On February 24, the US and Britain presented the other 13 members of the UN Security Council with a draft resolution which declares that "Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded it in resolution 1441 (adopted by the council on November 8)", to "comply with its disarmament obligations".
Passage of this resolution will be used by US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian PM John Howard to claim they have a UN mandate to carry out their planned war of conquest of Iraq.
"You are not going to decide whether there is war in Iraq or not. That decision is ours, and we have already made it. The only question now is whether the council will go along with it or not", US officials told a senior diplomat of one of the non-permanent Security Council member countries, according to the February 25 Washington Post.
Bush has repeatedly made it clear the US will invade Iraq with or without UN endorsement. His justification for an invasion — that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction — is totally fraudulent.
Despite repeated tips from US and British intelligence agencies about where to look for alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, the UN weapons' inspectors have found nothing. On February 20, CBS news reported: "So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the US intelligence they've been getting as 'garbage after garbage after garbage'."
The planned US invasion has nothing to do with disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, but everything to do with seizing control of Iraq's vast oil reserves. In a January 5 New York Times article, columnist Thomas Friedman, an outspoken supporter of a US invasion of Iraq, acknowledged that this is the prize Washington is after: "Is the war that the Bush team is preparing to launch in Iraq really a war for oil? My short answer is yes. To deny that is laughable."
In the February 24 Australian Financial Review, former Liberal MP and former AFR investment editor Michael Baume correctly observed that France and Russia are opposed to a unilateral US-engineered "regime change" in Baghdad because their "lucrative oil deals with the present Iraqi regime may not survive its removal". Baume, however, neglected to point out that a US conquest of Iraq would result in these lucrative oil deals being awarded to US oil companies.
The September 20 San Francisco Chronicle reported: "The world's biggest oil bonanza in recent memory may be just around the corner, giving US oil companies huge profits... oil analysts and Iraqi exile leaders believe a new, pro-Western government would prompt US ... petroleum giants to rush into Iraq, dramatically increasing the output of a nation whose oil reserves are second only to that of Saudi Arabia."
UN aid agencies estimate that a US invasion of Iraq could result in up to 500,000 Iraqi civilians being killed or seriously injured and the displacement of millions of others. The destruction of water and power infrastructure, and the collapse of the Iraqi government's food rationing system, would leave up to 10 million Iraqis in grave danger of starvation. A confidential UN report dated January 7 predicts that 30% of Iraqi children under the age of five — 1.26 million — "would be at risk of death from malnutrition".
The death and destruction that will be inflicted on the people of Iraq by a US invasion will not be any less if this invasion has UN approval. All UN approval will do is give the Bush gang a thin veneer of international legality for an aggressive war aimed at brutally subjugating the Iraqi people to the greed of the US oil corporations.
On the weekend of February 15-16, 12 million people participated in world-wide protests against the US war drive. It is only through such massive mobilisations of anti-war sentiment that the US war drive can be stopped.
What the war makers in Washington, London and Canberra fear most is masses of people — workers, students and others — becoming politically active and organised outside their established framework, outside the parliamentary game of replacing one set of ruling-class politicians with another set every few years.
Only when masses of people take independent political action to protest the war drive — through marches in the streets, rallies in their neighbourhoods, and strikes at their workplaces and places of study — will the domestic political costs to our rulers begin to outweigh the political and economic gains they hope to get from a military victory. That was how we forced them to end the war against Vietnam in the 1970s, and it is the way we can stop their present drive to war.
From Green Left Weekly, March 5, 2003.
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