraq's nuclear program. (And by the way, we already have the first-hand accounts of a number of defectors, including Mr. Hussein's chief bomb maker, that the program exists.) But taking individual scientists to Geneva for a day will be meaningless unless entire families are evacuated.
And so this process spins on: 45 days of inspections plus another 60 days for Mr. Blix to submit his report.
A strong case can be made that the Bush administration ceded far too much of its latitude for action to the United Nations. Sure, broad international support is a desirable thing - but not at any price.
By agreeing to this latest inspections game, the United States has lost latitude for action. Can't we just declare at the first sign of recalcitrance or obstruction from Mr. Hussein that he is in material breach of the U.N. agreement? Not easily, no. As The Weekly Standard explains, the French and Russians lobbied hard to ensure that such breaches would be "reported to the council for assessment." If we jump in to declare unilaterally that Iraq is not complying, we risk being accused of violating the resolution that we endorsed.
And yet President Bush seems as determined as ever to remove Mr. Hussein. He announces that he isn't playing hide-and-seek, though that is what the United States, at Mr. Powell's urging, did agree to. Mr. Bush has been quietly deploying forces to the Persian Gulf and has stated, repeatedly, that Mr. Hussein represents an unacceptable threat to this country.
Why did the president limit his own scope of action by agreeing to this latest U.N. charade? Was he placating his secretary of state, the Europeans or both? Surely President Bush knows that if Mr. Hussein remains in office in 2004, he won't.
And just as surely, the president is determined - for the good of the nation - to ensure that that isn't the case. Perhaps the president is banking on Mr. Hussein's stupidity and rigidity - a reliable bet considering the man's history. Or perhaps he is confident that action creates its own constituency. Either way, it will be interesting to see how Mr. Bush extricates us, as I'm confident he will, from this U.N. bog.
Mona Charen's syndicated column appears Mondays in The Sun.