| |
THE ROVING EYE
Why the US needs the
UN
By Pepe Escobar
CAIRO -
Among the roughly 500,000-strong members of the Iraqi
diaspora scattered around the Middle East - and some are
very sympathetic to Saddam Hussein - there's a certitude
that in the upcoming Desert Storm replay Baghdad could
not hold out for more than a week. These Iraqis figure
the US 3rd Infantry Division - currently training in a
US military camp aka a country called Kuwait - could
reach Baghdad in three days. The Bush administration
mantra of the week is "time is running out". Not as much
for Iraq as for the UN weapons inspectors.
Does
Iraq have an active nuclear program? No, and Mohamed
ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency's
chief, practically said so at Monday's great theater of
the Security Council meeting, demanding a few months to
prove it beyond any doubt. Will there be a smoking gun?
No. Will there be a non-smoking gun? Yes - and it may be
what happened to stocks of poison gas and anthrax
unaccounted for, or 30,000 warheads that Washington says
Iraq still held as of the late 1990s.
Will there
be war? Yes - as virtually all participants of the World
Economic Forum in Davos have admitted. When? In February
or March? No one at this point can tell. When will it be
decided? Most probably on Friday at Camp David by George
W Bush and Tony Blair.
Hans Blix's undoubtedly
"grey" report was described by the Arab League as a kind
of school report: Iraq is an average student at best,
and it has to try harder. There have been anti-war
demonstrations in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, even
Egypt. Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Cairo insist that the
inspectors must be given enough time. But as far as
Washington's hawks are concerned, time is not running
out: time's up. The hawks know and say that Saddam's
regime has a huge attitude problem. The European Union
may want it to cooperate "more pro-actively". But this
would be tantamount to changing the nature of Saddam's
regime itself.
The European position will be the
key to any solution found inside the Security Council.
It is an extremely nuanced position. The British - Tony
Blair and his minions, not public opinion - remain
unabashedly pro-hardline Washington. And Spain, Italy,
Denmark and the Netherlands are extremely careful not to
antagonize Washington. France and Germany defend a
strictly peaceful UN-directed process, followed by
Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg and Sweden. And then there's
more nuance: France and Germany are both anti-war. But
while Germany is 100 percent pacifist, France will have
to carefully consider the consequences of not engaging
in an inevitable Anglo-American-led war.
Apparently there will be a compromise at the UN:
The inspectors will be given some more time - but not
enough. According to a Spanish diplomat, "The English
managed to get a delay from the Americans when Jack
Straw visited Washington." The next key date is now
February 15 - one day after a new report by the
inspectors is presented to the Security Council. Even
Ana Palacio, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs,
also impressed on Secretary of State Colin Powell the
need for more time for the inspectors.
Spain
entered the Security Council this January as a
non-permanent member, with no veto power. It is fully
aligned with Washington's position: President Jose Maria
Aznar talks to Bush practically on a daily basis. In the
black-and-white (no greys) world of the Bush White
House, Spain is right behind Great Britain and Poland in
the "you're with us" European camp. France and Germany
are definitely in the "you're not with us" camp. It's no
wonder that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - a man
baffled by the existence of nuances - branded France and
Germany as "old Europe". America loves NATO, not the
European Union. America controls NATO, and simply cannot
control the EU. So this ideal "new" Europe has to be
represented by minor European powers like Spain under a
conservative government; or - even better - by Poland, a
former Soviet Union satellite. Eastern European
countries like Poland see the European Union the way
Washington hawks would like it to be: as simply a huge
common market under the umbrella of NATO.
A new
inspections report should be presented to the Security
Council at the end of March. Washington as much as
reduced this to ashes - but at the same time did not
find enough allies to definitely cancel the inspectors'
mission, which has been going on for only two months
now. So, according to European and Arab diplomats, the
new "fake" key date of February 14 for a so-called
routine briefing by Hans Blix to the Security Council is
perfect as far as Washington's military timetable is
concerned. By then Washington should have been able to
display enough ammunition to impress to the UN that Iraq
is not cooperating as it must.
The feeling in
Brussels, as well as Cairo, Beirut, Damascus or Amman,
is pervasive: war cannot be avoided; but now it's too
late, too costly (a Yale study circulating in Davos was
talking about US$125 billion) and too extremely
unpopular for Washington to go to war without UN
approval.
It's no secret in the Arab world that
CIA and Special Forces are already in Iraqi Kurdistan -
a replay of the tactics employed in Afghanistan in 2001
when CIA and Special Forces were advising the Northern
Alliance. The awesome American military machine will be
almost ready by mid-February. On the diplomatic front,
though, things are much more - well - nuanced. Until
now, the Bush administration has not dared to launch a
preemptive war based exclusively on its own judgment of
a so-called threat to American interests. Washington
hawks argue that the UN should be bypassed altogether
because the Gulf War ceasefire in 1991 stipulated that
Saddam should face obligations stated by the Security
Council. So if he is not complying, there should be war.
But the fact is, that the UN is the only body capable of
certifying that Saddam's regime has not passed the test.
From a military point of view, the US does not
need anything from the co-called "coalition of the
willing", except the right to fly over a given country's
airspace and the right to use a few airbases - which
will be in Kuwait, Qatar and Turkey. Kuwait and Qatar
are in the bag, but Turkey could be a very complicated
matter. Washington so far has offered US$4 billion to
Turkey, which is peanuts compared to the negative
fallout of a possible war. Turkey estimates it may have
lost as much as US$50 billion because of the 1991 Gulf
War.
As the world once again contemplates the
spectacle of ultra-high-tech electronic jamming, the
thousands of smart, or not so smart, bombs, and the
likely thousands or dozens of thousands of collateral
damage, Washington will definitely need the
international community for the mopping-up business of
post-Saddam. Powell himself put it succinctly; the US
would like to internationalize the intervention as much
as possible, because later "there will be too much work
to do". This is a basic tenet of the Bush doctrine:
America bombs, and the rest of the world picks up the
pieces.
So the Kosovo and Afghan models will be
implemented again. According to new Washington plans,
American forces and others from the "coalition of the
willing" would remain in Iraq for one year or one year
and a half, under a civilian authority designated by the
UN. So the world should expect somebody like former
French Doctors Without Borders member Bernard Kouchner
in Kosovo, or former Algerian ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi
in Afghanistan to fill this role.
Forget about
the bunch of gangsters who pass for "Iraqi opposition
groups". Forget an Iraqi Hamid Karzai solution.
According to diplomatic sources, Washington hawks also
seem to be somehow convinced that General Tommy Franks
is no MacArthur - and an American military occupation
and government, puppet or not, of Iraq would generate a
hardcore backlash in the Arab world. Anyway, it remains
to be seen how the UN will be able to stretch its
resources to manage a fractured country of 24 million
people, as big as France, inevitably on the verge of
civil war and certainly suffering a tremendous
humanitarian crisis.
Washington hawks don't need
and certainly don't want the UN to get inside Iraq. They
may need the UN to get out. But who said they will want
to get out?
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies,
or to submit a letter to the editor.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
