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http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_73069,00120001.htm The Hindustan Times Paranoid androids Prem Shankar Jha September 26 Several recent developments have left little room for doubt that the US and the UK intend to launch a military attack on Iraq, not in January or February, as most analysts seem to think, but within days of the passage of a �tough� new UN resolution, that Iraq may well refuse to comply with. In New York, George W. Bush used the podium of the UN General Assembly, an organisation designed to preserve peace, to make what amounted to a unilateral declaration of war. In London, Tony Blair released a 55-page intelligence assessment which purported to show not only that Iraq continues to build weapons of mass destruction, but is capable of having some of them ready for use within 45 minutes of receiving Saddam Hussein�s order. The last time he released a similar document was when the US was on the verge of launching its attack on Afghanistan. American forces are already in place for the attack. A command headquarters has been set up in Kuwait. The chief of the US Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks, has visited Kuwait to discuss the state of planning for the Iraq war with the chiefs of the three services in his command. All this has gone on behind a veritable media blitzkrieg of carefully leaked stories that have revealed American war plans in unprecedented detail. Along with this has come a barrage of pseudo-moral justification. �In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and long range missiles and to prove to the world that it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge,� said Bush at the UN. Blair was more explicit: �The threat posed to international peace and security when WMD are in the hands of a brutal and aggressive regime like Saddam�s, is real. Unless we face up to the threat, not only do we risk undermining the authority of the UN, whose resolutions he defies, but more importantly, we place at risk the lives and prosperity of our own people.� The State against which he has made this charge is, no doubt, ruled by a despot with a less than savoury record of waging war, not least against his own people. But it is a broken and exhausted nation. By 1998, according to a UNICEF report, economic sanctions imposed after the Gulf war had killed more than half-a-million children. The UNICEF arrived at this figure by comparing the infant mortality rate in Iraq before and after the war. The same report said that under the sanctions regime the infrastructure of the country and, most important of all, its water supply and sanitation systems, had broken down. What is true of the civilian infrastructure is also true of its weaponry. Since 1990, Iraq has received little new military equipment. Its planes, tanks and artillery are more than a decade old. Much of what was left after the Gulf war has been destroyed in successive bombing raids on tank and artillery depots, ammunition dumps and airfields. A part of the little that has survived has been cannibalised to keep the rest running. Thus only a fraction of the armament that survived the Gulf war is still fit for combat. Iraq does not have the economic strength, the military muscle or the emotional staying power to threaten anyone. On the contrary, in November 1998, when the US was on the brink of an attack, it quietly sent a message to Tel Aviv that it would not attack Israel if the US attacked it. This was not the act of a war-crazed despot. Why then are the US and UK so determined to invade Iraq? The ostensible reason is that Saddam, who has demonstrated his willingness to use WMD against Iran and on the Kurds, must be preempted from acquiring the capacity to build them again. But the real fear is that, having alienated Saddam beyond any hope of repair, the US cannot take the risk of a resurgent Iraq becoming the next State sponsor of international terrorism. This fear haunts Washington despite the fact that Iraq is the one State that is totally free of Islamic fundamentalism and that the most diligent US efforts have failed to uncover links with any international terrorist group. Iraq is therefore to be invaded and destroyed not because of what it has done; not because of what it has threatened to do; not even for what it is capable of doing; but for what it is suspected of being capable of doing. This is paranoia on a scale the world has never known before. According to Bush and Blair, Saddam played hide and seek with the UN weapons inspectors (UNSCOM) between 1991 and 1998, and forced them out of Iraq rather than let them complete their job of dismantling its WMD capability. According to them, Iraq withdrew cooperation from UNSCOM in November 1997 but backtracked when faced by the threat of bombing in the same month; it withdrew it in February 1998, but backtracked in the face of another bombing threat the same month; it withdrew cooperation in August 1998 but backtracked in November, and withdrew it finally in December 1998. On each occasion it tried to strike bargains with the remaining permanent members of the Security Council to lift sanctions in exchange for allowing the weapons inspectors back in. In the process, it eroded the effectiveness of the sanctions and drove a wedge between the UK and US and the rest. Undoubtedly, Iraq did not cooperate with UNSCOM willingly. At the very outset, Saddam set up a �high level concealment committee� to minimise the amount of weapons and WMD making facilities that UNSCOM could unearth. But thanks to intelligence inputs from Israel, it had immense success. On April 11, 1997, UNSCOM reported to the Security Council that �the accumulated effect of the work that has been accomplished over six years since the ceasefire went into effect � is such that not much is unknown about Iraq�s retained proscribed weapons capabilities�. >From there, everything went downhill. By December 1998, UNSCOM had withdrawn from Iraq and the US and UK had begun four days of intense bombardment designed to �degrade� its capacity to build WMD and threaten its neighbours in the future. In a manner that eerily foreshadowed the way that Yasser Arafat and the PLO would be held responsible for the violence that was unleashed upon Israel and Palestine by Ariel Sharon, the spin doctors of the US and UK ensured that the blame for the breakdown of the inspection regime would be heaped on Saddam. However, the breakdown was engineered by the US. To cite one example, Iraq broke off cooperation with UNSCOM in late 1997 because it believed that Scott Ritter, a senior American specialist on UNSCOM, was a CIA agent. The US dismissed the charge, nearly went to war in February over Ritter�s reinstatement, and succeeded in making Iraq back down in February. Six months later when Ritter turned �rogue�, the world�s press came to know that he had been a member not of the CIA but US Marine Intelligence and had enjoyed a cosy two-way relationship with Israeli intelligence while in Iraq. The US sabotaged the end of weapons inspection because it soon realised that while compliance with the UN resolutions could destroy Iraq�s WMD building capability, it could not prevent it from developing it again when the sanctions were lifted. The only insurance was a completely pliant regime in Baghdad. Between 1991 and 1997, it made five unsuccessful attempts to oust Saddam. After the 1998 bombing destroyed UNSCOM, it genuinely did not know where to go next. Today Bush and Blair face the same alternatives � rehabilitate Saddam or kill him. They have chosen the latter. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bacIlu Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
