You Blinked! No, You Did!

George Bush and Saddam Hussein have this much in common: each wants to keep his job, and each would like to be rid of the other. They've been doing their best on both fronts. After days of hard negotiation at the United Nations, the three-week showdown over whether a U.N. inspection team would gain access to the Iraqi Agriculture Ministry ended. Baghdad agreed to admit a team of inspectors -- with one important catch: the building would still be barred to inspectors from the U.S. or any other nation that fought Iraq in the Gulf War.

George Bush quickly called the agreement a "cave-in" by Saddam. In part, it was. Saddam relented in the face of signs that the U.S. was reaching for its guns. Over the weekend, with the carrier Independence already in the Persian Gulf, the Pentagon moved the Saratoga to the eastern Mediterranean and dispatched Patriot launchers and missiles to Kuwait. But Baghdad's two-steps- forward-one-step-back confrontation with Washington allowed Saddam for the first time have a say in the makeup of a U.N. inspection team. It also let him claim a triumph over the U.S. By the time the U.N. team entered the building on Tuesday -- as three inspectors, two of them American, waited outside -- the Iraqis had had five days to remove any incriminating materials. To no one's surprise, the inspectors found nothing.

Baghdad's compromise left the U.S. without a clear policy for getting Saddam to observe the cease-fire that he has been violating for months in ways large and small. Among the largest has been his mounting assault on Shi'ite rebels in southern Iraq. As one countermove, Secretary of State James Baker met in Washington with leaders of the Iraqi opposition. At the U.N., Britain, France and the U.S. are drawing up a new resolution to authorize force if the Shi'ite crackdown is not stopped.

Bush has pointedly left open the possibility of future military action. To back up his point, on Friday the Pentagon announced that the U.S. will send 2,400 Army troops to Kuwait over the next three weeks for training exercises. Saddam may think that the President's political weakness at home will make it more difficult for him to muster support for renewed action against Iraq -- and at the same time more damaging for him to give the impression of being powerless in the face of Iraqi provocations. Bush may have been thinking along & the same lines last week when he insisted that Saddam will be made to comply with all terms of the cease-fire. Said the President: "He may not know it, but he's going to do it." (See related story on page 30.)