After the bombing, the West's muddle remains: Leading article

There is something intrinsically absurd about hurling million- dollar, computer-packed missiles at Iraq - each worth the annual average income of 400 Iraqis. On the other hand, the more strident and sanctimonious criticisms of President Clinton's decision to send in the Tomahawks - that these were purely electoral air raids and therefore immoral - miss the point.

Bombing Iraq may well be an an electoral windfall for Bill Clinton, but the logic of US, and Western, policy would have demanded a response of this kind at any time in the past five years. At least, this time around, Washington - but not the British government - has spared us the moralising and tendentious justification that this is all about helping the Kurds.

Of course it is not. It is about looking after our own vital interests in the region; first and foremost ensuring that access to oil is controlled by regimes which are stable and on our side. More specifically, it is about maintaining (with the vaguely legal backing of various UN resolutions) the heavy chains placed on Saddam Hussein in 1991 after the Gulf war allies balked at the military and political cost of eliminating him.

Within the the limited confines of this policy, once Saddam had sent his tanks into the autonomous Kurdish zone, President Clinton had no choice. Sending in the cruise missiles was a statement to Saddam that the US was as determined as ever to slap him down. This is a limited statement and solves nothing in the longer term; but it is not a wholly empty statement. Doing nothing would also have been a statement and one which Saddam, on past form, would have read all too eagerly.

Of course, the Clinton administration might have done more to prevent the disintegration of the Kurds into squabbling factions (although no one has ever succeeded in the past). As revealed by this newspaper today, Washington utterly failed to respond to increasingly plaintive messages from the Kurdish Democratic Party, asking for help against their Iranian- backed Kurdish fraternal foes, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The US was understandably reluctant to take sides in internal Kurdish fighting, dismissing them as ``small fish''. But the consequence - the KDP falling into Saddam's clutches - was foreseeable and deeply regrettable. The missile strikes may intimidate Saddam into limiting his military aid to his victims-turned-clients but they have done nothing to alter the new politics of northern Iraq.

The wider truth is that US, and Western, policy towards Iraq is a half- baked muddle (and lack of attention by the Clinton administration is partly responsible). But can anyone offer a sensible alternative? Containing Saddam without removing him leaves him as a permanent, resourceful, vengeful and evil presence. The extension of the No Fly Zone in southern Iraq up to the Baghdad suburbs is an attempt to squeeze and humiliate him further, in the hope that his own brow-beaten military will eventually lose patience with the "God-supported leader". Don't hold your breath.

But not containing Saddam makes even less sense. The approach suggested by French and Russian attitudes, attempting to, in France's phrase, "reintegrate" Saddam with "the international community" smacks of either appeasement or cant. The "collapse" of the Gulf war coalition reported this week is old news. France, Russia, Turkey and Syria have been playing footsy with Saddam for quite a while now. France is almost indecently eager to sign new trade deals with Baghdad. This was the approach adopted by the US and British governments in the late 1980s which led directly to the 1991 Gulf war.

Despite this week's first meeting between Mr Arafat and Mr Netanyahu, the Palestinian-Israeli peace process is in a menacing state of abeyance. The divisions between Europe and the US on how to deal with Iran - critical dialogue or aggressive containment - are dangerous and self-defeating. Talk in 1991 of the Gulf war producing a New World Order through the UN, and a New Pax Americana in the Middle East, have proved to be an illusion (although the Palestinian-Israeli peace has proceeded much further than many thought possible and is, perhaps, still rescuable).

Perhaps most disturbing of all are the hostages to fortune represented by our blind support for the autocratic and repressive regimes in the region which happen to be friendly to the West. Some argue that there is no difference, except maybe in degrees of ingenious brutality, between Saddam and other Arab regimes. This is nonsense. Saddam is an expansionist megalomaniac; the Gulf kings, princes and emirs are not. However, if the name of the game is ensuring that stable pro-Western governments remain guardians of the world's biggest and best oil wells, our unconditional support for some of the most anti-democratic regimes in the world may be counter-productive. In the longer run, the biggest threat to Western interests in the region may not be Iran or Iraq but the internal pressure- cookers bubbling away in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain.

Periodic air raids on Iraq, widely portrayed in the region as Americans killing Arabs, or Christians killing Muslims, do not help. On the other hand, releasing Saddam from his Western-made bottle would help even less. The cruise raids were necessary but nothing to be proud of. Once the presidential elections are over, European countries, and the the new US president (or the old one), must start an urgent reappraisal of long-term Western strategy in the Middle East.