By Sean Malloy
More than 110 warplanes, from the United States, France and Britain, were involved in the January 14 attack which bombed at least five places in southern Iraq in half an hour.
The majority of Australian daily newspapers reprinted a report by Associated Press glorifying the raid. The article said that pilots talked "excitedly about the colourful explosion patterns" and quoted one pilot calling the raid "beautiful". The air raid killed 19 people and wounded 15.
Outgoing US President George Bush has ordered an army battalion, of around 1100 soldiers, to enter Kuwait immediately and station themselves in the Umm Qasr region.
President-elect Bill Clinton is collaborating closely with Bush and intends to continue US pressure on Iraq. "We cannot do anything to give him [Hussein] or anyone else the slightest indication that we are wavering", said Clinton.
The US bombing is the latest in a series of US attempts to oust Saddam Hussein and foster an Iraqi regime that will facilitate US interests in the region.
Iraq has been split into three sections by the US and its allies. A section north of the 36th parallel, designated as a Kurdish "safe haven", was enforced by the allies in April 1991.
A southern section below the 32nd parallel was declared a "no-fly zone" for Iraqi warplanes by the US in August 1992, supposedly to protect Shi'ites from Iraqi airforce attack.
The Baathist regime now controls only the middle section of the country, between the 36th and 32nd parallels.
Other machinations to remove Hussein include the UN inspections for nuclear weapons in late 1991, the US plan to provoke Iraq over UN weapons inspections, revealed in August 1992 just before the "no-fly zone" crisis, and the February 1992 expose of $US30 million in funds for CIA programs to topple Hussein.
In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, George Bush called for the people of Iraq to overthrow Hussein. He didn't mean, however, the Kurds, Shi'ites or any democratic forces; he meant elements of the army or the Baathist party.
Former CIA director William Webster explained, "If we had been fortunate, the troops in his army and the cadres in his party might have moved to take him out".
Kurds, Shi'ites and other opposition elements were crushed by the Iraqi army when they took Bush's call as a signal of US support for uprisings against Hussein.
Iraq's sovereignty continues to be undermined by the US and the UN. Iraq's infrastructure has not recovered since the war, resulting in the death of thousands of Iraqis from disease and hunger in the last two years.
On November 23-24, 1992, the Security Council decided to continue economic sanctions against Iraq. Sanctions have meant a continuing lack of medicines, food and other essential items.
Media reports of Iraqi "border incursions" or "cross-border raids" into an area incorrectly described as part of Kuwait have been presented as military operations that threaten Kuwait.
In fact, the "raids" consisted of Iraqi workers dismantling parts of an Iraqi navy base in the port of Umm Qasr and moving them to what will be, according to the United Nations, the new Iraqi border.
In 1992 a UN commission formed to demarcate the boundary between Iraq and Kuwait redrew the borders, placing most of the naval and commercial ports of Umm Qasr under Kuwaiti control. The new borders divide Iraq's Rumaila oilfield between Iraq and Kuwait, moving the border 80 kilometres into Iraqi territory. The Rumaila oilfield has an estimated remaining production of 11 billion barrels of crude oil.
Umm Qasr was Iraq's only operating seaport. The port of Basra is blocked by vessels sunk during the early stages of the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq spent billions of dollars upgrading Umm Qasr's ports, building factories and petrochemical plants and dredging channels to enable large tankers to dock.
The new borders became "official" under UN auspices on January 15.
While UN resolutions on Iraq are enforced to the letter by the US, resolutions on other Middle East problems are ignored. With US support, Israel thumbs its nose at the 1948 Resolution 194, calling on Israel to respect Palestinians' right to return to their land, or 1967 UN resolutions 242 and 338, calling upon Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and 1992 UN resolution 799, demanding that Israel return the 415
Palestinians dumped in Lebanon.
The US now has 120 combat jets, 20 Stealth bombers, 11 warships, two submarines and one aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf alone. It also has air bases in Taif and Khamis Mushayt along the Red Sea coast in Saudi Arabia, as well as forces in Somalia.
A new justification for continued US presence in the region is the US State Department's "internal review" of US policy towards Iran. Fear of an Iranian nuclear threat "within three to five years" is being whipped up, putting Iran next on the US target list as a world villain to be "policed".