LONDON: During the 17 months of the Bush administration, just about everything has gone wrong for the US government in preparing the public for military strikes against Iraq. Convincing friendly governments and allies has not fared much better. Acts of terrorism against US facilities overseas and the anthrax menace at home could not be linked to Iraq. The evidence of any Al Qaeda-lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam, a small group which allegedly harbours Al Qaeda elements and is trying to destabilize lraqi Kurdistan.
In the aftermath of the carnage of Sept 11, the political landscape in the Middle East has changed dramatically. Years of US double standards in dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have taken a heavy toll. The Arab, Turkish and Kurdish public in the area is wary of facing more turmoil, suffering and uncertainty.
The Beirut summit of the Arab League in March signalled that all 22 governments want to see an end to the conflict with Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Iraq have since reopened their border at Arar, and Saudi businessmen are selling their wares in Baghdad. Iraq has agreed to return Kuwait’s national archives and to discuss the issue of missing Kuwaitis.
Iran and Iraq have accelerated the exchange of refugees. Syria has normalized its relations with Iraq. Lebanon has done the same. Hardly a week passes without Turkish and Jordanian officials and business delegations visiting Iraq.
Jordan’s national airline flies five times a week between Amman and Baghdad. Air links exist between Damascus and Baghdad. Iraqi Kurdistan maintains contacts with Baghdad at scientific, cultural and sports levels, and tries to make the best out of its present (albeit tenuous) local stability. Iraq’s political and economic isolation in the Middle East is all but over.
A wave of senior American visitors have tried to dislocate these trends towards normalization and reconciliation in this troubled region. The US administration has put the UN secretary general on a short leash in his meetings with the Iraqi authorities. The only topic worthy of discussion, according to the Americans, is the return to Iraq of UN arms inspectors. This became most apparent during the recently concluded talks with the Iraqis in Vienna.
Europe is increasingly uncomfortable with this unilateral insistence on solving the Iraqi conflict militarily.
Concurrently, a systematic disinformation campaign — one of the biggest ever undertaken by US authorities — is intensifying. The American and international public are being sedated daily with increasing doses of propaganda about the threat Iraq poses to the world in 2002. In the forefront of those advocating war against Iraq has been the US deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who sees a military solution as the only option.
The US Department of Defence and the CIA know perfectly well that today’s Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest. They know, for example, that Al Dora, formerly a production centre for vaccine against foot and mouth disease on the outskirts of Baghdad, and Al Fallujah, a pesticide and herbicide manufacturing unit in the western desert, are today defunct and beyond repair. The UN concluded the former had been involved in biological agent research and development and the latter in the production of materials for chemical warfare.
UN disarmament personnel permanently disabled Al Dora in 1996. During a visit there with a German TV crew in mid-July — a site chosen by me and not the Iraqi authorities — I found it in the same destroyed condition in which I had last seen it in 1999. Al Fallujah was partly destroyed in 1991 during the Gulf war and again in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox.
In between a UN disarmament team disabled all facilities in any way related to weapons of mass destruction there, including the castor oil production unit.
One does not need to be a specialist in weapons of mass destruction to conclude that these sites had been rendered harmless and have remained in this condition. The truly worrying fact is that the US Department of Defence has all of this information.
Why then, one must ask, does the Bush administration want to include Iraq in its “fight against terrorism?” Is it really too far fetched to suggest that the US government does not want UN arms inspectors back in Iraq? Do they fear that this would lead to a political drama of the first order since the inspectors would confirm what individuals such as Scott Ritter have argued for some time, that Iraq no longer possesses any capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction?
This indeed would be the final blow to the “war against Iraq” policy of the Bush administration, a policy that no one else wants. The Iraqis would be well advised to seize this opportunity and open their doors without delay to time-limited arms inspectors, thereby confirming that they indeed have nothing to hide.
This would make a US war against Iraq next to impossible and start the long journey towards the country’s return to normality.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.