Global Policy Forum

By Jim Hoagland

Hi ya, big boy. Yeah, you, Saddam. The Mother of All Dictators. O.K., O.K., the All Mighty and Munificent One, then. Still touchy after all these years, I see. You've been busy rebuilding missile factories and other secret toys. Here, we've been distracted with a nascent election campaign in which both sides pray that you stay out of sight.

They don't learn, do they, O Blessed Hope of Iraq? They underestimate your need to stay in the spotlight. You'll be back. And they sure as heck don't get how you've honed that trademark touchiness you unleash so quickly as one of your most important political weapons.

You use it to attract useful idiots from abroad to plead for an end to international infringement on Iraq's ''sovereignty.'' And you use it to intimidate other governments and the United Nations into tiptoeing around your deadly toys so as not to set off your nasty side. World-class tactics, pal. They help you big time now in wriggling away from UN sanctions. Why am I not surprised? Maybe because I have seen your skills firsthand. During our 1975 interview in your palace in Baghdad, for example.

When one of your minions called to say that you were upset with the article that followed, I thought I knew why: those references to you as a teenage gunman and the violence and intimidation you used to rule Iraq. All true, I said.

Nah, not that stuff, your diplomat shot back. It's the diamond cuff links. How could I have mentioned the obvious pride of the Greatest Arab Socialist in History in such worldly goods? This would not help your image, and what did not help your image was dangerous in Iraq.

Recent reports say you and your clan still live luxuriously and your army thrives while Iraqi children die from hunger and neglect. But somehow today the diamond cuff links part of the picture gets left out: Your line that sanctions, rather than your bloody rule and defiance of the United Nations, are the root cause of Iraq's troubles is propagated widely by people who should know better. They portray you as the victim.

But there I go again.

Look at the debate at the UN last week over a mind-numbing nuance: Should Hans Blix, the chairman of the new team of arms inspectors, announce that his group was ready to return to Iraq, or should he say the arms experts ''could plan and commence'' preliminary tasks to prepare for future inspections once they are approved by Iraq?

Stop laughing, Saddam. Don't gloat because Mr. Blix chose the second option after Washington and Moscow told him they didn't want an announcement that would ''create a climate of confrontation at an inappropriate time,'' as a Security Council diplomat told Colum Lynch of The Washington Post (IHT, Sept. 1).

Moscow wants to avoid any hint of confrontation. President Vladimir Putin is avidly working to get sanctions off and business with Iraq resumed, no matter how many hidden atomic, chemical or biological weapon facilities you've built. Washington's motivation is more complex but no less craven.

Diplomatic confrontation would call attention to the fact that there have been no inspections for weapons of mass destruction since you unilaterally ended them in December 1998. Al Gore does not want that dredged up now. Not even Bush-Cheney-Powell seem eager to have U.S. televiewers or newspaper readers reminded that you survive, and plot.

Silence about the thwarted inspections plays into your hands. It keeps the international focus on sanctions, not on your defiance. It shields the reality that you could end tomorrow the cruel deprivation that afflicts Iraq's children by simply living up to the obligations you undertook to the United Nations and to the administration of George W. Bush's father to get an end to the the Gulf War.

''Europeans feel we cannot go on starving innocent children with these sanctions,'' a leading German politician said on a recent Washington visit. I asked him if it made any difference that it was Baghdad's just-repeated refusal of inspections that kept the sanctions in place. ''No, people just see the children,'' he responded.

You turned 63 this spring, O Crafty Survivor of All Survivors. But you haven't lost a step in the flimflam and intimidation game, Saddam. You are one of a kind. Or so I pray.