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CounterPunch
January
31, 2003
Inspections
as Charade
All They Want
is War
by AARON MATÉ
However much more time the UN Security Council
now extends to inspections in Iraq, the US has already made clear
that their findings will be of little relevance. "President
George Bush is determined to go to war with Saddam Hussein in
the next few weeks, without UN backing if necessary, according
to authoritative sources in Washington and London," the
Guardian reports on January 24th. The only debate within the
Bush administration centers along the much-hyped Rumsfeld-Powell
divide, with the former "[wanting] Mr. Bush to set a clear
and imminent deadline" while the Secretary of State is "resisting,
asking for a little more time for diplomatic coalition-building"
before bombing this suffering, miserable country.
Whenever they may be implemented, the
Bush administration's war plans reflect well-established precedents
familiar to the people of Iraq and the Middle East: the death
and misery of millions of people to ensure Western control over
the region's oil resources. The basic aim helps explain why the
US has supported dictatorial regimes throughout the region, Saddam
no exception.
Less than a year after Saddam used poison
gas to massacre 5000 Iraqi Kurds in March 1988, newly inaugurated
president George Bush Sr. called for establishing close ties
with the Iraqi dictator, explaining that "normal relations
between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer term
interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle
East," and encouraging "economic and political incentives
for Iraq to moderate its behaviour and to increase our influence."
Bush Sr.'s overtures were by no means
novel; six years earlier President Reagan had dispatched special
envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to visit "with the explicit
aim of fostering better relations between the United States and
Iraq," as John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago
and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard note in the January 2003 issue
of Foreign Policy. Soon after, "Saddam was gassing Kurds
and Iranians," all with US cooperation and support, progressing
into direct "facilitat[ion] of Iraq's efforts to develop
biological weapons by allowing Baghdad to import disease-producing
biological materials such as anthrax, West Nile virus, and botulinal
toxin."
The authors, two respected scholars well
within the mainstream, invoke this crucial background to illustrate
the limited tactical point that Saddam can still be deterred
today -- as indicated by his selective instances of gassing innocents
and attacking neighbours only when he could count on the support
of his patron superpower [Kuwait included just before the
invasion U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie had told Saddam that "[W]e
have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border
disagreement with Kuwait"], leaving the obvious moral questions
aside. Nevertheless, their point is significant: echoing nearly
every serious intelligence analysis on record, Saddam "has
no more incentive to give al Qaeda nuclear weapons than the United
States does-unless, of course, the country makes clear it is
trying to overthrow him", an observation that extends to
all terrorist acts that Saddam could possibly take. In other
words, as the CIA pointed out in an October 7th letter to the
Senate Intelligence Committee, "Should Saddam conclude that
a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would
become much less constrained in adopting terrorist action."
Perhaps picking up on these disaproving
analyses, the Bush administration has once again tried to push
the alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The idea was raised
with much fervor in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with much
of the focus centering on allegations of a prior meeting between
Iraqi officials and Mohammed Atta in the Czech republic. But
the business section of the New York Times reported on October
26, 2001 that "Czech officials said they had been asked
by Washington to comb their records to determine whether Mr.
Atta met with an Iraqi diplomat or agent here. They said they
had told the United States they found no evidence of any such
meeting. ... Petr Necas, chairman of the parliamentary defense
committee, said, 'I haven't seen any direct evidence that Mr.
Atta met any Iraqi agent'."
Yet addressing the media on Monday, January
28th, "[Press Secretary Ari] Fleisher and {Secretary of
State Colin] Powell repeated the president's long-held beliefs
that Iraq has been a refuge for al-Qaida and that Iraqis have
trained terrorists in the use of chemical weapons," the
Associated Press reports. When pressed for details, Fleisher
could offer only the very telling line of "it's a story
that's unfolding," as it no doubt is in the imaginations
of the speechwriters and PR managers that have been attempting
to spin it for a long while, in the continued effort to scare
the American population into accepting war. (Ron Fournier, "Bush
Address Won't Include New Iraq Data", AP, Monday Jan 27)
Of course, even expecting fabricated evidence to justify the
attack before it begins might even be asking too much. The day
that Hans Blix submitted his progress report to the UN, the Financial
Times, citing a "senior western security official",
informs us that "strong evidence of Iraq's success in hiding
its WMD programme will also emerge only after foreign troops
have occupied the areas in which its alleged chemical and biological
weapons programmes have been carried out," entrusting
the foreign invading army to provide the evidence after it has
taken over the country. It is unclear why the US does not simply
to pass on its intelligence of these alleged areas of WMD programmes
to the UN inspections regime right now. Perhaps because "US
administration officials stress that just because certain sites
are not operating does not mean that they will not be used for
WMD production in the future," a logic that would thus have
us bomb anywhere in the world if it was actually taken seriously.
(Mark Hubbard and Charles Clover, "Full evidence on Iraq
arms only after war", FT, Jan 27). That no citizenship outside
of the United States seems to accept these transparencies are
remarkable achievements of domestic US propaganda, as Noam Chomsky
has pointed out. But that public opinion polls in the US continue
to disagree with the Bush administration's extreme stance is
also a tribute to the growing anti-war sentiment that has been
displayed in the country. The widespread public opposition to
war is also considerable here in Canada, given how much effort
has been made in the mainstream to convince us of the merits
of subordination to US power and greed. Globe and Mail Washington
Bureau chief John Ibbitson provides an apt example in posing
the "basic" dilemma facing Canada, asking the profound
question of whether "we stand with the United States when
they need us," or do we choose to make our own decisions,
"acting with the United States only when we agree with its
aims and actions?"
It's difficult to reconcile, he writes,
when we are amongst the select group that embodies the "liberal
and democratic traditions [that] are almost exclusively the preserve
of what Winston Churchill called 'the English-speaking peoples':
Great Britain and its major settler colonies," who are "leading
the world toward a future of universal democracy, open markets,
and collective peace." We thus face a challenge "when
the leader of this coalition, the United States, concludes that
they, we, and everyone else are in imminent danger from a rogue
state and that action must be taken." It's a challenge that
has undoubtedly been faced by any state that has lacked the values
of universal democracy and human rights to not to submit itself
stronger, imperial powers bent on decimating local populations
and taking over their resources.
As always, the business press offers
a more honest account of the real questions faced in this war.
"Executives of US oil companies are conferring with officials
at the White House, the Department of Defense and the State Department
to figure out how to best jump-start Iraq's oil industry following
a war," Thaddeus Herrick reports in the Wall Street Journal.
"With oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia's, Iraq would
offer the oil industry enormous opportunity should a war topple
Saddam Hussein," an opportunity that will likely go, incidentally,
to "oil services firms such as Halliburton Co., where Vice-President
Dick Cheney formerly served as Chief Executive for what could
be as much as $1.5 billion in contracts." But in case anyone
might get the wrong idea, Larry Goldstein, "president of
the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York",
an industry lobby group, dismisses any misconceptions: "If
we go to war, it's not about oil," he explains. "But
the day the war ends, it has everything to do with oil."
("U.S. Oil Wants to work in Iraq," WSJ, January 16
2003).
The background illustrates a Western
policy guided by narrow self-interest that is easy enough to
document and denounce; what is more difficult is to capture in
words is just how much suffering it has caused. One does not
have to venture into the devastated hospitals and decaying infrastructure
of Iraqi society to get an idea it
is beyond words to look at pictures of Iraqi babies born with
severe deformities due to exposure to depleted uranium from US
bombing . Under US/UK-led sanctions and periodic bombings
since the Gulf War, 400,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives,
taking the conservative estimates. A comprehensive August 2002
report by 13 religious and non-governmental associations conducted
in partnership with Save the Children (UK) on the humanitarian
consequences of the Iraqi sanctions notes that while Saddam's
regime holds considerable responsibility for the suffering in
his country, "many" of its problems "can be attributed
to the sanctions." The bombings have caused "Electricity
shortages, [which] in addition to shutting down water-treatment,
seriously disrupt hospital care Sanctions also result in shortages
of medical equipment and spare parts, blockages of certain important
medicines, shortages of skilled medical staff, and more."
The health crisis that Iraqis endure is worsened by "sanctions
that deepen that crisis as a cause and also block measures that
could mitigate it through public health measures and curative
medical procedures."
An attack launched on Iraq would only
increase this suffering. "This is going to be a major undertaking
for us," the World Food Programme's Khaled Mansour tells
the Associated Press of the likely humanitarian effort required
in event of an attack. "This is not going to be a small
crisis from the humanitarian perspective. The need will be huge,
because the population is already highly vulnerable." (Timothy
Appleby, Associated Press/Globe and Mail, Jan. 15).
That there is even a question of whether
we are to participate in bringing about this crisis is shameful
in itself; a telling indication of the direction that "universal
democracy" and "collective peace" have taken under
its Western leadership. Whether these values can come to have
some remote meaning today certainly begins with the ongoing efforts
to oppose the planned attack on Iraq. This opposition is crucial
-- given our leaders' overall indifference to whatever real dangers
face either us or the intended victims, our public dissent stands
as the only real chance to ensure that our destructive polices
do not continue on their well-established course.
Aaron Maté is Vice-President (campaigns) of the Concordia
Student Union in Montreal. He can be reached at aaronjmate@yahoo.com
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January 25
/ 26, 2003
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