Subway Guitars: Articles
Go on, call Bush's bluff
If Iraq lets the arms inspectors back in,
America's case for
war will be exposed as fiction
Hans von Sponeck
Monday, July 22, 2002
The Guardian
During the 17 months of the Bush administration just about everything
has gone wrong for the US government in preparing the public for
military strikes against Iraq. Convincing friendly governments and
allies has not fared much better. Acts of terrorism against US
facilities overseas and the anthrax menace at home could not be linked
to Iraq. Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither
in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam, a small
fundamentalist group which allegedly harbours al-Qaida elements and is
trying to destabilise lraqi Kurdistan.
In the aftermath of the carnage of September 11, the political landscape
in the Middle East has changed dramatically. Years of US double
standards in dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have taken a
heavy toll. The Arab, Turkish and Kurdish public in the area is wary of
facing more turmoil, suffering and uncertainty.
The Beirut summit of the Arab League in March signalled that all 22
governments want to see an end to the conflict with Iraq. Saudi Arabia
and Iraq have since reopened their border at Arar and Saudi businessmen
are selling their wares in Baghdad. Iraq has agreed to return Kuwait's
national archives and to discuss the issue of missing Kuwaitis. Iran and
Iraq have accelerated the exchange of refugees. Syria has normalised its
relations with Iraq. Lebanon has done the same. Hardly a week passes
without Turkish and Jordanian officials and business delegations
visiting Iraq. Jordan's national airline flies five times a week between
Amman and Baghdad. Airlinks exist between Damascus and Baghdad. Iraqi
Kurdistan maintains contacts with Baghdad at scientific, cultural and
sports levels and tries to make the best out of its present (albeit
tenuous) local stability. Iraq's political and economic isolation in the
Middle East is all but over.
A wave of senior US visitors has tried to dislocate these trends towards
normalisation and reconciliation in this troubled region. The US
administration has put the UN secretary general on a short leash in his
meetings with the Iraqi authorities. The only topic worthy of discussion
according to the Americans is the return to Iraq of the UN arms
inspectors. This became most apparent during the recently concluded
talks with the Iraqis in Vienna.
Europe is increasingly uncomfortable with this unilateral insistence on
solving the Iraqi conflict militarily. In varying degrees the same
applies to countries in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has served notice
that the Sultan air base near Riyadh will not be available for a new US
offensive against Iraq. Under severe US pressure, Qatar has agreed to
permit the transfer of logistics from Saudi Arabia to its territory. A
political crisis is looming in Jordan as a result of US demands to use
Jordan as a possible staging area in a war against Iraq. A similar
debacle will face the Turkish government once the prime minister, Bulent
Ecevit, decides to relinquish his post and fresh elections are
scheduled. An entire region is being destabilised to suit American
preferences for political change in Iraq.
Concurrently, a systematic dis- and mis-information campaign, one of the
biggest ever undertaken by the US authorities, is intensifying. The US
and the international public are being sedated daily with increasing
doses of propaganda about the threat Iraq poses to the world in 2002. In
the forefront of those advocating war against Iraq has been the US
deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who sees a military
solution as the only option. On July 14 he stated in Istanbul:
"President Bush has made it clear how dangerous the current Iraqi regime
is to the United States and that it represents a danger we cannot live
with indefinitely."
To make such statements without offering supporting evidence is
irresponsible. It promotes government-induced mass hysteria in the US
and is meant to garner bipartisan support for military action. A war on
Iraq justified by conjecture is politically foolish and morally
repugnant. In the words of the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Rowan Williams:
"It is deplorable that the world's most powerful nations continue to
regard war, and the threat of war, as an acceptable instrument of
foreign policy."
The US Department of Defence and the CIA know perfectly well that
today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the
United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest. They know, for example,
that al-Dora, formerly a production centre for vaccine against foot and
mouth disease on the outskirts of Baghdad, and al-Fallujah, a pesticide
and herbicide manufacturing unit in the western desert, are today
defunct and beyond repair. The UN concluded the former had been involved
in biological agent research and development and the latter in the
production of materials for chemical warfare. UN disarmament personnel
permanently disabled al-Dora in 1996. During a visit with a German TV
crew to al-Dora in mid-July - a site chosen by me and not the Iraqi
authorities - I found it in the same destroyed condition in which I had
last seen it in 1999. Al-Fallujah was partially destroyed in 1991 during
the Gulf war and again in December 1998, during operation desert fox. In
between a UN disarmament team disabled all facilities in any way related
to weapons of mass destruction there, including the castor oil
production unit. My visit this month disclosed beyond any doubt that the
castor oil unit was inoperable. Remnants of other production facilities
are used to manufacture herbicides and pesticides for plant protection
and household use.
One does not need to be a specialist in weapons of mass destruction to
con clude that these sites had been rendered harmless and have remained
in this condition. The truly worrying fact is that the US Department of
Defence has all of this information. Why then, one must ask, does the
Bush administration want to include Iraq in its fight against terrorism?
Is it really too far-fetched to suggest that the US government does not
want UN arms inspectors back in Iraq? Do they fear that this would lead
to a political drama of the first order since the inspectors would
confirm what individuals such as Scott Ritter have argued for some time,
that Iraq no longer possesses any capacity to produce weapons of mass
destruction? This indeed would be the final blow to the "war against
Iraq" policy of the Bush administration, a policy that no one else
wants. The Iraqis would be well advised to seize this opportunity and
open their doors without delay to time-limited arms inspectors, thereby
confirming that they indeed have nothing to hide.
This would make a US war against Iraq next to impossible and start the
long journey towards the country's return to normality. What was it that
Paul Wolfowitz said on the west front of the US Capitol on April 15?
"May God bless all the peacemakers in the world." He still has a chance
to be among them.
Hans von Sponeck was the UN humanitarian aid coordinator for Iraq
from 1998-2000 and has just returned from a two-week stay in
Iraq
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