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THE ROVING EYE
Smoking guns and the dogs
of war
By Pepe Escobar
BANGKOK - Everybody knew the feelings of the
Arab street. Now it's official: the European street has
pronounced itself - fully supported by Pope John Paul
II. Almost 60 percent of British public opinion and 77
percent of French are against war on Iraq, with or
without UN approval. And an overwhelming majority of
Germans - the most anti-war of all European big powers -
keep echoing Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who has been
promising since his electoral campaign not to be
involved in an attack against Iraq.
It may be hard for some Americans
to understand that public political debate in member
countries of the European Union is much more nuanced than
the daily avalanche of spinning coming from the White
House and the Pentagon. Britain, France and Germany,
for instance, are not convinced that Saddam Hussein
is the ultimate evil. There has been no
conclusive proof whatsoever that Saddam is involved with al-Qaeda.
There has been no smoking or even non-smoking gun
pointing to an Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Military experts, many of them American, insist Saddam
was "contained" long ago.
The whole Iraqi mess
is about power politics, not law. Security Council
Resolution 1441 - basically orchestrated by the US -
says that Saddam must prove that he has dismantled his
weapons of mass destruction. European public opinion
says that the Bush administration must provide the
evidence about the weapons. America should establish
beyond any reasonable doubt the existence itself - and
the level of danger - of an Iraqi mass destruction
arsenal, before committing the world to war. Javier
Solana, the de facto spokesman for European foreign
policy, and someone who could never be qualified as
anti-American, did not mince his words: "Without proof,
it will be very hard to declare war on Iraq." Not only
in the political corridors of Brussels and Geneva, but
in the streets of London, Paris and Berlin people are
asking: If this evidence is so crystal clear - as Bush
and Blair say it is - why is it not presented to world
opinion?
Tony Blair has been forced to admit
that January 27 is not a deadline: He is now saying that
UN inspectors need "space and time" to do their work.
Blair, under pressure of public opinion, plus tremendous
convulsion in the ranks of his Labour Party, has
realized he simply cannot afford to go to war simply on
America's word. He has urged Bush to "listen back" to
the international community's fears over Iraq. He warned
of the danger of "chaos" if the world were split into
"rival poles of power; the US in one corner; anti-US
forces in another". But did anyone in Washington
understand the message?
In France, President Jacques Chirac has been saying
practically every day that the Security Council will approve
war "only when all options have been exhausted". Russia,
also a permanent member of the Security Council, has officially
stated that the UN inspections have no time limit. Chief
inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei go to Baghdad
next weekend to demand Iraqi account for missing stocks
of nerve gas, missile engines and chemical bombs, before
delivering their report on January 27. France and Russia
have officially confirmed that they would veto any
American attempt to force the Security Council to vote
for war.
A French mission comprising scientists,
physicists and geologists and organized by Amities
Franco-Irakiennes, an association directed by Iraq
expert Gilles Munier, is currently in Baghdad. Most of
the participants fully endorse the feelings of the Arab
street and are not exactly applauding American foreign
policy. The mission was duly received by Abdel Razzak
Al-Hashemi, the coordinator for all the missions of war
opponents which have been landing in Baghdad practically
every week. Al-Hashemi seemed to be very well informed
about French opposition to war.
The mission also
met face-to-face with General Amir Al-Saadi, Saddam's
councilor and the man in charge of high-level contacts
with the UN inspectors. Amir has qualified most of the
inspectors as "spies"; they allegedly pose questions
that have nothing to do with weapons of mass
destruction. This is exactly what the Iraqis said the UN
inspectors were doing during the 1990s, something that
was later acknowledged by the White House.
The French mission visited the Al Tadji complex, an
Iraqi site 35 kilometers north of Baghdad already inspected
by a UN team. The site was mentioned as being part of
the Iraqi nuclear program in the famous Blair report
of autumn 2002. The director of the site, General
Heissam Al-Chihab, was the tour leader. He said the rockets
made at the factory had only a 10 kilometer range - which
as any analyst knows makes them unfit to carry
non-conventional weapons.
Asia Times Online has
also learned that, according to French Admiral Michel
Debray, one of the members of the visiting delegation,
what he saw "confirms the spying mission of the US. The
inspectors came here six times. They saw everything, and
they could evaluate the stocks and the production rhythm
of Iraqi weapons, and now they know very well where to
drop their bombs. With this inspection regime, the
Iraqis don't have any means any more to organize their
defense or to protect themselves, even with conventional
weapons."
The French also met
an Iraqi engineer, Kadeem Mobjil. He said that everything
he explained to an IAEA (International Atomic
Energy Agency) inspector last December had been distorted to give the impression
of a nuclear program being developed at the Al
Tadji site. This engineer apparently refused to
be interrogated abroad under provisions contained in Resolution
1441.
Hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv are
seeing red, but the fact is the Anglo-American war
against Iraq is increasingly not as inevitable as it had
seemed last December.
Kim Jong-il's latest coup de
theater
has also made clear to the Arab and European
street the double standards at work. Pyongyang may - or
has to - be contained by diplomacy, but Baghdad has to
be smashed. As far as totalitarian regimes go, Kim
Jong-il has absolutely nothing to learn from Saddam
Hussein.
The crisis in Venezuela also clashed
head on with the Bush administration´s plans. Venezuelan
oil exports have been severely reduced. A war in Iraq in
the next few weeks would mean that the world oil market
would lose a total from both producers of something
around 5 million barrels a day. OPEC has already decided
to increase production, but that would not be enough to
close the gap. Inevitably oil prices, already well over
$30 a barrel, would skyrocket: that would be a
tremendous blow to the already depressed world economy.
Turkey's Prime Minister Abdullah Gul has just
completed a tour of Arab states in which he did his best
to assure them that Turkey is against the war. It's
extremely unlikely at this point that Turkey's
involvement would get parliamentary approval. Saudi
Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal has made
it clear in no uncertain terms that the kingdom's
national interests may not coincide with America's in
this case. Syria's President Bashar Assad has also made
clear that he is totally opposed to war. There have been
weekly anti-war and anti-American demonstrations in
Pakistan.
For the record, the UN inspectors have
been to more than 200 sites in Iraq so far. They have
discovered absolutely no trace of any weapons of mass
destruction. But at the same time America will have
close to 250,000 troops with awesome fire power
completely encircling Iraq by mid-February. The Pentagon
spin may be that Saddam will agree to disarm peacefully
when the threat of war is imminent and totally credible.
But the undisputed fact remains that hawks in Washington
and Israel want war, as soon as possible, no matter
whether Iraq has or has not those weapons of mass
destruction.
As UN diplomats have
already confirmed previously to Asia Times Online, the
whole weapons soap opera is just a sideshow. The
hawks' designs for the post-Ottoman Middle East are based
on total control over oil resources, breaking the
Palestinian resistance to Israel's colonial occupation,
and establishing total American and Israeli control over
the region.
The latest
Israeli corruption scandal notwithstanding, Ariel Sharon
cannot survive without war. After the US attacks Iraq, Sharon
will not miss the opportunity to go after Hezbollah
in Lebanon, provoke Syria and finally get rid of Yasser
Arafat, which in theory would mean the total destruction
of the Palestinian Authority.
The
psychological warfare against Saddam's regime is
absolutely relentless. There are all sorts of post-Saddam
scenarios flying about - including childishly unrealistic
ones in which Iraq's "territorial integrity" would be preserved
but the American military would run the country for at
least a year and a half. There are also widespread
rumors that Arab leaders are pressing Saddam to go into
exile: the self-styled heir to the great Babylonian
emperors would rather die as a martyr.
"Regime
change" remains very much in the cards in Washington.
But we may be approaching a very dangerous turn where a
key element of international relations will be the
boiling-point anger of Washington's hawks in case Saddam
- or the UN inspectors for that matter - do not provide
the smoking or non-smoking gun necessary for war. Anyone
can bet that Hans Blix and his team will be thoroughly
discredited by the American spinning machine. But a gun,
smoking or not, will be manufactured.
(©2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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