“Thwart Mode”
For the past
eight years, the US has
undermined
disarmament in Iraq
by
George Monbiot
Dissident Voice
October 10, 2002
There is little that those of us who oppose the coming war
with Iraq can now do to prevent it. George Bush has staked his credibility on
the project; he has mid-term elections to consider, oil supplies to secure and
a flagging war on terror to revive. Our voices are as little heeded in the
White House as the singing of the birds.
Our role is now, perhaps,
confined to the modest but necessary task of demonstrating the withdrawal of
our consent, while seeking to undermine the moral confidence which could turn
the attack on Iraq into a war against all those states perceived to offend US
strategic interests. No task is more urgent than to expose the two astonishing
lies contained in George Bush's radio address on Saturday, namely that
"the United States does not desire military conflict, because we know the
awful nature of war" and "we hope that Iraq complies with the world's
demands." Mr Bush appears to have done everything in his power to prevent
Iraq from complying with the world's demands, while ensuring that military
conflict becomes inevitable.
On July 4 this year, Kofi Annan,
the secretary-general of the United Nations, began negotiating with Iraq over
the return of UN weapons inspectors. Iraq had resisted UN inspections for three
and a half years, but now it felt the screw turning, and appeared to be on the
point of capitulation. On July 5, the Pentagon leaked its war plan to the New
York Times. The US, a Pentagon official revealed, was preparing "a major
air campaign and land invasion", to "topple President Saddam
Hussein". The talks immediately collapsed.
Ten days ago, they were about to
resume. Hans Blix, the head of the UN inspections body, was due to meet Iraqi
officials in Vienna, to discuss the practicalities of re-entering the country.
The US airforce launched bombing raids on Basra, in southern Iraq, destroying a
radar system. As the Russian government pointed out, the attack could scarcely
have been better designed to scupper the talks. But this time the Iraqis,
mindful of the consequences of excluding the inspectors, kept talking. Last
Tuesday, they agreed to let the UN back in. The State Department immediately
announced, with more candour than elegance, that it would "go into thwart
mode".
It wasn't bluffing. The following
day, it leaked the draft resolution on inspections it was placing before the UN
Security Council. This resembles nothing so much as a plan for unopposed
invasion. The decisions about which sites should be "inspected" would
no longer be made by the UN alone, but also by "any permanent member of
the Security Council", such as the United States. The people inspecting
these sites could also be chosen by the US, and they would enjoy
"unrestricted rights of entry into and out of Iraq" and "the
right to free, unrestricted and immediate movement" within Iraq,
"including unrestricted access to presidential sites". They would be
permitted to establish "regional bases and operating bases throughout
Iraq", where they would be "accompanied ... by sufficient US security
forces to protect them". They would have the right to declare exclusion
zones, no-fly zones and "ground and air transit corridors". They
would be allowed to fly and land as many planes, helicopters and surveillance
drones in Iraq as they want, to set up "encrypted communication"
networks and to seize "any equipment" they choose to lay hands on.
The resolution, in other words,
could not have failed to remind Iraq of the alleged infiltration of the UN team
in 1996. Both the Iraqi government and the former inspector Scott Ritter
maintain that the weapons inspectors were joined that year by CIA covert
operations specialists, who used the UN's special access to collect information
and encourage the republican guard to launch a coup. On Thursday, Britain and
the United States instructed the weapons inspectors not to enter Iraq until the
new resolution has been adopted.
As Milan Rai's new book "War
Plan Iraq" documents, the US has been undermining disarmament for years.
The UN's principal means of persuasion was paragraph 22 of the Security
Council's resolution 687, which promised that economic sanctions would be
lifted once Iraq ceased to possess weapons of mass destruction. But in April
1994, Warren Christopher, the US Secretary of State, unilaterally withdrew this
promise, removing Iraq's main incentive to comply. Three years later his
successor, Madeline Albright, insisted that sanctions would not be lifted while
Saddam remained in power.
The US government maintains that
Saddam Hussein expelled the UN inspectors from Iraq in 1998, but this is not
true. On October 30 1998 the US rejected a new UN proposal by again refusing to
lift the oil embargo if Iraq disarmed. On the following day, the Iraqi
government announced that it would cease to cooperate with the inspectors. In
fact it permitted them to continue working, and over the next six weeks they
completed around 300 operations. On December 14, Richard Butler, the head of
the inspection team, published a curiously contradictory report. The body of the
report recorded that over the past month "the majority of the inspections
of facilities and sites under the ongoing monitoring system were carried out
with Iraq's cooperation", but his well-publicised conclusion was that
"no progress" had been made. Russia and China accused Butler of bias.
On December 15th, the US ambassador to the UN warned him that his team should
leave Iraq for its own safety. Butler pulled out, and on the following day the
US started bombing Iraq.
From that point on, Saddam
Hussein refused to allow UN inspectors to return. At the end of last year, Jose
Bustani, the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,
proposed a means of resolving the crisis. His organisation had not been
involved in the messy business of 1998, so he offered to send in his own
inspectors, and complete the job the UN had almost finished. The US responded
by demanding Bustani's dismissal. The other member states agreed to depose him
only after the United States threatened to destroy the organisation if he
stayed. Now Hans Blix, the head of the new UN inspectorate, may also be feeling
the heat. On Tuesday he insisted that he would take his orders only from the
Security Council. On Thursday, after an hour-long meeting with US officials, he
agreed with the Americans that there should be no inspections until a new
resolution had been approved.
For the past eight years the US, with Britain's help, appears to have been seeking to prevent a resolution of the crisis in Iraq. It is almost as if Iraq has been kept on ice, as a necessary enemy to be warmed up whenever the occasion demands. Today, as the economy slides and Bin Laden's latest mocking message suggests that the war on terrorism has so far failed, an enemy which can be located and bombed is more necessary than ever. A just war can be pursued only when all peaceful means have been exhausted. In this case, the peaceful means have been averted.
George Monbiot
is Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics
in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at
the University of East London. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian
newspaper of London. His articles and contact info can be found at his website:
www.monbiot.com