Two alternative resolutions to grant the president authorization for war against Iraq are being wrongly portrayed as compromises of the president’s position. They are just the opposite – either would strengthen his position for attacking, and recent events show why.

Saddam Hussein used dissension, especially of Russia and France in the United Nations Security Council, to his advantage Tuesday in agreeing to an arms-inspection deal for everywhere in Iraq except the eight presidential palaces, clearly a condition that would have been unacceptable to the United States. But no one asked the United States. The deal was with U.N. officials in Vienna and drafted by Hans Blix, head of the U.N. inspection agency UNMOVIC. According to Iraqi delegation chief Amir El-Sadi, U.N. weapons inspectors could be in Baghdad within two weeks.

At about the same time as the agreement was being signed, President Bush was telling the press, “I don’t want to get a resolution that ties my hands,” as if Saddam’s representatives were not doing precisely that in Vienna. Instead, the president said he wanted a congressional resolution that “sends a clear signal that the country is determined to disarm Iraq and thereby bring peace to the world.”

The idea that the planet’s lack of peace can be traced back to Iraq’s weapons cache is remarkable, and would certainly explain the administration’s zeal in trying to eliminate those weapons. Almost everyone, in fact, would agree that a world with a disarmed Saddam Hussein is a better world, even if everyone would not go quite as far in making the weapons a first cause.

Can the United States unilaterally bomb Baghdad if dozens of U.N. weapons inspectors are working there? Not likely. That’s why war authorization by Sens. Joe Biden and Richard Lugar and another by Sen. Carl Levin seek U.N. support for U.S. action. Getting that support, while onerous to the cause of world peace, means that the Iraqi president would have a much harder time cutting side deals with sympathetic U.N. countries. It automatically puts the United States in a stronger position to influence what other nations do.

Though it is used as a campaign cudgel now, the Senate debate over the Gulf War a decade ago was once viewed as an accomplishment of reasonable and thoughtful leaders coming together to debate and act on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The response by the United States then was shaped by the quality of discussion in the Senate. That matters now because, if anything, Saddam Hussein has gotten smarter in the intervening years.