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CounterPunch
February
13, 2003
Oh, What a Web They Weave
Will Hans Get
Blixed?
By LINDA S. HEARD
In the red/blue corner we have 'Dr. Spin' Tony
Blair, managed by 'Dubya' Bush and in the blue/red corner the
'Lion of Old Europe' Jacques Chirac and his manager, Gerhardt
'The Peacemaker' Schroeder. If the Bush/Blair team has its way,
the starter bell will ring at any minute.
Not so for Chirac and Schroeder who want
to see the game cancelled without having to accede the title.
In this game the Prize is the future of Iraq - peace or war?
Israel and Australia are cheering on the <U.S./U.K>. combo,
while Russia and Belgium applaud for France and Germany. Drs.
Blix and El Baradei are the referees. If only it were that simple.
Chirac and Putin said at a joint press
conference on Monday in Paris that they saw war only as a last
resort, that their stance was a moral one and that they insisted
on adhering strictly to international law. Putin stressed that
the vast majority of countries represented in the UN General
Assembly wanted to see a peaceful solution to the Iraq problem.
On Monday evening, the Iraqi ambassador
to the UN put a spoke in the American wheel by saying that Iraq
is now willing to allow U-2 flights and other aircraft to fly
unconditionally over their territory.
Earlier, in Germany, we saw the battle
of the political giants, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
and Germany's Foreign Minister Joschke Fischer who recently engaged
in a heated exchange, which in earlier centuries might have been
resolved by pistols at dawn.
Rumsfeld wants what he calls 'Old Europe'
to vote 'yea' for an invasion of Iraq, and insists that NATO
ready itself to protect Turkey when, and if, the pyrotechnics
begin.
Fischer, backed by France and Russia
are having none of it. They want to see inspections take their
course and are considering pushing through a UN Resolution aimed
at doubling the numbers of weapons inspectors, a UN peacekeeping
force being installed in Iraq, and that country being turned
into a giant No-Fly Zone. Rumsfeld warned that NATO, like the
UN, is in danger of being labeled his favourite word 'irrelevant'.
The thwarted American President is not amused.
What America had hoped would be most
of the world against the Iraqi regime has turned not only into
a crisis for members of the North Atlantic Alliance but also
for Europe itself. Leading the pro-war Brigade is Britain's Prime
Minister, one of the signatories on a letter backing the US,
penned by eight European nations and published in various leading
European newspapers.
Blair has got to have full marks for
tenacity and determination, given that over 80 per cent of the
British people are anti-war, along with the Anglican church,
the Vatican, a number of head honchos in the British military,
over 100 of his own Labour Party backbenchers and even members
of his cabinet.
There is also an alleged growing divide
between M15/M16 and the British government over a plagiarized
dossier, which Blair's office had lifted off the Internet - the
work of a post-graduate Arab American student. Britain's intelligence
community was so incensed that it 'leaked' one of their own documents
showing that, contrary to the plagiarized dossier, available
intelligence shows that the Iraqi regime has no tangible links
to Al Queda or to any other terrorist groups.
Powell's
manipulation of the truth
Despite the general consensus to the
contrary, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell still insists
that Iraq has links to Al Queda. He has even claimed that in
a tape recently aired by Al Jazeera Bin Laden is heard professing
his cooperation with Saddam Hussein. Even the hawkish Rumsfeld
refrained from going to those lengths but that didn't stop Britain's
own Defense Secretary Jeff Hoon from jumping on the bandwagon
and stressing that Bin Laden and Saddam share common cause.
Powell, whose credibility was previously
hardly ever called into question, made another faux pas this
week when telling a Congressional Committee that the ricin poison
found in a North London apartment emanated from Iraq, although
he did add not from the Baghdad-controlled region.
When subsequent reports out of London
suggested that this could not be true, since the ricin found
in that flat was home-made, Powell's aide later stated that his
boss meant that the 'know-how' came from Iraq. How the heck could
he have known where the know-how came from in this Internet age?
The people arrested for making the poison were Algerians and
could have picked up their recipe from just about anywhere.
Reaction
from the Arab world
The Arab world is carved up into various
camps too. Kuwait and Qatar are actively and visibly cooperating
with the American build-up of troops and weaponry in the Gulf,
and reading between the lines have indicated that they really
had little choice. The UAE, which is vehemently against the war,
has, nevertheless, sent 5,000 of its troops and a warship to
Kuwait for that country's defense in accordance with GCC common
defense treaties.
According to Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak's statement recently after a meeting with Presidents
Bashar Al Assad of Syria and Muammar Gaddafhi of Libya, the Arabs
are looking to Britain to change course and dilute the American
led aggression on Iraq. He seemed to be throwing up his hands
in despair and admitting that the Arabs are impotent to stop
the invasion.
Jordan's King Abdullah was at first reluctant
to join with the U.S. but appears to have succumbed to heavy
American pressure to lend some support, a decision which is far
from being popular among that country's five million ethnic Palestinians.
Jordan presently enjoys cheap imports of Iraqi oil and trades
with Baghdad to the tune of some two billion dollars annually.
Kuwait has pledged to make up for the shortfall in petroleum.
Turkey's street is boiling too and feels
that its pro-Islamic new government has let down the populace,
some 90 per cent of which are against any military adventurism
in Iraq. Again, the Pentagon has been twisting Turkey's arm with
warnings and incentives.
The Turkish government is damned if it
does and damned if it doesn't. Its fragile economy relies on
loans from the World Bank and the IMF, and the last thing the
country wants, from a geopolitical viewpoint, is to see an autonomous
Kurdish region in northern Iraq, providing a rallying point for
its own militant Kurds. On Monday a further complication appeared.
The Turkish army refused to operate under U.S. command and control.
The Palestinians fear that the Prime
Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon is waiting ominously in the wings
to pounce when the time is right. They are concerned that Sharon
will use war with Iraq to further his ambitions of a Greater
Israel either by further colonization of the West Bank or by
attempting to ethnically cleanse the Occupied Territories.
Blix in
a fix
If we are to believe diplomatic statements
coming out of world capitals, then whether or not there will
be a conflict depends on Messrs Blix and ElBaradei of the United
Nations and the IAEA respectively. This is a heavy weight on
the heads of these two men who have the mandate to prove that
Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. The politicians and
the press hang onto every word that these two men utter, and
use those sentences to back-up their own case very often in a
disingenuous manner.
I have no doubt that Blix and ElBaradei
take their responsibilities very seriously and are aware of the
consequences of a single error of judgment, but at the same time
they are human, all too human. It seems to me very wrong that
these 'non-biased' judges or arbiters shuttle between Washington
and London before flying to Baghdad.
In a perfect world, the Chief Inspectors
should not be subjected to the sway of either side's politicians
and should, surely, confine themselves to the realms of science
and the facts on the ground. They are currently behaving like
judges who sit down to afternoon tea with both the accuser and
the accused before presenting a verdict.
Upon his return from Baghdad, Blix gave
a preview of the contents of his report to the UN, scheduled
for Friday, to the big five in a closed session. According to
reports, Blix appears hopeful of Iraqi cooperation, but Condoleeza
Rice told him that he must be firmer in his stance and stress
that Iraq is in material breach of Resolution 1441. How on earth
is Blix supposed to deliver an objective report when he is coming
under so much pressure from the Superpower?
However, Blix has now been offered the
perfect red herring in the shape of reports that some of Baghdad's
missiles exceed the permitted 150-kilometer range. Tony Blair
is already making headlines screaming his concern over these
weapons, which contravene relevant resolutions. The range of
the offending missiles is just 185-kilometers. What on earth
is 35 kilometers between friends, or even enemies for that matter?
Not in our
name
While the politicians bicker and the
armies flex their muscles, we, the people have spoken. 'Not in
our name'. We don't want war. We do not believe that Iraq is
either a danger to its neighbors or to the rest of the planet.
We don't want to sit in our armchairs, munching on popcorn, watching
Iraqi mothers and children being killed by missiles and bombs.
We may not appreciate Iraq's dictator and his brutal methods,
yet most of us feel that he is their leader and it is up to them
and/or the region to deal with him.
But, we the people feel helpless to really
do anything to prevent the inevitable. Most of are too busy with
our own lives, or too apathetic to bother even though we feel
a gnawing sense of discomfort that justice is being ignored.
Some of us are spending our time writing letters to the editor,
or to our political leaders, others turn up at anti-war demonstrations,
while the most courageous of us have headed off to Baghdad to
offer themselves up as human shields.
The Iraqi people are left to stoically
await their fate, hoping against hope that America and Britain
will leave them be. "Haven't we suffered enough," they
cry. "Why us?" Why indeed? And so, the fight between
the suits and ties in their smart offices goes on. Let's hope
it will not be to the death - neither the death of the Iraqi
people, nor the young, wide-eyed soldiers sent to the killing
fields.
Will the report presented to the UN General
Assembly by the chief weapons inspectors on Friday offer yet
more grist to the warmonger's mill? Or will it provide the 'Old
Europe' crowd with the moral high ground to pursue its peaceful
path? I trust that these two eminent civil servants Messrs Blix
and ElBaradei will search their respective consciences and do
what is empirically right.
Linda Heard
is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She can be reached
at: freenewsreport@yahoo.com
Yesterday's
Features
Alexander Cockburn
The
Largest Anti-War Out Cry in History
Tom Gorman
Bill
O'Reilly's Fascism, Part 2:
Goebbels Would've Been Proud
Theodore McDowell
Searching for a Christian Response to War:
Iraq: a Call for Repentance and Resistance
Emrah Göker
Turkey and War:
94 Percent Oppose Invasion of Iraq
R.S. Zaharna
The
New Bin Laden Tape:
How It Plays in the Arab World
Maria Tomchick
Powell's Evidence Unravels
Harry Browne
The
View from Dublin:
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Iraq
Aviv Lavie
Partners in Pain:
Arabs Study the Holocaust
Bernard Weiner
Artistic Sign Language:
Symbols of the Coming Bush Fall
Mano Singham
What War Looks Like
Charles Sullivan
Manifest Destiny Rides Again
Nick Ring
A Student's View of the New Bin Laden Tape
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