Saddam's Iraq is the ideal enemy

What is the case for war against Iraq? We still have more than a week to wait for the British Government's much-anticipated dossier on Saddam Hussein's regime, but if the information released last week by the White House is any guide, it will contain little that is new.

The outlines of the argument are already known; President George Bush repeated them at the United Nations on Thursday, the same day the White House published its information. Iraq has persistently defied UN Security Council resolutions. Saddam Hussein is a wicked man who has used weapons of mass destruction in the past – 5,000 people were gassed in the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988 – and is doing his best to develop nuclear weapons (not very successfully, according to the respected Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the US). If he is not stopped, the world, shaken by the al-Qa'ida attacks on New York and Washington a year ago, will become immeasurably more dangerous.

Critics are pointing out, however, that most of these accusations apply to other countries as well. Israel has flouted Security Council res- olution 242 since 1967, annexing the Golan Heights and east Jerusalem, and allowing Jewish settlements to expand all over the West Bank and Gaza, yet the US has done little to oppose the process, let alone threaten military action. Indeed, one of its main reasons for threatening Iraq is because of the potential danger to Israel.

This contradiction enrages the Arab world and attracts recruits to al-Qa'ida, but the US has been demanding "regime change", not of Israel, but of the Palestinians. The Bush administration has called publicly for Yasser Arafat to be ousted as head of the Palestinian Authority. Ironically, nothing is more likely to guarantee his re-election in January, despite growing Pale- stinian discontent with him.

In most of the Middle East, equating Israel with Iraq appears obvious. In most of the West, the comparison is considered absurd. But what of North Korea, Baghdad's partner in Mr Bush's "Axis of Evil"?

It too is a nightmarish regime which defies the international community, has gone to war with the West and supports terrorism. Worse, unlike Iraq it already has nuclear weapons – but that is precisely why the US treats North Korea differently.

The knowledge that Pyongyang could leave the Korean peninsula and Japan an irradiated wasteland is a powerful disincentive to threats; it has to be left to the South Koreans to try to persuade their neighbours to behave rationally. But if weapons of mass destruction are likely to be used anywhere soon, it is in south Asia.

India and Pakistan, both declared nuclear powers, have gone to war three times since independence in 1947, twice over Kashmir, and looked dangerously close to doing so again earlier this year. Yet the US, which needed Pakistan's support when it went to war in Afghanistan, waived sanctions imposed because of Islamabad's nuclear programme. Similar realpolitik applies to India.

Even without their nuclear weapons, India or Pakistan would be a daunting prospect for a superpower seeking to exercise its military strength. But if regime change is an option wherever there are unpleasant dictators, some have asked, why not Zimbabwe? Robert Mugabe's oppression is worsening to the point where up to half the population is threatened with famine, and removing him would be the work of an afternoon for the US military. The country's neighbours would be outraged – but that does not seem to be a problem in the Middle East.

The suggestion is satirical, of course, but why? Because Zimbabwe, like North Korea, India and Pakistan, is not a major oil exporter, and therefore ranks low in US strategic thinking. The same cannot be said of Iran: bracketed with its neighbour in the "Axis of Evil", also a key oil producer and also, according to the US, seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. When President Saddam was seen as the West's friend, it was because of Western hostility to the clerical regime in Tehran.

Unpleasant, authoritarian and anti-Western as it may be, however, Iran is not a dictatorship in the Iraqi or North Korean mould. A recognisable civil society is struggling to evolve, and would unite against any hint of an American-led attack. Tehran swiftly condemned the terrorist acts of 11 September.

No, Iraq is unique: oil-rich, governed by fear and dangerous, yet militarily weak enough to contemplate defeating. That is what singles out Saddam Hussein for special treatment, though Tony Blair's dossier will not put it quite that way.