Problem: Scare the Iraqis, You Terrorize the Home Folks

Saddam Hussein must be confused by the contradictory messages coming from the United States. The lead story is the historic U.N. Security Council vote authorizing the use of military force if he does not back down before Jan. 15. The next news item: Experts testifying before the Senate recommend delaying the military option for at least another six months to a year. And now, President Bush says he’s willing to talk--but not to compromise.

Is the U.S. threat to use force credible or not? If Hussein considers the remarkable U.N. success engineered by President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, he cannot but be impressed that the military option is real. When he watches the hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he has good reason to doubt that the President has the domestic support needed to use force.

Bush’s gulf policy is trapped in an almost irreconcilable dilemma. For a threat to work it must be credible. That means that the country being threatened must be both afraid of what you are going to do and believe that you will actually do it. Credible threats are scary threats, by definition.

The problem is that scary threats terrify people at home even as they frighten the enemy. In a democracy, frightened people quickly get attention. Domestic voices, in this case powerful Democrats in Congress, begin to question the wisdom of making such a scary threat. Concerned citizens launch protests, causing public support to drop. Declining public support erodes the credibility of the threat, making it less effective abroad.

There is one way out of this dilemma: Change public opinion and make the public more afraid of the enemy than of the threat. This is precisely what the Administration has been trying to do lately, with its emphasis on Hussein’s quest for nuclear weapons and brutal Iraqi war crimes. But unless Hussein helps out, doing something provocative and foolish like killing a few hostages or initiating a military strike on his own, the President will find it tough going. His own experts dispute the likelihood of an early Iraqi nuclear capability and public opinion polls indicate that Americans have no stomach for being global police; sadly, killing Western hostages might be enough to justify the use of force, but killing Kuwaitis is not.

Bush’s proposal for a meeting between Baker and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz shows he is capable of a fascinating gamble on the international stage. But should that fail, it will be ultimately more telling to watch the President play to his toughest audience: the American people.