[Peace-discuss] U.N. resolution for Iraq makes war inevitable (duh!)

[Jim Buell]

By the way, Jeff Guntzel, co-director of Voices in the Wilderness, who's 
quoted in this article, will be speaking at Channing-Murray Foundation next 
Thursday, Nov. 21, from 7 to 9 p.m. Channing-Murray is located at 1209 W. 
Oregon, Urbana.

The event, part of Channing-Murray's Social Justice Forum series, is free 
and open to the public. Guntzel will also be the guest on WILL-AM's Focus 
580 the same day. I'll post out a more detailed announcement to this and 
other lists later in the day. As most on this list will recall, Guntzel was 
also a featured speaker at an AWARE teach-in not long ago.

jb

At 11:04 AM 11/15/2002 -0800, R. Brad Scott wrote:
>http://salon.com/news/feature/2002/11/15/war/print.html
>
>...
>But most experts doubt that Saddam will be able to finesse the issue
>that far. Indeed, he may well run afoul of the U.N. right off the bat.
>"The question is, can Saddam satisfy the demands of the resolution,
>which is filled up with traps for Iraq to fall into," asks Guntzel.
>
>The first test will come on Dec. 8, when Iraq, according to 1441, must
>deliver "a currently accurate, full, and complete declaration of all
>aspects of its programs to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear
>weapons, ballistic missiles, and other delivery systems." The U.S. will
>compare the submitted list to its own internal intelligence to
>determine whether Saddam is being open and forthright. Any omissions
>from that list or false statements would constitute a material breach,
>according to the Security Council.
>
>"Is it even humanly possible for them to record all that information?"
>wonders Lopez. "Could the Soviet Union have provided this inventory at
>the height of the cold war, compared to a backward, secretive country
>like Iraq where so few people actually know all the information about
>the weapons program?"
>
>How the weapons declaration is handled by the administration, which has
>called for "zero tolerance" for inspection violations, will be an early
>indication of the White House's mind-set. ... if hawks at the White
>House have their way, the U.S. would launch a war based on omissions
>from the Dec. 8 weapons list... "The hawks don't want the resolution to
>work. They want an excuse to go in and get Saddam now."
>...
>"There are some in the administration who obviously want to do more
>than inspections; you can feel their aching," says P.W. Singer, an Olin
>fellow in the foreign-policy studies program at the Brookings
>Institution.
>
>The hawks' first big chance may be when Iraq submits its list of
>weapons. "It will be the single most difficult obstacle [for Saddam]
>because the United States will say the list is no good," says Judith
>Kipper, co-director of the Middle East Program at the Center for
>Strategic and International Studies. "But France and Russia and Israel
>will have their own lists and nobody [for competitive reasons] will
>want to share them."
>...