• Attack on Iraq

December 18, 1998
Attack on Iraq
THE US and Britain have unilaterally launched a massive cruise missile and air attack against Iraq within hours of receiving a negative report from chief UN weapons inspector Richard Butler on Baghdad's alleged lack of cooperation with UNSCOM. The attackers have taken refuge behind the UN Security Council resolution of last November which empowered them to launch such an attack without any further permission from the UNSC, if Iraq failed to abide by its commitment to unrestricted access for the weapons inspectors. However, if the sentiment inside the UNSC, the international community, the Arab and Muslim world is taken stock of afresh, it is obvious that far from the kind of unity which accompanied the Gulf War and later armed actions against Iraq, there is nothing but division as to how to deal with the lingering crisis. Russia, China and France, three permanent members of the UNSC, have expressed their varying degrees of anger and disappointment with the premature resort to force when diplomatic efforts had yet to be exhausted. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who had brokered an agreement with Baghdad in February over a similar inspections crisis, had recommended that the comprehensive review of the seven year old sanctions demanded by Iraq, should be used as a lever to persuade Baghdad to cooperate. But the US and UK, ignoring the deep reservations in the minds of so many major and minor players on the international and Middle East scene, have decided to heap more suffering on an already exhausted Iraqi populace. Iraqi children are dying for want of food and medicine, the old, sick, women, all weaker groups in Iraqi society are feeling the direct impact of the lingering sanctions regime which seems to have no end in sight. It is inconceivable that the weapons inspectors have not managed, in seven years, to go over all actual and potential weapons sites in Iraq with a fine toothcomb. If they still insist that Saddam Hussein has the capacity for developing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, one can only be led inexorably to the conclusion that the real purpose is to keep up pressure on Saddam Hussein's regime to create the conditions for its overthrow. It is no accident that recent reports have revealed the support being offered by the US and UK to Iraqi opposition groups in exile which, fractious and ineffective as they are, are united on one point: the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Whatever one may think of the government in Baghdad, how these great powers can justify such blatant and open interference in the internal affairs of another country, and yet have the gall to quote international law and UN resolutions where it suits them, can only be viewed as carrying hypocrisy to the level of a fine art. Iraq no longer is in a position to threaten anybody, but the paranoia concerning attacks such as the Scud missiles Iraq launched during the Gulf War on Israel, whose interests the US and UK are wedded to protecting at all costs, means that these great powers will continue to utilise any excuse to take out the only remaining potential military threat to the Zionist state. And it is not beyond the domestically embattled President Clinton to use an external military assault on Iraq to divert attention from his own impeachment troubles.
The real reason why the Anglo-Saxon powers are able to get away with such open aggression is because the Muslim world has failed to respond meaningfully to the crisis over Iraq, or come to the aid and succour of their Iraqi brethren without necessarily endorsing Saddam Hussein. Had they mounted a pre-emptive diplomatic effort before things came to a head, the Muslim world's irrelevance would not have been exposed so ruthlessly.

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