Steady On, George: The costs of going wobbly.(support for war against Iraq)

'We're taking him out." That's what President Bush said last winter about Saddam Hussein to a group of senators in the White House. On subsequent occasions, notably to the West Point graduates in June, he committed himself to the same end in more elegant language. Doing nothing about Saddam, he often repeats, is "not an option." He envisages regime change, and freedom and democracy for Iraq.

In his address to the United Nations on September 12, he spelled out Saddam's past crimes and present threats with an oratory many held to be Churchillian, and concluded with an appeal to both the United States and the United Nations: "We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind." The military build-up is no secret either. On one hand, forces in Qatar, in Oman, Bahrain, and Jordan; on the other, anxieties about the use of bases in Saudi Arabia and the possible backsliding of Turkey, following the election of Islamists there.

Since the collapse of Communism, supreme power across the world has been tilting increasingly in favor of the United States. Everywhere and at all times, the strong and the weak, the just and the unjust, engage in tugs-of-war. Intractable cases such as the Balkans, Palestine, or Kashmir -- and even Northern Ireland -- have little to do with American national interests, but the parties call for U.S. intervention to resolve issues which they cannot resolve for themselves. President Clinton is still beating his breast for the self-imputed failure to stop genocide in Rwanda -- a horror, to be sure, but as far away from the American national interest as can be imagined.

Supreme power serves the indispensable purpose of providing a standard which allows people to predict with a reasonable chance of being right who is going to win and who is going to lose, insuring themselves against chaos. Saddam Hussein and the United States of course are unequal in every respect, but for a decade they have been locked in a tug-of-war which puts their relative power to the test.

What can be predicted with certainty about Saddam is that for his own purposes he will seek to maximize power, no matter the abuse involved, or the cost to anyone else. His invasion of Iran in 1980 first faced Washington with what was to grow into the present quandary. Resisting, Iran was about to break through to victory, in its wake spreading Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamism. To maintain a regional balance of power, the United States supplied Saddam with aid and intelligence. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 further exposed the fragility of the regional balance of power. No Arab state or combination of Arab states had the strength to resist a dictator with his means and his ambitions. With the armed support of the principal Arab states, the United States then expelled Saddam from Kuwait, but for legalistic reasons to do with its mandate from the United Nations did not go on to overthrow him.

A good deal of the current hatred in the Middle East for the United States springs from the unpredictability which followed the unexpected reprieve of Saddam at the close of the Gulf War. The United States suddenly became inscrutable -- why had it allowed this enemy to live to fight another day? What ever is the point of supreme power if not to use it? Ask such questions of anyone in the "Arab street," and you will hear that Saddam must have been maintained in Baghdad as a secret agent, in order to provide Washington with a plausible pretext for moving militarily into the region. In one perspective, such conspiracy theory is laughable, but in another it is an attempt to make sense of America's otherwise inexplicable refusal to use its power as expected.

For some, though, the key to the puzzle is simpler. In ...