[Dryerase] The Alarm!--War Notes 11-15-02

[The Alarm!Newswire]

War Notes  11-15-02

By sasha k
The Alarm! Newspaper Columnist

The Resolution
On Friday November 8, after weeks of haggling, the United Nations 
Security Council passed a resolution calling for a tough weapons 
inspection regime in Iraq with a fifteen to zero vote. In the end, the 
United States, France and Russia compromised. The resolution does not 
give automatic approval to war with Iraq if they do not comply with the 
resolution, but it also does not specifically state that military 
action needs Security Council approval. It is the vagueness of the 
resolution that allowed its passage.

According to resolution 1441, if Iraq does not fully cooperate with 
implementation, Iraq shall be considered in “material breach” and Hans 
Blix, the head of Unmovic, the UN weapons inspection team, and Mohamed 
ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team, 
are to report Iraq to the Council for “assessment.”  No specific 
consequences for noncompliance are named, although it is “recalled” in 
the resolution that Iraq has already been warned “that it will face 
serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its 
obligations.”

The resolution gives Blix and ElBaradei wide latitude to judge Iraqi 
compliance. “We will be guided by the definition of material breach, 
which is really a major violation of the very purpose of the process,” 
ElBaradei told the New York Times. Many of the arguments during the 
drafting of the resolution have been over the meaning of the phrase 
“material breach.”  The Bush administration has been arguing that even 
the slightest misstep on the part of the Iraqi government would be 
cause for war.

In addition, the US administration has indicated that it will make its 
own judgement on whether Iraq is in compliance or not, holding it to 
tougher standards than Unmovic and the IAEA team. It is the ambiguity 
of the resolution—in not stating that any response to Iraqi 
noncompliance must be approved by the Security Council—that keeps us 
firmly on the path to war. The US policy towards Saddam Hussein is 
still essentially “to commit suicide or be liquidated,” as Ayman 
El-Amir of Al-Ahram has said.

The Arab League was quick to offer its own interpretation of 1441. 
After approving the resolution, they stated that only the Security 
Council should evaluate the reports of weapons inspectors and that the 
inspection team must include more Arabs than in the past. Farouk 
al-Sharaa, foreign minister of Syria, which voted for the resolution as 
a member of the Security Council, said, “this resolution stopped an 
immediate strike against Iraq, but only an immediate strike. Now 
America cannot strike Iraq under UN auspices, although of course the 
United States can strike Iraq unilaterally outside international law. 
If this happens, the world will not be with the Americans. It will have 
to deal with all those demonstrators from Los Angeles to the Far East 
and the Arab countries.”

Iraqi response: On Wednesday, two days before the Friday deadline, the 
Iraqi government stated that it would comply with the resolution. 
Earlier in the week, seemingly as a way to express Iraqi distaste for 
1441, the Iraqi parliament recommended that the government reject the 
resolution, leaving the final decision up to Saddam Hussein. With 
France, Russia and the Arab world backing the resolution, Iraq had no 
option to reject compliance.

The first opportunity for the Bush administration to again push for war 
will be thirty days after the adoption of the resolution. By that date 
the Iraqi government must clearly outline to Unmovic and the IAEA all 
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and weapons development 
projects that it has. If it fails to do so, it would be considered in 
material breach of the resolution and would be reported to the Security 
Council. On Wednesday, the Iraqi ambassador to the UN announced that 
Iraq had no such programs.  Britain and the US maintain that it does. 
Thus the stage for conflict is set.

Newest war plans
The Pentagon has again leaked a new war plan—ostensibly in an attempt 
to frighten the Iraqi military and government. This “rolling war” would 
not aim to immediately occupy Baghdad, but would instead take three 
regions of Iraq—the northern Kurdish region from Turkey, the south from 
Kuwait and the west possibly from Israel or Jordan—and hold them as 
bases for further attacks on the Iraqi government and military. These 
bases would allow for attacks aimed at the “pillars of the regime”—its 
missiles, air defenses, presidential sites and military targets.

The hope would be that the Iraqi government would crumble and the 
military would end its support for Hussein without needing a possibly 
costly ground assault on Baghdad itself. By taking the southern city of 
Basra as a major base, US forces would not need to use Saudi territory. 
Four British minesweeper ships are already on their way to the region 
to clear the Shatt al-Arab waterway that runs up to Basra.

According to the BBC, the plan includes a psychological 
campaign—including encouraging uprisings and a coup—which would begin 
before the actual conflict. This campaign is probably already underway.

The war, of course, has been underway for some time. US and British 
fighters have been bombing Iraqi targets since the first Gulf War, 
despite the fact that no US or British plane has been shot down since 
then. But since the summer, they have expanded the type of 
installations targeted. Instead of only hitting anti-aircraft and 
missile batteries in “self-defense,” planes are now taking out command 
bunkers, communication stations and radar systems, weakening Iraqi 
defenses before the start of full-scale war.

Meanwhile, the British organization Medical Action for Global Security 
estimates that around half a million people would die in a war with 
Iraq, 200,000 of whom would die from starvation and disease.

Yemen
On November 3, the CIA used a Predator drone—a remote controlled plane 
with no pilot—to kill what it claimed were al-Qaida operatives in 
Yemen. This the first time such planes have been used outside of 
Afghanistan to target people. They have been used in southern Iraq for 
the last month and have attacked radar dishes. The CIA and senior 
intelligence officials seem to have been given the right to decide for 
themselves when to use the tactic; President Bush did not make the 
decision himself. Perhaps even more worrying, the Yemen killings 
closely resemble the Israeli tactic of “targeted killings” 
(assassinations) of its opponents. The US has maintained that it 
opposes the Israeli tactic, but the Yemen assassinations confirm that 
the US and Israel are increasingly converging on military tactics. The 
Israelification of US military tactics and strategy—preemption and 
assassination—coincides with a shift in US strategy that now more than 
ever promotes Israel as the regional hegemonic power and looks to 
redraw the Mideast map.

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