BY DOUG LORIMER
Washington has turned the diplomatic battle over the passage of a UN Security Council resolution that it can claim gives it a mandate to invade Iraq into a charade.
The resolution itself is a cynical ploy. It does not provide any explicit authorisation for a military attack on Iraq, but merely declares that "Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in resolution 1441", adopted by the council last November, "to comply with its disarmament obligations".
This wording is designed to enable Washington to make its case for the resolution's adoption on the basis of previous complaints by chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix that Iraq was not fully co-operating with the inspectors.
But as Baghdad has met each successive demand placed upon it by Blix, Washington has increasingly sought to discredit the entire inspections process by claiming that the inspectors are being deceived.
The latest example of this has centred on Iraq's short-range al Samoud 2 missile. In his February 14 report to the Security Council, Blix claimed that the missiles were capable of exceeding the 150km maximum range allowed under council resolutions 687 and 715 by 30kms, and therefore had to be scrapped.
Prior to Blix issuing his demand, government officials in Washington and London described the destruction of the al Samoud 2 missiles as an important test of Iraq's willingness to comply with "its disarmament obligations". However, when Iraq agreed on March 1 to destroy the missiles, US President George Bush denounced the decision as "continued trickery, continued deception".
Clearly, it does not matter how much the Iraqi regime of President Saddam Hussein co-operates with the UN weapons inspectors, it will never be able to satisfy Washington.
Indeed, the Bush administration has always regarded the UN weapons inspections process as a ruse to provide it with a pretext for launching a war of conquest against Iraq. Last November, when he was asked by a journalist what would happen if the inspectors failed to find any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld replied that all "it would prove would be that the inspections process had been successfully defeated by the Iraqis".
No WMD stockpiles
Right from the beginning of the weapons inspection process, Washington knew that the UN inspectors would not find stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. According to the March 3 Newsweek, General Hussein Kamel, Hussein's son-in-law and head of Iraq's WMD program, who defected from the regime in 1995, told CIA and British MI6 analysts in August 1995 that all Iraq's banned weapons had been destroyed after the Gulf War. "A military aide who defected with Kamel ... backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks", Newsweek reported.
Kamel fled Iraq carrying crates of secret documents on Iraq's past WMD programs, which have since been used by the Bush administration to claim that Iraq is hiding vast quantities of "unaccounted for" pre-1991 chemical and biological weapons, which can only be destroyed with a US military takeover of Iraq.
On March 5, for example, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): "Back in 1991, Iraq was required then to declare and destroy its arsenal of all of these kinds of materials and VX. And what did Iraq do back in 1991? It denied it had any, and it stuck to that denial for four long years all the way through 1995.
"Inspectors were all over the country, inspectors were there looking. Inspectors are doing what inspectors are supposed to do, verify what they have been told. And they were told there was no VX.
"In 1995 or thereabouts, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who knew a lot, defected and he spilled the beans. He let it be known that the Iraqi regime had VX. And as a result of what he told the international community, what he told the inspectors, the Iraqi regime was forced to admit it, forced to admit that it had produced large amounts of this terrible, terrible poison."
In reality, Kamel disclosed that Iraq had destroyed its stocks of VX gas by dumping them on the ground.
Speaking in New York on March 5, Blix announced that efforts were underway to verify, through analysis of soil samples, Iraq's assurances that it had destroyed its chemical and biological weapons following the 1991 Gulf War.
"I think one could also characterise these efforts as very fine disarmament", Blix said, "because the actual disarmament, if it took place, was the pouring of the material into the ground. There will be lots of question marks attached to many things in the past and here, then, is the verification. If we can straighten out the question marks, and there we have to examine each of the things they are doing and the Iraqis are undertaking quite a lot of steps in this direction."
Referring to Iraq's destruction of al Samoud 2 missiles, its release of previously unseen documents, its greater cooperation in allowing UN inspectors to interview Iraqi scientists and the digging up of old R-400 biological bombs, Blix said: "Now that is real disarmament."
A few hours later, in his speech to the CSIS, Powell tried to discredit the whole weapons inspections process. He claimed that while the UN inspectors were busy overseeing the destruction of the al Samoud 2 missiles in one part of Iraq, US intelligence had found that Iraq had begun to hide machinery to "convert other kinds of engines" to power the same missiles.
He also claimed that, in late January, Iraqi officials had taken chemical and biological agents "to areas far away from Baghdad near the Syrian and Turkish borders in order to conceal them". The March 6 New York Times observed that the divergence between Blix's and Powell's assessments "illustrated the enormous barriers faced by the United States in making the argument that the inspections have run their course and the time had arrived to decide to go to war. The exchange also showed how early American hopes that Mr Blix would help make the case for force against Iraq had proved false."
Coalition of the coerced
With this hope fading, the Bush administration is only going through the motions of arguing that war is necessary to rid Iraq of its mythical WMD. Instead, Washington is relying on bribes and threats to secure a majority of votes on the UN Security Council for its implicitly pro-war resolution.
On February 26, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington released a devastating study, "Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced", which examines in detail the pressure being applied by Washington to the 15 members of the UN Security Council. The study also examines how the Bush administration is putting together the so-called coalition of the willing.
The study lists 34 countries whose governments have endorsed Washington's drive to conquer Iraq: Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Oman, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
The study notes that these 34 countries represent "only about 10 percent of the population of the world's 197 countries. Subtracting the estimated 70 per cent of their populations that opinion polls show are not in favor of war, the war supporters in the coalition of the willing countries make up only about 3 per cent of the world's population."
The study shows that most were recruited through bullying and bribery: "The pursuit of access to US export markets is a powerful lever for influence over many countries, including Chile and Costa Rica, both of which are close to concluding free trade deals with the United States; African nations that want to maintain US trade preferences; and Mexico, which depends on the US market for about 80 per cent of its export sales."
Both Chile and Mexico are among the so-called "swinging six" non-permanent members of the Security Council whose vote would be decisive in approving the US-sponsored second resolution on Iraq. Mexico can't afford to vote against the US. It would lose aid and trade. If Chile votes against the US, it won't get the same access to the US market as Canada and Mexico.
On February 24, Associated Press reported that "Mexican diplomats described the visits [by US state department officials to Mexico City] as hostile in tone and complained that Washington was demonstrating little concern for the constraints of the Mexican government whose people are overwhelmingly opposed to a war with Iraq".
"They told us: 'any country that doesn't go along with us will be paying a very heavy price'", a Mexican diplomat told AP correspondent Dafna Linzer.
Pakistan, another of the "swinging six", is also in a terrible spot. If it votes against the US, it will accord with Pakistani public opinion, which is almost 100% anti-war. But then it would lose hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid and loans it is getting as a "front-line" state in the so-called "war on terror".
If Angola votes against the US, it won't get future loans to develop its oil industry.
According to Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies UN and Middle East expert and one of the three authors of the study: "It's hardly a new phenomenon for the US to use bribes and threats to get its way in the UN. What's new this time around is the breathtaking scale of those pressures — because this time around, global public opinion has weighed in, and every government leaning Washington's way faces massive opposition at home."
On March 1, massive public opposition to a war against Iraq led Turkey's parliament to reject a motion from the Turkish government to allow 62,000 US troops to use bases in eastern Turkey as staging posts for an invasion of northern Iraq. According to the March 6 Washington Post, the Turkish parliament's decision has "emboldened smaller countries on the Security Council to consider defying the United States".
"Between Turkey and the German-French-Russian statements that hint at a veto, it doesn't look good", the Washington Post quoted Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to US President Jimmy Carter.
China's foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan told a March 6 Beijing press conference that his government endorses the joint statement issued the previous day by the foreign ministers of France, Russia and Germany declaring they would block any new UN resolution authorising a US war against Iraq.
A March 7 Agence France Presse dispatch from London reported that "Britain, Spain and the US were cooking up a compromise to put before the UN Security Council giving Iraq a deadline to disarm". A British diplomat told AFP that the amended resolution would issue Baghdad with "an ultimatum" of "precise tasks" in the hope of winning over the undecided council members. The ultimatum would come with "a very short deadline because everybody knows that the United States is not ready to accept a long delay" in launching its invasion of Iraq, the diplomat said.
At the March 7 UN Security Council meeting, convened to hear Blix's latest report, British foreign minister Jack Straw announced that the US, Britain and Spain were amending their draft resolution to include a March 17 deadline for Iraq to "disarm" or face war.
From Green Left Weekly, March 12, 2003.
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