The press release which reached my desk the other day began with these words: In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful....
I was certain the "unofficial translation of a statement by the Revolution Command Council" had been posted to me by the Iranian Embassy. I was wrong. It had been sent by the Iraqi mission, an Iraq which had waged a long, cruel, and wasteful war, with the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary Iran.
On my first visit to Baghdad my host was Al Thawra, the journal of the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party. Its editor was Tariq Aziz, now Deputy Prime Minister and President Saddam Hussein's leading spokesman "Baathism" was Arab socialism, a "socialism adapted to our own conditions, our history and others". Baathism was secular. And modern?
Right now, the Baath Party elite has evidently felt that Islam is the more powerful rallying cry thus, Allah, the compassionate and merciful, even if such a gesture is a quiet bow to Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Iranian revolution. Taken quite close to the battleground I saw the bodies, the wounded, the carnage... a meaningless war, not about ideology nor even oil production and price. Iraq did have a superpower ally, the Soviet Union. The merchants of war sold arms to both sides which squandered their oil wealth, in a confrontation that neither could decisively win.
The current crisis however deserves the attention of all those students of post Cold War politics and the so-called "New World Order" and the terminology.... unipolar, multipolarity etc.
The role of the United States and the diplomacy of the Clinton administration, its tactics and manoeuvres, do call for reflection and close scrutiny. This question did worry the United Nations, certainly the then Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali. Did the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) become a tool of American policy? One recalls the interesting remark of Dr. Ghali that the United Nations did not require James Bond type "spy planes" at the U.N. The Iraqi authorities did claim that all the missile attacks on the Rushed Hotel, the Iraqi Intelligence Agency Hqrs. and the Nidaa Establishment had been based on intelligence gathered by the U.S. U-2 plane.
In the protracted talks between the Iraqi representatives and the Special Commission, the Iraqis insisted that there should be an equal number of experts representing all permanent members of the Security Council. But the operational list suggests that there has been a smart hijacking operation before the "inspection" was launched.
Since this operation could be a precedent, serious students of the United Nations must pay some attention to the crisis, the challenges Iraq is facing and its capacity to face such tests. Iraq has stressed the following:
i. Who holds the key posts at UNSCOM
ii. The identity of those who manage UNSCOM's important activities such inspections, analysis, interviews and the draft/final reports.
Right now the U. S. and its staunchest ally Britain play a predominant role.
The Deputy Executive Chairman Charles Duelfe is an American and this post has been held successively by four Americans, from 1991.
iii. The Director of Operations is James Moore, an American.
iv. The main files on weapons are in charge of Americans.
There are five 'experts' in "the missile area. The five experts are: Scott Ritter (US); John Larabee (US), Mark Silver (US), Tim McCarthy (US), and Gentry Curtis (US). A truly an all-American team.
Tariq Aziz has already a complete file on this and connected problems which suggest that the U. S. has skillfully used UNSCOM for its own explicitly "military intelligence" purposes.
BAGHDAD
- One of the UNSCOM American inspectors walks past an anti-American slogan upon
his arrival in Baghdad, November 21. United Nations's arms inspectors, including
Americans, arrived back in Iraq on Friday after an accord, which a Baghdad
newspaper hailed as a great over the "world oppressors in America",
appeared to put an end to the three-week-old crisis-. -Reuter
The
question that the U. N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan cannot dodge is how quickly
and effectively he can rescue the United Nations from the United States, so that
the world body could serve these objectives that have been identified, plainly,
by the U. N. The U. S. though now the sole superpower, is nonetheless just one
member of the Security Council and the General Assembly. Countries like China,
Russia, France, India, Japan and others represent more plainly "We, the
people", more truly than the United States.
Right now however the Sheriff in the White House, playing globocop in a unipolar world, has picked his posse — Ritter, Larrabee, Silver, McCarthy and Curtis. They are after the super villain who achieved stardom in that award-winning box office hit of the last decade Desert Storm.
As I write, another initiative. The foreign ministers of the U. S., Russia, Britain and France were scheduled to meet on Thursday. Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, a veteran Middle East correspondent in his day knows Iraq and Saddam Hussein well, and of course fellow journalist Tariq Aziz, , intimately. But the conspicuous absence of China, a permanent member of the Security Council, is certain to puzzle students of both Arab affairs and post-Cold War politics, meaning the global power structure.
Right now one has reason to admire the skill of President Yeltsin's foreign policy advisers. Moscow concentrates on two fronts - Europe as well as Asia.
Despite the Moscow-Beijing tensions of the past, the forward policy planners in Moscow pay equal attention to Asia and China as they do to the western alliance, Unipolarity, the reward of victory in Cold War, will be difficult to sustain in a 21st century where the nature and distribution of power, are likely to produce a complex configuration.
Students and policy planners in the first decade of the next century are likely to regard the new "Desert Storm" an important event.
"The political culture of Islam that motivates the global political community of Islam, the Umma, has been re-invigorated by the Islamic Revolution in Iran" observed Dr. Kalim Siddiqi, a distinguished Arab scholar. Iraq fought Iran for many years. But when the "threat" comes from the West, even Iraq's Saddam Hussein turns to Islam....and the Iranian revolution for succour.
By the hour the out line of the Russian- brokered deal is becoming clearer. Saddam Hussein has won what he has long sought - light at the end of the sanctions tunnel. But in return he has to renew his long-standing, but very on and off, commitment to the UN - to let its arms inspectors and dismantlers do their work unimpeded, until they are totally satisfied that they have done their job.
It is a good deal. America is giving away what it should have done a long time ago the right for Iraq to live sanctions-free once the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction is complete. In return Iraq will give the world peace of mind. During the past six years the UN inspectors have successfully dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme. Now they will continue the work of keeping his biological and chemical weapons programmes contained.
The world has belatedly begun, to wake up to the dangers of biological weapons that kill people and other living beings by spreading deadly diseases. Ironically, it was the arch proponent of realpolitik who sent us to sleep on the issue.
President Richard Nixon pushed for and won the Biological Weapons Convention outlawing such weapons, convinced that they were no longer in America's interest, since they were unstable and unusable.
Today, because of scientific advances that were not even guessed at 25 years ago, biological weapons have become both more usable and more effective. Re-combinant DNA technology has revolutionised their potential. Now they pose a serious threat on the battlefield and, in the not too distant future could be delivered by missiles thousands of miles to an opponent's city.
In its latest "Strategic Survey" the International Institute for Strategic Studies observes, "Preventing determined proliferators acquiring biological and toxin agents appears to be virtually impossible. The complexities associated with weaponising and delivering biological and toxin agents might prevent large-scale attacks, at least in the near term. Nevertheless, these barriers are crumbling and the revolutionary advances in biotechnology will probably remove them altogether in the first decade of the 21st century."
The only mystery about the present crisis with Iraq is why it has taken this long to come to the boil. In my column of March 26, I wrote that "despite the most vigilant arms control inspection ever mounted, including U-2 high altitude reconnaissance flights, helicopter monitoring with ground-penetrating radar, Saddam Hussein is still engaged in secret operations to build weapons of mass destruction."
This was after the UN, over the years, had uncovered and supervised the dismantling of Iraq's $10 billion nuclear weapons programme and missiles with biological and chemical weapons at the ready to be fitted to them.
The latter although rudimentary - about 8 litres of liquid anthrax and botulinum in a single warhead - would have been sufficient to contaminate a few square kilometres.
Iraq had also fitted 155m artillery rounds and R-400 free-fall bombs with biological agents. And after UN inspectors kept reporting that there was still much more to be discovered.
So why then did the White House wait until the UN inspectors were thrown out? Late last year Saddam thwarted attempts by the inspectors to gain access to Iraqi Republican Guard facilities and the White House and the Security Council sat on their hands. Since the last bombing for noncompliance in1993 there has been dangerous lassitude which allowed Saddam to dare to go the brink.
It sounds simplistic, but it seems to be part of a pattern - that the Clinton Administration has an ambiguous, verging on the insouciant, attitude to arms control. It has put reciprocal nuclear disarmament with Russia into some far back pigeon hole. It badly weakened the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by refusing to listen to a sensible Indian proposal for the treaty to be linked to a big power timetable on nuclear disarmament. It has kept the Pentagon budget at its astronomical, and economically and socially distorting, high Cold War level. And, inexplicably, it has made the expansion of NATO its top foreign policy objective.
But we can't only blame America. Western Europe has also gone to sleep on arms control and in Russia the Yeltsin Administration needs to take a more responsible attitude to the ratification of SALT 2, the partial nuclear disarmament treaty agreed with America, despite the hostility of the Duma.
Otherwise the moral leverage on Saddam Hussein is reduced by the year. After all the Biological Weapons Treaty is nothing more than a moral norm. There is no world-wide enforcement mechanism, not even a monitoring system. It can only work if the political climate is right. Bringing Saddam Hussein into line is one, overdue, thing. Keeping up the momentum on banning all weapons of mass destruction all over the world is another. But the two are intimately related.
This column is also distributed by Editors Press Service to : El Pais, Colombia; The News, Mexico; The Advocate, Barbados; The Gleaner, Jamaica; The St. Croix Avis, virgin Islands; The Guardian, Bahamas; The Guyana Graphic; El Diario, Bolivia: El Espectator, Colombia; El Heraldo, Mexico; Diario El Sol, Peru; El Pais, Uruguay and the New Zealand Herald
Has the Gulf alliance painstakingly built up by the United States to drive out Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 collapsed? This is the question now being asked in the Gulf following the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit to the region last week apparently to explore the possibility of seeking military facilities in case of a confrontation with Iraq.
During an unscheduled visit to the Gulf she urged the Arabs to put up a strong united front against Saddam Hussein. But the appeal fell on deaf ears despite all what Saddam Hussein had done to destabilise the region and the sufferings caused to millions of people. It is a crisis of credibility for the US in the entire region. Her original plan was after addressing the fourth Middle East North Africa Economic Conference in Doha last Sunday to visit Pakistan and India. But due to the deteriorating situation in the Gulf she changed her itinerary.
Though the US was all out to build up a case for use of force against Iraq the mood in the Arab world in general and the Gulf countries in particular was for dialogue and peaceful solution. Sick and tired of US double standards, even friendly Arab countries are disillusioned with the US because it insists on the need for Iraq to strictly comply with all UN resolutions while doing nothing against Israel, the only country which had violated almost every UN resolution.
The UN sanctions were implemented with little or no respect to the sufferings of the Iraqi people. If the reasons behind the sanctions were to bring about a change of government in Iraq, then the policy has been a failure.
The MENA summit in Doha, boycotted by most Arab states over Israeli participation, was a clear demonstration of the feeling in the region.
The US Secretary of State was quick to realize that there was little support from the Arabs for any kind of military strike. The support for use of force had eroded to such a low ebb that even Kuwait, the victim of Iraqi invasion, said "no".
The Kuwaiti Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah said in Cairo that "we have not supported any military action against Iraq as it would harm the Iraqi people," while bystanders in the Egyptian city of Ismailia watched the US aircraft carrier George Washington pass through the Suez Canal on its way to the Gulf.
From Doha, Albright arrived in Bahrain which has underlined the need for self restraint in the current Gulf crisis and expressed deep concern over safeguarding Iraq's unity, territorial integrity and safety of its people. From Bahrain she proceeded to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the message was quite clear - diplomatic solutions to the crisis and no more military strikes.
A leading opposition figure in Amman, Hamza Mansour, said "Our people's hearts are filled with anger and they are waiting for a chance to express their anger". Going a step ahead Salem Nahas, leader of the Jordanian People's Democratic Party said "We hate the US and we wish, all their interests in the Middle East could be abolished, but we are not going to do something like this."
Alleviating the suffering of the Iraqi people was given prime importance by many Arab states including Kuwait.
The Secretary General of the GCC, Sheikh Jamil Hujailan said "At any rate we wish to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people who are part of us. Some may think that there are differences of opinion over sympathy with the Iraqi people. But that sympathy is widespread throughout the Gulf, including Kuwait.
The mood of the people and the governments alike was echoed by Jordan's Crown Prince Hassan in his interview with BBC on November 17 when he said "The West in general adopts double standard towards the Middle East as a whole. The United Nations was only interested in destroying weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for the past seven years. Why cannot UN hold a conference to discuss the plight of the more than 18 million Iraqi people's suffering due to its own sanctions?" he asked. (According to some reports more than half a million Iraqis have already died due to UN sanctions and this tragedy continues with no attention paid at all).
Hassan said that oil, arms trade and Israel, had been the three main factors deciding the Western attitude towards the region and that since the Gulf War more than $ 300 billion worth of arms were sold to countries in the Middle East. These sophisticated and destructive weapons were dumped at a time when the UN was insisting on destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Who is benefiting? Isn't it the Jewish controlled Western arms manufacturers.
In the midst Saddam Hussein seems to have won the sympathy of Arab masses who accused the US of stirring up the latest tensions for ulterior motives to ensure free flow of oil, arms trade and make the Middle East safe for Israel as once stated by former US president George Bush, the architect of the Gulf alliance.
They feel that Saddam Hussein had not become a tyrant yesterday as he was known for his ruthlessness even during the time of President Hassen Al Baker.
The West failed to condemn him then as he suited its interest. His eight-year destructive war with Iran not only killed around a million people on both sides but also brought about unprecedented destruction and devastation while the merchants of death flourished in the war described as the richest in the world history.
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