Bring Me the Head of Saddam Hussein

            Iraq was Issue 1 as the
Sunday pundits readied the country for war against Saddam Hussein. As they did,
pundits on both the right (Bill Kristol of ABC's This Week ) and the left
(Mara Liasson of Fox News Sunday ) asked why the commander in chief
wasn't mobilizing public opinion for the coming clash. No problem, said all the
president's persons, who swarmed the weekend shows, conducting well-scripted
teach-ins about the dangers posed by Saddam and his biological weapons. Last
week's line was that Saddam's quarrel was with the United Nations, not the
United States, but this week the emphasis shifted slightly to leave no doubt
that the United States will settle the dispute, unilaterally if need be.

            The talking heads were
a-babble with bellicosity. "Form as big a posse as we can," urged Mort
Kondracke on The McLaughlin Group . Juan Williams of Fox News
Sunday predicted a cruise-missile attack followed by "hand-to-hand combat."
"Clearly, we've got to strike the head," said Sam Donaldson on This
Week . "[Saddam] must go," said Margaret Carlson on CNN's Capital
Gang . "Extend the no-fly zone," said David Gergen. "Tighten the noose."
Contemplating Saddam's anthrax-tipped warheads on NBC's Meet the Press ,
Rush Limbaugh answered his own question when he asked, should we "wait until he
does it, or pre-empt it?"

            Having cast their vote for
assassinating Saddam last Sunday, This Week 's Kristol and George
Stephanopoulos had no room to escalate. So they offered sober military
strategies. "If you go in, it has to be a sustained bombing campaign and that
has to be followed up by the threat of ground troops," said Kristol. The silver
lining of the coming war, Kristol smiled, was that it, NATO expansion, and the
troops in Bosnia would make 1998 a "foreign-policy year."

            Having
declared war, the pundit posse immediately expressed doubt that it could be
won. Iraq absorbed 88,000 tons of bombs during the 43 days of the Gulf War
without folding or replacing Saddam, noted several pundits, including Tim
Russert on NBC's Meet the Press . Saddam's bio-chem arsenal was surely
bunkered beyond the reach of U.S. bombs, they concluded. This Week 's
George Will pointed out that "it took weeks to find Manuel Noriega" in tiny
Panama after the invasion.

            Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf agreed on Meet the Press
that invaders would never apprehend Saddam, but he still insisted that the
United States "bomb him into submission." The "end game" of all the dictator's
schemes is undermining U.N. authority and "getting the sanctions lifted,"
Schwarzkopf said. Only by pulverizing Iraq could the United States deny Saddam
these diplomatic victories and preserve the United Nations' power to police
rogue nations in the future.

            The only AWOLs in the pundit
battalion were Robert Novak on Capital Gang and John McLaughlin, who
suggested that we talk the Iraqis into compliance. (They were shouted down.)
"Accept Saddam as he is," ventured Novak, and make a deal. "Reintegrate Iraq
into the world community," offered McLaughlin, who added that Iraq wasn't the
only outsider nation with chemical and biological weapons.

            National Security Adviser
Sandy Berger called Saddam a "weapons of mass destruction repeat-offender."
Extending Berger's criminal-justice metaphor, Secretary of Defense William
Cohen rejected Iraq's demand that Americans be excluded from the U.N.
inspection team. "[Saddam], being a parolee, is not in a position to determine
who his parole officer will be." Cohen also played show-and-tell on This
Week , holding up a 5-pound bag of Domino's sugar. The same-sized package
containing anthrax could kill half of the inhabitants of Washington, D.C., he
warned.

            The pundits tipped their hand
on where the debate will go next week when they tried--without much success--to
inject Israel into the debate. The Arab League had aligned with Saddam, said
Gergen on The McLaughlin Group and others, because it was angry with the
United States for the stalled peace process.

            "All
politics is personal" was the commentariat's reading of President Clinton's
failure to muster Democratic support for fast-track trade legislation. The
defeat was "payback" (Liasson, Limbaugh, and Mark Shields on Capital
Gang ) by Old Democrats for New Democrat Clinton's sins of triangulation
(the balanced budget, welfare reform, the tax cuts). "They're not scared of
him," said Kristol. "It's beyond not being scared of him," shot back This
Week co-host Cokie Roberts. "They're mad at him!" Reprising an earlier
theme about Iraq, Donaldson criticized the White House for not organizing a
"campaign far enough in advance" to pass fast track.

            

               Innuendos 97: Fox News' Brit Hume
claimed on Fox News Sunday that the "word around town" has it that the
Department of Justice--which has failed to nail even one of the million
Democrats guilty of campaign-finance violations--is aggressively pursuing its
investigation of former Republican National Committee chief Haley Barbour. "It
looks terrible," the Fox Washington bureau chief observed, more in anger than
in sorrow.

            
               Pundit Bites: Last
week, President Clinton claimed on Meet the Press that he hasn't eaten
at McDonald's since becoming president. Limbaugh countered that Clinton had, in
fact, snarfed at Mickey D's in Hawaii. "If he'll [lie] about McDonald's, he'll
do it about Iraq," Limbaugh charged. ... Can you bomb a nation into
compliance with U.N. resolutions? Yes, said former Secretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger and Maj. Gen. Perry Smith (USAF, Ret.) on Late Edition ,
citing the Serb surrender to the Dayton peace conference as an example.

            

               --Jack
Shafer