Keep trying peaceful approach

The United States, Great Britain, Spain and Bulgaria have proposed a U.N. resolution saying Iraq has used up its last chance to avoid war. France, Germany and Russia have a better idea: Give peace another chance.

The U.S.-led proposal is precipitous, with little hope of garnering enough Security Council votes to pass. As such, it will serve only to further isolate the United States' foreign policy on Iraq and to strengthen prospects for military action in which the United States acts either alone or, at best, accompanied by few allies.

The current situation does not yet constitute the test of the United Nations' credibility that President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair legitimately say may come over the attempt to disarm Iraq.

That test might well come, however, if Iraq refuses to destroy its stock of Al Samoud 2 missiles by Saturday, as ordered by U.N. arms inspectors. Such an unequivocal act of defiance to U.N. authority would be a watershed. Even the French would find it difficult to make the case against military action in the face of such a challenge.

So far, however, the evidence of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction remains sufficiently absent and Iraq's cooperation with weapons inspectors remains sufficiently high that there is insufficient justification for military force at this time.

So the French-German-Russian proposal is both more realistic and reasonable. The proposal, so far in the form only of a "memorandum" for discussion and not a resolution for adoption, reinforces the commitment that Iraq disarmament is an absolute necessity, but military action may not be.

While Saddam is hardly to be trusted and his record of duplicity is well-established, the facts are as the memorandum states: No evidence has been given that Iraq still possesses banned weapons; the inspection process has just gotten up to speed and, while Iraqi cooperation has been less than perfect, the inspections are going on without hindrance.

The memorandum calls for a strengthened inspection regime, to include increasing the staff and adding to the diversity of the inspectors' expertise and establishing mobile units to track trucks. It also prescribes enhanced aerial surveillance and strict timelines for inspections and assessment of Iraqi compliance.

This proposal for continued containment of the Iraqi weapons threat is a healthy reminder of the objective, which is to disarm Iraq through peaceful means if possible. War is the last resort to achieve the objective of disarmament, not the objective itself.

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