What If They Gave a War and Nobody Covered It?

It's the war that has faded from the front pages to the news briefs — and the White House is suddenly under pressure over it. The New York Times reports Friday that a bipartisan group of senior senators and congressmen has written to President Clinton warning of the "drift" in U.S. policy on Iraq, and urging that Saddam Hussein be given a new deadline for compliance with arms-control requirements or face a new round of intense bombing. Although air strikes on Iraq hardly make the paper any longer, let alone the front page, the U.S. and Britain have fired 1,100 missiles at 359 targets this year alone (and flown about 65 percent of the number of missions carried out during the Kosovo conflict). The low-key air war, which followed four days of intense bombing in response to a showdown on arms control last December, has failed to alter the strategic equation in Iraq. With Iraq’s leaders and its anti-aircraft gunners as defiant as ever, the administration is now debating whether to up the ante.

Escalating the conflict, however, raises the political risk. Intensified bombing would inevitably bring greater civilian casualties, and with a United Nations report released Thursday showing that the death rate among Iraqi children under age 5 has doubled in the era of U.N. sanctions, will only add to the disquiet of Washington’s Arab and European allies over U.S. Iraq policy (even if, as Washington insists, much of that suffering is caused by Saddam’s failure to distribute humanitarian supplies allowed through under the embargo). In addition, as a senior administration official told the Times, unless the U.S. and its allies are prepared to send in ground troops, the best Washington can hope for is to contain — rather than overthrow — Saddam’s regime. And containment is a strategy pursued in the news briefs rather than the headlines.