Bush’s Iraq obsession

PRESIDENT George Bush’s fury against Iraq should have abated after President Saddam Hussein agree to allow unlettered access to the United Nations inspectors to his country’s suspected sites of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But it has not aggravated, perhaps, by his frustration at frequent setbacks to the US-led war against terror in Afghanistan.

The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan has said that the US seems to have a lower threshold of patience in the matter of going to war against Iraq than other nations represented in the UN Security Council. At a meeting with President Bush the other day, Mr. Annan asked the US to be patient and not rush into military action on mere suspicion of Iraq possessing or developing lethal weapons.

However, the US president and his senior aides continue to threaten Iraq with dire consequences and it will not be surprising if they go ahead with their war plans against Baghdad unilaterally by contriving some technical violation or non-compliance on the latter’s part as a pretext for punishing action.

The vituperative outbursts of some senior American officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, reflect an irrational anti-Muslim mindset not aimed at Iraq alone. It appears that they would want to deal with Iraq once they have taken care of Iraq. Washington remains callously indifferent to the tragic plight of the Palestinians, turning a blind eye to Israel’s brutal persecution of these people.

The growing anti-Muslim trend in the United States has been deplored by the international Humn Rights Watch (HRW) in one of its recent reports.

Contrary to scepticism openly expressed by the US and some other western governments at the renewed exercise in weapons inspection, Dr. Hans Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, who heads the team of UN inspectors, appears satisfied with the attitude of the Iraqi authorities to his mission. On his arrival in Baghdad on Monday with an advance team of inspectors and accompanied by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed Al-Baradei, Dr. Blix had a preliminary round of discussions with Iraqi officials, including President Saddam Hussein’s senior adviser, Gen. Amer al Saadi. Dr. Blix later told the press he was making progress, in pursuit of his mission.

Dr. Blix and his team will start their inspection of some 700 sites identified by them and will have two months to complete their assignment and then report to the UN Security Council about the outcome. This is the fourth time that Iraq is being subjected to such inspection. The weapons inspectors now have the benefit of some of the most advanced technology, including hand-held testers, to analyse small samples of suspected materials and support from US satellites which can spot objects as small as 60 centimetres wide as against two-meter wide previously. They will also instal secret radio links with New York.

The Iraqi foreign minister has expressed the hope that the weapons inspectors will respect Iraq’s sovereignty and “the dignity of the Iraqi people”. Dr. Blix has given an assurance to that effect but in the end it could turn out to be a mere sop, knowing some of inspectors’ possible links with America’s CIA. Washington appears to be certain that ultimately the whole matter would need to be sorted by military means. The US defence department’s chief spokesperson disclosed the other day that Pentagon is already training media reporters who may be assigned to future battlefields in Iraq. Nearly 60 media persons representing some 30 news organizations in three countries are now at the Andrews Air base in the US undergoing a special course of training in war news reporting.

It is evident that “punishing Iraq” for its supposed possession or manufacture of weapons of mass destruction has become something of an obsession with President Bush, regardless of what the field inspections might actually reveal. The former head of the United Nations Special Commission for Iraq (UNSCOM), Australian diplomat Richard Butler, was widely believed to be secretly in links with Washington.

Butler himself has recorded in his account of the earlier inspections in Iraq saying that when he reported to the UN Security Council in December 1998 he had always provided “factual advice” to the UNSCOM. The Russian ambassador, Lavrov, called him a liar and in a hard-hitting speech charged him with having curtailed the inspections and “tailored his reports to provide the US the justification for bombing Iraq”.

Lavrov also maintained that Iraq had offered the UNSCOM team “splendid cooperation” in more than 400 encounters while Butler called all this a deliberate distortion of facts. Shortly afterwards Butler resigned from the UNSCOM which has since been replaced by a successor agency the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) with Dr. Hans Blix as its head.

That some members of the UNSCOM team of inspectors were suspected of working as spies for the US is also widely known. The chief inspector and head of UNSCOM’s Concealment Unit, Scott Ritter, resigned in August 1998 accusing Richard Butler of taking directions from the US government and allowing UNSCOM to be used as a conduit for US intelligence collection” in Iraq. Butler denies these allegations. However, Dr. Hans Blix has conceded in a statement that there could be spies in the present team of 200 weapons inspectors also.

There has been considerable criticism of Washington’s attitude towards Iraq within the US. Former US president, Jimmy Carter, recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace prize, has called upon the US, for reasons of consistency, to disarm itself of its huge arsenal of DMD. In fact, the US has been accused of not having complied with international efforts to enforce the agreement on elimination of chemical weapons. President Carter has stressed that the “major powers themselves need to set an example”.

It is pertinent to recall that Iraq and the UN had come close to an agreement on the modalities of a plan for inspection and ultimately removing the economic sanctions which have caused untold sufferings to the Iraqi people. UN Secretary General went to Baghdad on what he called “a sacred mission” in February 1999 and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Iraqi deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, which provided for “an unconditional commitment” by Iraq to cooperate with UNSCOM and IAEA and for intensifying efforts for the completion of its mission by UNSCOM. The memorandum also noted that the lifting of the economic sanctions was of “paramount importance to the government and people of Iraq”.

However, not long after-wards differences developed between Richard Butler and the Iraqi authorities on the modalities of the inspection of as presidential palaces and sites in Iraq where work on weapons of mass destruction was supposedly in progress UNSCOM insisted on its right to photograph some of these sites to which the Iraqi authorities did not agree.

The memorandum was soon lost sight of and the American TV channel CNN March 1999, telecast a most tendentious documentary criticizing Mr. Kofi Annan for having agreed to sign it. The purpose of the documentary was to prove that Iraq was trying to deceive UNSCOM and frustrate the work of weapons inspectors.

Losing the election

THANK heaven the election is over. The winners are still enjoying their hangovers and the losers are looking for jobs.

It wasn’t easy for the latter, because some didn’t set aside any of their campaign money to see them through the winter.

The losers spent all their funds on television smear commercials.

It was the day after election that Buff Lafftop, who lost his bid for Congress, showed up at the unemployment office. He waited three hours before someone would talk to him.

Finally he was ushered into a small booth. The man behind the desk said, “Lafftop — any relation to the guy who had a 30-point lead and blew the election?”

“Yes,” he said. “I try not to brag about it.”

The unemployment officer said, “You had the dirtiest commercials of any politician in the country.”

“I tried to do the best I could, but it wasn’t enough.”

“I saw one of your commercials in which you claimed your opponent wore cheap shoes and had athlete’s foot.”

“It was one of the weaker ones. My people thought it would be a political plus for the baby boomer vote.”

The officer said, “Then there was one that showed Saddam Hussein shooting his rifle into the air followed by opponent Cholly Duncan shooting his rifle in the air. Your announcer said, ‘What do Saddam Hussein and Cholly Duncan have in common? They both suck nerve gas.”’

“We got the Saddam footage from the Pentagon. My handlers in the White House were really counting on it to beat Duncan.”

“I’m sorry I have to ask you all these questions, but if we are going to find a job for you we have to dig into your background. You showed another TV spot with a bunch of prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard followed by a shot of Duncan’s wife campaigning for him. The voiceover said, ‘Not all the prostitutes are on Hollywood Boulevard.”’

“We slotted it in the seventh inning of a World Series game. By the ninth we were getting e-mails at headquarters from all over the country.”

“Where did you get the money for all the commercials?”

“The National Committee poured it in. They would do anything to win the election. But when I lost they wouldn’t even give me taxi fare to come to the unemployment office.”

The officer said, “Except for running a dirty political campaign, I don’t know what your qualifications make you fit for.”

“What about advertising? I could write copy for McDonald’s telling the people how bad the other carryouts are.”

“There is that — or you could become a lobbyist and tell congressmen they should abolish environmental laws that are hurting big business and giving dirty air a bad name.”

“I’d like that. I always dreamed of being a lobbyist and serving my country.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

A new turn in the war on terror

WHAT happened in Yemen on November 3 marks an alarming, new turn in the United States’ war on terrorism and Al Qaeda in particular. A Hellfire missile fired from a CIA unmanned drone on a moving car killed all the six persons travelling in it, including a high-ranking Al Qaeda leader.

The question the missile attack raises is: are political assassinations for which the CIA was notorious in the 1970s back in vogue? The remote-control killing of Al Qaeda’s key leader, Abu Ali Harithi, is the first of its kind — and may not in all probability be the last — and marks a new stage in the on-going war against terror. It also signals an end to the decades-long ban on political assassinations imposed by former President Gerald Ford following Senate hearings on the issue by the Church Committee in 1975.

Many senior members of the US establishment had, at the time, realized that assassination was, after all, an act of terrorism that discredited the US government throughout the world and that carrying out such actions only legitimized terrorist actions against the US itself.

The hard fact is that despite 9/11, the executive order prohibiting assassinations still remains in force. However, the United States has, during the past four years, been inclined to interpret the provisions of the order as not disallowing certain measures to deal with the threat posed by Osama bin Laden.

This began in 1998 when President Clinton signed a secret order approving the use of lethal force against Osama bin Laden. A month after the September 11 attacks, which were blamed on his Al Qaeda network, The Washington Post reported that President Bush had approved an intelligence “finding” instructing the CIA to engage in “lethal covert operations” to destroy Osama and his Al Qaeda organization. At the time, the White House and CIA lawyers asserted that the move was within the limits of the constitution because the ban on political assassinations did not apply during wartime.

It is interesting to note that the American media and mainstream public opinion have shown no qualms about accepting the Yemen killings and would, it appears, prefer to turn a blind eye to such illegal and immoral practices if the targets were Al Qaeda operatives. So far, not a single prominent Democrat has condemned the killings or even questioned the legality of the operation. This is an entirely different attitude. In the mid-1970s, the Americans had strongly protested against such assassinations carried out by the CIA, mostly in Latin America and Asia usually, through hired killers of foreign origin so as to maintain its right to deny its involvement.

The CIA has always preferred to operate in the shadows to “preserve deniability”. Yemen’s president was highly embarrassed when the Predator drone attack story leaked.

The CIA officials, according to Newsweek, are now worried that the leak will discourage other countries from allowing such remote-control strikes within their borders. They blame the defence department for the leak only to exhibit “a macho show of force”.

Abu Ali Harithi, the key victim of the Predator drone attack, is said to have been the mastermind behind the attack on the USS Cole two years ago. Harithi’s assassination, one may note, has come in stark contrast with the non-assassination of the Taliban leader, Mulla Omar, in the early days of the US-led Afghan operations. As Seymour Hersh had then reported in The New Yorker, a CIA Hellfire-armed drone, like the one that killed Harithi, had pursued Mulla Omar but the military lawyers had refused permission to the CIA to kill him. The latest killing shows that this official scruple — seeking permission from the military lawyers — has now been set aside. The new strategy involves fewer decision-makers in the “trigger-pulling” chain of command.

Meanwhile, American officials insist that the missile strike was an act of self-defence. The argument is that Harithi had already attacked the United States in October 2000 when he helped blow up USS Cole that claimed seventeen lives. Hence, he was ‘an enemy combatant’ and deserved to be ‘eliminated’.

Bush administration’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, defending the killing, has described the attack as “well within the bounds of accepted practice,” she said: “The president has given broad authority to a variety of people to do what they have to do to protect this country.”

However, there are no two opinions about the fact that this kind of remote-control assassination is a clear violation of international law, morality and human rights conventions, no matter what the nationality or affiliation of the victims. It is an ominous development for Pakistan because many activists of Al Qaeda and Taliban frequently visit its western border areas because of traditional tribal or family bonds. Any attempt by the CIA to launch Yemen-like strikes can create a new crisis for the government as these would cause great resentment among the people in the tribal areas.

The Predator strike, described by the US officials as “an innovative way of getting the job done”, is an updated response by the US military, which has so far been too slow to counter the ever-changing tactics of Al Qaeda activists. The CIA has now become a central tactical military tool in the Bush-led war on terrorism which it never was in any previous conflict, largely because it has a much less cumbersome bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post has, in its November 7 editorial, posed the question: “If the United States can fire a missile at an Al Qaeda leader in Yemen, some ask, why shouldn’t Israel aim one at Yasser Arafat in Ramallah, or Russia target exiled Chechen leaders in Turkey and Azerbaijan?” But, in an outright defence of the CIA attack, the newspaper said: “Al Qaeda has no conventional cause, no homeland, no purely political leaders; there is no territory.... The only course, chosen not by the United States but by Al Qaeda, is a scattered and unconventional military conflict across continents, lasting until one side is eradicated. There is no way to treat Al Qaeda’s members other than as combatants, because they have no other understanding of themselves.”

This is the first time the United States has used the unmanned weapon outside Afghanistan. Also killed in the Yemen attack was Kamal Derwish, a US citizen who was named as a co-conspirator in the federal case against six men in Lackawanna, New York, charged with giving “material support” to a terrorist organization for allegedly attending an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in early 2001. It means that a US citizen, charged with a crime under the US law that has yet to be proved, is now liable to be assassinated in a territory outside the US. Some American officials are reported to have asserted that had the CIA been aware that Derwish was in the car when it decided to fire the missile, it would not have made any difference. “If you are a terrorist, you are a terrorist”, one official said.

Amnesty International has strongly protested over the incident in a letter to President Bush: “If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest, in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law”. The human rights group called on Washington to clarify the role played by the US personnel in the killing and give assurances that the US officials found involved in such actions would be brought to justice.

If seen in the light of various provisions of international laws, the CIA’s heinous act amounts to no less than a war crime. Although the attack was launched with the permission of the government of Yemen, as American sources claim, it could have occurred even without its permission because Yemen is too weak to resist US pressure. Like Pakistan, this Arab country, too, had immediately changed its foreign policy after 9/11 and joined the Bush-led war on terrorism. In lieu of that, the US gave increased military assistance to Yemen.

With a combination of repressive measures at home and targeted killings abroad, there does exist a strong possibility that America may create and use paramilitary units the way the US-backed dictatorships did in the past to eliminate their opponents in Latin America, South-east Asia and elsewhere.

In any case, the Bush administration has entered a murky area of international law and may use more aggressive and controversial tactics in the name of defending US interests abroad than it has hitherto employed.

According to Newsweek, “with about a dozen armed Predators in stock and two coming off the assembly line every month, the CIA has a growing capacity to execute hits all over the world. It also has about a dozen newer-tech Global Hawks that fly much higher and cover a wider area with their cameras”.

In recent years, the United States has attacked targets in countries with which it was not at war, although such strikes apparently did not target specific individuals. In 1998, for instance, the Clinton administration used cruise missiles to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that it claimed was involved in chemical-weapons production.