[Peace-discuss] How war came

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Scholar and activist Noam Chomsky was asked the other day, Weren't the
inspectors able to work at all only because the US was threatening Iraq
with 300,000 troops?  His answer is a concise and devastating summary of
the run-up to war. --CGE]


Whether UNMOVIC or its predecessor UNSCOM could have continued its work
without a huge build-up of troops is unclear. You could be right, but I
don't see the basis for your certainty.

What we do know is that UNSCOM had largely disarmed Iraq by 1998, to the
point where it was the weakest state in the region, by a good margin. It
might have continued its work after 1998 had it not been for US moves to
undermine it. One reason goes back to the earliest stages of
inspection: the US repeatedly insisted that it would not live up to the
requirement that sanctions would end if Iraq was disarmed, which removed
the motivation for compliance. That persisted to the end. A narrower
reason was Washington's use of UNSCOM for spying on Iraq, which had become
pretty clear by 1996, and was not in question by 1998. That again
undermined inspections, obviously. It was followed by the Clinton bombing
in defiance of the UN (in fact, in a calculated insult to the UN, if you
look at the timing). That ended UNSCOM for the time being. However, there
were possibilities for renewing the inspections in following years, prior
to the US troop build-up. In July 2002, Iraq sought assurances that if
inspections were renewed, they would not "just come to update the
information [on Iraqi targets] and provide it to the US military and
intelligence bodies to use in bombing Iraq," as part of Washington's plans
to overthrow the government. They received no assurances from the US, and
the Security Council was in no position to give assurances about US
policy. Nonetheless, on Sept. 16, Iraq announced its acceptance of a
return of inspectors "without conditions." That's all before the troop
build-up. At that time, the government-media propaganda campaign Iraq's
threat to US security and terrorist connections was just beginning.

A few days ago, chief inspector Hans Blix delivered a scathing attack on
Britain and the US, accusing them of planning the war `well in advance and
of `fabricating evidence against Iraq to justify their campaign, and also
saying that Iraq was paying `a very high price' -- in terms of human lives
and the destruction of a country. Reported in England (Guardian), though I
haven't seen it here.

So you might be right, but I think your confidence is misplaced. Another
possibility is that if the US had accepted the original UN resolutions
instead of flatly rejecting them, and had allowed inspections without
undermining them, they might have proceeded from virtually disarming Iraq
to completely disarming it.

Which immediately raises another question, namely the crucial paragraph in
the main resolution (687) which calls for elimination of WMD and delivery
systems throughout the region -- a code word for the offshore US military
base in Israel, which has 100s of nuclear weapons, probably chemical and
biological weapons, and air and armored forces that are larger and
technologically more advanced than any NATO power (let alone any regional
power), according to IDF [Israeli army] analysts.

And then in the background remains the solemn commitment of all the
official nuclear powers, including the US, to make "good faith" efforts to
eliminate nuclear weapons...

Noam Chomsky