PRELUDE TO WAR

President Bush delivered a sober, thoughtful speech tonight aimed at informing the American people of the need to topple Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime. The speech was concise, clear and well-delivered. At this moment in history, the President's speech was a needed word from the Commander in Chief on the necessity of military intervention.

It has been American policy since 1998 that Saddam Hussein's regime should be replaced. For seven years prior to that, Hussein had flouted the case law passed in the UN against him, demanding that he disarm his nation of all weapons of mass destruction or that the Gulf War would resume. On several occassions throughout that period, the Gulf War did in fact resume, as the United States and its allies launched a series of air campaigns aimed at changing Saddam's behavior.

Throughout those years, the coalition arrayed against Saddam unravelled. The sanctions placed against him missed him--as the strongman ruler he could and did deflect the economic sanctions designed to contain him and allow the impact to fall on his people. The result has been more than a decade of death, disease and misery for the Iraqi people, a grinding existence we in the West can scarcely imagine. Over time, as information of the sanctions' impact reached allied capitals, the sanctions regime itself became the issue, and calls arose to lift those sanctions regardless of Saddam's compliance to disarm. Eventually Iraq was allowed to resume selling oil, ostensibly to buy food and medicines for its people. But again Saddam played the international community's best intentions against it, and instead of feeding his people he used the funds from oil sales to rebuild his military and resume production of weapons of mass destruction. In this he apparently had the economic and technological assistance of France and Germany, two allies which it seems had decided to play both sides of the disarmament issue.

So now it has come to war. Had the international community remained steadfast, war would probably not be necessary. But the years since the Gulf War have seen cracks grow in old alliances, and friends have turned against one another. France, America's oldest ally, has become America's chief antagonist in realms of diplomacy while Russia, one of America's newest allies, has become once again a skeptic of Washington's intentions.

All of this would have been avoided had Saddam Hussein done what UN Security Council Resolutions 678 and 687 proscribed--disarm within 15 days of the cessation of hostilities stemming from the invasion of Kuwait, and the sanctions would be lifted. The responsibility for this situation rests ultimately with Saddam Hussein and his refusal to live up to the very bargains that allowed him to retain power. But secondarily, some responsibility for the war and destruction to come must rest with many of America's erstwhile allies. Throughout the dozen years since the Gulf War cease fire, the United States and United Kingdom have remained steadfast in containing Saddam Hussein, facing down resistance from the neighboring Arab states, other Islamic states, China, Russia, Germany and France. These nations must be held responsible for their respective roles in arming Saddam, in thwarting the laws passed against him, and in destroying the international consensus against him. They all have their reasons, ranging from the purely economic to the pragmatic to the long term and strategic. None of these reasons eclipse the central issue, which is that Iraq lost the Gulf War which began with Iraq's aggression against its neighbor, and that in losing that war Iraq promised to disarm. It has not, and has allied itself over the years with radical terrorist organizations from the Abu Nidal group to al Qaeda.

President Bush laid out his case. It is a just case; this will be a just war. Iraq has had its chances to disarm, and failed. The international community has had a dozen years to prove it can remain united enough to contain Saddam, and it has also failed. Now it is up the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Australia, Poland, Kuwait, Qatar, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Albania and all others that have chosen to join the coalition of the willing to do the necessary work of ending Saddam's rule and establishing in Iraq a model of democracy for the region and the world.