You've got to hand it to Saddam. In one brisk, neat
letter to Kofi Annan, he pulled the rug from right under
George Bush's feet. There was the American
president last week, playing the role of multilateralist,
warning the world that Iraq had one last chance –
through the UN – to avoid Armageddon. "If the Iraqi
regime wishes peace," he told us all in the General Assembly, "it will immediately
and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass
destruction, long-range missiles and all related material." And that, of course, is the
point. Saddam would do everything he could to avoid war. President Bush was doing
everything he could to avoid peace. And now the Iraqi regime has put the Americans
into a corner. The arms inspectors are welcome back in Iraq. No conditions. Just as
the Americans asked.

No wonder the United States was whingeing on about "false hopes" yesterday. No
wonder the Americans were searching desperately for another casus belli – be sure
that they will find one – in an attempt to make sure that their next war keeps to its
timetable. Be sure, too, that Saddam, that master of the post-agreement conditional
clause, will have a few surprises for the UN inspectors when they do turn up in
Baghdad. Will the UN boys be allowed to visit the Beast of Baghdad's palaces? Will
they be waved through all checkpoints when they want to visit Tuwaitha or any of the
other horror factories in which the Iraqis once cooked up their biological weapons?

But for now, the Americans have been sandbagged. It will take at least 25 days to
put the UN inspection team together, another 60 for their preliminary assessment –
always assuming they are given "unfettered" access to all Iraqi government facilities
-- then another 60 days for further inspections. In other words, George Bush's latest
war has been delayed by more than five months. Saddam, of course, must have his
own worries. Back in 1996, the Iraqis were already accusing the UN inspectorate of
working with the Israelis.

Major Scott Ritter, Iraq's nemesis-turned-saviour, was indeed – as an inspector –
regularly travelling to Tel Aviv to consult Israeli intelligence. Then Saddam accused
the UN inspectors of working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it
emerged, was using the UN's Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's government
communications. And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the US and
Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", it turned out that virtually every one of the
bombing targets had been visited by UN inspectors over the previous six months.
Far from being an inspectorate, the UN lads – though they didn't all know it – had
been acting as forward air controllers, drawing up an American hit list rather than
monitoring compliance with UN resolutions.

But a glance back at George Bush's UN speech last week shows that a free
inspection of Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction was just
one of six conditions which Iraq would have to meet if it "wishes peace". In other
words, stand by for further UN Security Council resolutions which Saddam will find
far more difficult to accept.

The other Bush demands, for example, included the "end of all support for terrorism".
Does this mean the UN will now be urged to send inspectors to hunt for evidence
inside Iraq for Saddam's previous – or current – liaisons with guns-for-hire?

Then Bush demanded that Iraq "cease persecution of its civilian population, including
Shia, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans and others". Notwithstanding the inclusion of
Turkomans – worthy of protection indeed, though one wonders how they turned up
on the Bush list – does this mean that the UN could demand human rights monitors
inside Iraq? In reality, such a proposal would be both moral and highly ethical, but
America's Arab allies would profoundly hope that such monitors are not also
dispatched to Riyadh, Cairo, Amman and other centres of gentle interrogation.

Yet even if Saddam was prepared to accede to all these demands with a sincerity he
has not shown in response to other UN resolutions, the Americans have made clear
that sanctions will only be lifted – that Iraq's isolation will only end – with "regime
change". For Mr Bush's sudden passion for international adherence to UN Security
Council resolutions -- an enthusiasm which will not, of course, extend to Israel's
flouting of UN resolutions of equal importance – is in reality a cynical manoeuvre to
provide legitimacy for Washington's planned invasion of Iraq.

My own suspicion is that the Americans may try for a war crimes indictment against
Saddam Hussein. Mr Bush's crocodile tears for the victims of Saddam's secret
police torturers – who were hard at work when the president's father was maintaining
warm relations with the Iraqi monster – suggest that somebody in the administration
is playing with the idea of a war crimes trial. The tens of thousands of Iraqis subject
to "summary execution, and torture by beating, burning, electric shock, starvation,
mutilation and rape" could provide the evidence for any war crimes prosecution.
Indeed, when the Americans sealed off northern Iraq in 1991 to provide a dubious
"safe haven" for the Kurds, they scooped up masses of Iraqi government documents,
flew them out of Dohuk in a fleet of Chinook helicopters and squirrelled them away in
Washington as evidence for a possible future tribunal.

But even this idea has a hand grenade attached to it. Today, for example – and you
will look elsewhere in vain for any mention of this – marks the 20th anniversary of the
1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre, the slaughter of 1,700 Palestinian civilians by
Israel's Phalangist militia allies, a bloodbath which Israel's own army watched and
noted – and did nothing about. Lawyers for the families of the victims are even now
appealing against a Belgian decision not to allow Israel's prime minister, Ariel
Sharon – then the defence minister who was judged "personally responsible" by
Israel's commission of inquiry – to be tried for these mass murders.

If Saddam Hussein can be charged with war crimes – and he should be – then why
not Ariel Sharon? Why not Rifaat Assad, the brother of the late president of Syria,
whose Special Forces killed up to 20,000 Syrians in the rebellious city of Hama in
1982? Why not the Algerian police officers who have routinely tortured and murdered
civilians in the country's dirty war against the "Islamist" insurgency?

But justice is not what President Bush wants – unless it's a useful way of putting
America's enemies out of the way, of effecting "regime change" or of providing a
useful excuse for a military invasion which will leave US oil companies – including Mr
Bush's own buddies – in control of one of the world's largest reserves of oil. Saddam
Hussein's own cynicism – for he could have given UN inspectors free rein years ago
– will be matched by Mr Bush's cynicism. Saddam's letter to Mr Annan was a smart
move, as contemptuous as it was inevitable. Stand by, then, for an equally
contemptible response from President Bush.

www.zmag.org
[This message was edited Fri Sep 20 4:02:22 PDT 2002 by soulpower]

It couldn't be clearer that Bush's UN speech was purely strategic. He was banking on a "no" and a resolution backing the use of force. He condescendingly chided the world for having no backbone, the very image of self-satisfied arrogance. The truth is the world could show real backbone by saying "fuck off" to Bush and his cronies.The real reason why Bush is such a big warrior right now is because the elections are coming, and he's basically creating a wartime psychology ahead of the election, so that people feel it's their patriotic duty to back the republicans. It's as plain as that. Some moral superiority...

___

Iraq: The phantom menace
George W. Bush's war plans in the Middle East have more to do with elections than global security.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Robert Scheer
http://www.salon.com/news...index.html

Sept. 19, 2002 | Now we know just how vicious Saddam Hussein can be. Agreeing to unconditional United Nations inspections at a time when our president had his heart set on war is just the sort of mean-spirited treachery that one can expect from this modern-day Hitler.

The only greater betrayal will be if it turns out, upon inspection, that Iraq is not still building weapons of mass destruction and has no nuclear capability after all.


What if Scott Ritter, a one-time U.N. weapons inspector and former U.S. Marine who recently visited Baghdad, is right in arguing that Saddam's arsenal is a pale shadow of its former self?

The creation of that original arsenal of chemical and biological weapons was greatly facilitated by U.S. companies' sale of hardware to Iraq -- sales that were approved during the 1980s, when the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both sided with Iraq in its war with Iran.


These weapons, however, were largely eliminated by previous inspections; what materiel remains, Ritter has argued, has deteriorated to the point of uselessness.

As for nuclear weapons, Iraq's program lags far behind that of other unstable extremist nations, including Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Yet we have lifted sanctions against Pakistan intended to end its nuclear program, are building a nuclear plant for power generation in North Korea and have chosen to ignore Iran's well-documented nuclear weapons program.

And if concern over Iraq's nuclear program was truly the issue, we could destroy any suspicious installations from the air, as the Israelis did two decades ago in demolishing Iraq's French-built nuclear reactor.

Still, we must go to war or voters might start focusing on the dismal state of the economy under George W. Bush's stewardship and return a Democratic Congress in the November elections, right? Fortunately for Bush, arguments over Iraq now dominate water-cooler talk, rather than group commiseration over our Incredible Shrinking 401Ks -- but that can change.

What if people start asking about that miraculous tax cut that Bush made the centerpiece of his domestic program and that now has left the national accounts once again floating in red ink? The failure of inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction would make it appear that Bush has been using Iraq as a scapegoat for his own domestic problems.

Not to worry, though. If the inspectors fail to find weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration still is prepared to make the case for what it calls "regime change," a fine Orwellian phrase that certainly sounds more sanitary than the old-fashioned word "war," with all its nasty implications of death and madness. The trick is to make the lack of evidence of such weapons more convincing of their existence than real evidence would be.

That extremely convenient cop-out was most absurdly expressed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has declared that "absence of evidence" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq should not be considered "evidence of absence."

But the guilty-no-matter-what doctrine will ultimately not go down easily with the American public, and certainly not worldwide. That's why President Bush had to go to the United Nations and attempt to make the case that Iraq had threatening weapons. That tactic has now backfired; it would be a global embarrassment if Bush at this point turned down Saddam Hussein's offer of unconditional inspections.

But it also would be devastating if inspectors went there and found only old U.S. ordnance given to Iraq by Bush's father and Reagan. It was embarrassing enough for the younger Bush in his speech to the United Nations to be reduced to trotting out examples of Iraq's war crimes from the days when Saddam was a de facto ally of the United States. It's so inconvenient that Iraq did not appear to use any chemical or biological weapons during the Gulf War or in the decade since but definitely did back when Saddam was our partner in the war against Iran's Islamic revolution.

Worse, U.S. companies, with the permission of the Reagan and elder Bush administrations, supplied Saddam with the ingredients for making such savage weapons. The CIA reported that Iraq was using mustard gas against Iran as early as 1983 and nerve gas against Iranian troops a year later, yet the Reagan administration removed Iraq from its list of terrorist nations and approved the sale of 60 Hughes helicopters later used to spray lethal chemicals on civilians. The United States gave this man we now casually call a Hitler $1.5 billion in weapons and technology in the five years before the Gulf War.

Bush has fallen into a trap of his own design by going to the United Nations seeking approval. If the inspectors who now go to Iraq find new weaponry, it can easily be destroyed, but that would cheat Bush of an excuse for the war he desperately wants.

Aerogram said:

Good post. Ironically the US goverment is currently accusing Germany of doing just that. We are having national elections this Sunday and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who is planning on being re-elected, has made very clear a few weeks ago, that there will be "no US-war-adventure in iraq, with or without UN resolution". US diplomat Dan Coats has accused Schroeder of creating the fear of war before election, abusing and seriously damaging the relations between the two countries. The conservative opposition has critized Schroeder the same way, but they became more careful after they found out that the majority of germans is clearly against war. Germany is the only Nato-country which truly is having a backbone i this affair, and the relations between america and germany have cooled of to a point where they havent been since 1945. Donald Rumsfeld to a CNN-reporter being asked about Schroeders comment in the NY-Times ("Hands off Iraq"): "Dont make me say something non-diplomatic."
I wish more European countries would follow the german example and show some backbone. Because if we all stand up together, Bush will have nobody to finance his adventure.

I agree, except for the fact Bush was not counting on the world to "finance" his operation. No.. he was simply looking for some kind of greater legitimacy, so that he could say that the international community is defending itself (same model as the first Gulf war).

Not that it's a great achievement, but I predicted months ago that the war drums would start shortly before the November election. This whole thing most likely has been planned for months by republican leaders.
[This message was edited Fri Sep 20 4:55:17 PDT 2002 by Aerogram]

Aerogram said:

Actually, he is counting on Europe's financial support. Estimates say that a new war on iraq will cost about 100 billion dollars. The first war back in ' 91 cost about 70 Billion. In spite of the financial help (Germany allone transfered 17 Billion), the US economy crashed after the war, a recession was the result.
In 2002/03 we ALREADY are at recession. And so far nobody except for Britain and maybe France and Spain are willing to help out. So Bush knows a new war will be at the price of a new economical crash of his own country

soulpower said:

Well, he had been said to privately favor an almost exclusively american operation, back in the days when world opinion seemed to be staunchnly against an Iraq invations. Bush has this cowboy side to him, but now that he successfully used Sept. 11 to sway opinion, he certainly is after some cash.

Aerogram said:

Bush will have to seriously go after Saddams oil reserves if he wants to finance that war... otherwhiles he will ruin his country financially...

Hey soulpower, give Robert Fisk credit!:

http://www.independent.co...ory=334318

2the9s said:

I did! I posted the link up there! www.zmag.org (at least thats where I got it from since I dont read the INDEPENDENT here)