NEW YORK – Helmut Kohl broke down the Anglo-American isolation in the Gulf crisis yesterday, promising that the bases in Germany could be used for the punitive attack against Saddam Hussein. And other NATO countries, according to Pentagon chief William Cohen, after a meeting in Munich with Chancellor Kohl and the Western European Defense Ministers, are ready to help the United States and the Great Britain. But while the military preparation is intensifying and the latest diplomatic efforts are being attempted, there is a doubt that attacks all the protagonists of the Iraq crisis: what will change after the raid? Will it be possible by force to bend the intransigence of Baghdad? Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, talking together about Iraq in the weekly White House radio message, repeated yesterday that the undeniable objective is the neutralization of the chemical and bacteriological potential of Saddam: the hope is to get there on the roads of diplomacy, allowing UN inspectors to do their work undisturbed; otherwise the use of weapons is inevitable. “If Saddam does not renounce weapons of mass destruction – said Blair – military action will be inevitable”. But the warning from Charles Horner comes from the United States. He was the general of aviation who drove the offensive in the Gulf War with great success: therefore a true expert, one who knows the Iraqi theater as few others. According to Horner in the New York Times, the Pentagon has the tools for a victorious attack: smart bombs, “invisible” Stealth planes, the B-2 strategic bombers, the new Cruise missiles. And it can also – at the cost of many American deaths – kill Saddam.

But having the means does not mean we have to use them, “says the former general, even a carpet bombing would not be able to destroy all chemical and bacteriological weapons Saddam, so far an outlaw, risks becoming an Arab martyr. necessary to keep the rope tight, to maintain military pressure, but it is also opportune – he concludes – to define a long-term policy towards Iraq, shared by many observers, in America and elsewhere, Horner’s perplexities translate, paradoxically, into two opposing opinions: on the one hand there are those who insist, like the president of the American Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Jesse Helms, that the time has come to risk to the end, completing the unfinished work seven years ago, physically neutralizing Saddam. this hypothesis, supported also by Wafiq al Samarrai, former head of the Iraqi secret services now in exile in London, according to whom “if the generals of Baghdad knew that Saddam was in the crosshairs of Pentagon, they would be ready for a coup “. On the other hand, there is the party of diplomacy-to-all-costs, which in these hours continues to work, to study compromise hypotheses. The emissaries of the Cremlimo and the Palestinian Authority are still in Baghdad, where a special plane of Russian parliamentarians led by Vladimir Zhirinovskij is also expected. The envoys of France, of Turkey, of the Arab League commute between one capital and the other: announcing an initiative to the Security Council; signaling progress, the agreement reached yesterday between Baghdad and the UN inspectors to unearth chemical and bacteriological weapons, which were missing from the count and which the Iraqis say they had buried after the war. The White House, however, does not seem distracted either by the reasons for diplomacy to the bitter end, nor by those of Saddam’s killers. The plan always seems the same: try a diplomatic solution (“whose success, however, will depend on Saddam Hussein,” Clinton said yesterday) and meanwhile prepare a military action limited in purpose, but not in duration, intended to “reduce or delaying Iraq’s ability to produce non-conventional weapons “. Meanwhile, the United States and Great Britain have rejected the Japanese request to respect an “Olympic truce”, that is to wait for the raid to end the Olympic Winter Games. And Cohen, who ordered the further strengthening of US forces in the Gulf on Saturday, with six F-177 Stealth planes, six F-16s and six B-52s, will be in Riyadh today to expose the attack plans to King Fahd. hope, of course, of being able to count on the Saudi as well as the German bases.