[Socialism Today, No 27, April 1998, p. 14-18]
The planned US air strike against Iraq was narrowly averted by the agreement reached by UN General Secretary, Kofi Annan, in Baghdad on 24 February. Thankfully, many thousands of Iraqi men, women and children, already suffering from the devastating effects of sanctions, escaped more death, injury and social desolation. But has the agreement defused the crisis, asks Socialism Today, or merely postponed further military action by US imperialism?
The Annan-brokered deal was a setback for the US, thwarting Washington’s determination to punish Saddam unless he capitulated to US demands. The very fact that Annan’s mission went ahead underlined the growing isolation of the US. Other capitalist powers, particularly France and Russia, opposed a military strike, as did even US client states, like Saudi Arabia. Under Annan’s deal, Saddam agreed to unlimited inspection of eight presidential palaces by the UNSCOM weapons inspectors, who will now be accompanied by ‘diplomatic chaperones’. In exchange, Saddam undoubtedly received assurances from Annan, not fully spelt out in public, that sanctions would be relaxed so long as he sticks to the agreement.
Will the deal hold? The crucial factor will be whether or not the Western powers will relax sanctions and provide technical assistance enabling Iraq to pump enough oil to meet the increased oil-for-food targets. Unless they are relaxed, Saddam is likely to place new curbs on the weapons inspectors, leading to another confrontation with the US. A revival in trade, however, will probably strengthen Saddam’s regime for a time, underlining the fact that he has out-manoeuvred the US. In any new US-Iraqi confrontation, Saddam is likely to get more support from many of the Arab regimes, who are angered by US imperialism’s failure to deliver concessions to the Palestinians under the Oslo accords. Despite the ruthless, totalitarian nature of his regime, Saddam is seen throughout the Arab world as a leader who is prepared to stand up to US imperialism. There is universal anger amongst Arab people at the suffering imposed on the Iraqi people by sanctions, and by the glaring contrast between US hostility to Iraq and its indulgence’ of Netanyahu’s government in Israel.
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Sanctions – weapons of mass destruction
Since 24 February it has become much clearer how the latest crisis episode developed. Over the last two years the UNSCOM weapons inspectorate steadily widened the scope of its inspections, checking on the whole of Saddam’s military apparatus and its potential to produce weapons in the future. On the other side, partly in response to this and partly in response to the accumulating affect of sanctions on the Iraqi economy, Saddam placed more and more restrictions on the inspectors.
“Imagine a weapon that selectively kills babies, the old, the sick and the helpless,” says an Iraqi now living in the US: “That weapon is sanctions”. (Independent, 22 February) While the sanctions are legitimised by UN Resolution 661, other UN agencies, including the World Health Organisation and the World Food Programme, have documented their barbaric effects. Millions are desperately short of food, children and the elderly are falling sick and dying through malnutrition. Under the oil-for-food programme, some medicines and much medical equipment is still banned on the grounds that it could be diverted for military use. Iraq is barred from using its oil money for rebuilding the infrastructure. Electricity supply, for instance, is only around 40% of the pre-war level, which means breakdowns of the water and sanitation systems. As a result, epidemic diseases are rampant. The ruling elite, on the other hand, are not experiencing shortages, and still enjoy imported luxury goods. A circle of Saddam’s cronies, including his sons Uday and Qusay, are making fortunes through sanction-busting and the black market. Even in the capitalist press, however, reports show that anger against the corrupt ruling elite is far outweighed by anger against the US. A senior UN administrator recently commentated that the sanctions policy ‘enhances the leadership, it diminishes the people. It doesn’t work’. UN Assistant Secretary General, Dennis Halliday, head of the oil-forfood programme, wrote to Kofi Annan, complaining that the UN sanctions were causing untold suffering to innocent people. “I wrote that what we were doing was undermining the moral credibility of the UN,” says Halliday. “It seemed to me that what we were doing was in contradiction to the human rights provision in the UN’s own charter”. (independent, 25 February) “The sanctions,” says one Iraqi, “are the true weapons of mass destruction”. They should be ended immediately. Far from being a weapon that will finish Saddam’s regime, sanctions are a slow torture inflicted on the Iraqi people.
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The role of UNSCOM
Why did Saddam block the weapons inspectors? He had evidently come to the conclusion that UNSCOM, acting on US orders, would never declare Iraq ‘clean’ so long as he remained in power. Sanctions would continue, in other words, until he was toppled. Since 1996, moreover, the scope of UNSCOM, which has greater powers than any other UN agency, was steadily widened. In response, Saddam seized on the effective collapse of the Arab-Israeli ‘peace process’ to challenge the power of UNSCOM and of US imperialism.
UNSCOM claims that the full scale of Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons (CBW) programme only became clear in 1995, when Iraq’s leading germ warfare scientist, Dr Riya Taha, revealed a mass of detail. The intelligence agencies of the US and other Western powers, however, had long been aware of Iraq’s CBW programme, which began in 1974. The technology and equipment were originally supplied by Western firms. In fact, in 1995-96 UNSCOM completed its picture of Iraq’s CBW programme by collecting evidence from the suppliers in the US, France, Switzerland, Austria, Britain and elsewhere.
In the early 1970s, the US, the Soviet Union, and other powers signed various international conventions agreeing to destroy all CBW stocks and ban any further development of CBWs. Both the US and Russia, and undoubtedly others, however, have continued research and development for what they claim are purely ‘defensive’ purposes.
In 1975 the US corporation, Pfaulder of Rochester, New York State, sold Saddam the plans for the chemical weapons factory built at Akshat. Western firms also supplied technology for the germ-warfare programme at Salman Park, south of Baghdad. However, when the US ABC News first broadcast details of this facility, the State Department denied its existence.
In 1983 Saddam first used gas against Iran, during the Iran-Iraq war, killing 45,000 Iranian soldiers over the next five years. In 1988 Saddam sprayed mustard gas and sarin on the Kurdish village of Halabja, murdering at least 5,000 civilians. When they regarded Saddam as an ally against Iran, the Western powers said nothing. They continued to supply Saddam’s regime with arms and credits.
During 1996 UNSCOM secretly took a decision to widen the scope of its inspections to cover the ‘mechanism of concealment’. This involves identifying and monitoring key military units (especially the Republican Guard), key technical and administrative personnel, and all locations which could be used for storage. UNSCOM was no longer simply checking on Iraq’s past or surviving CBW programme, but attempting to pre-empt any future attempt to re-establish the programme. This inevitably led to sharpened tension between UNSCOM and the Iraqi regime.
“The dispute (over UNSCOM’s role)”, commented Robert Fisk (Independent, 24 February), “has its origins in the inspectors’ hunt for the entire methodology of Iraq’s armed security apparatus – the documents, working commissions and system of its arms production – rather than the weapons themselves. Only by discovering the names and status of hundreds of Republican Guard commanders and officials of the Iraqi intelligence service, the UN decided, could it build up a picture of what biological or chemical weapons the Iraqis intended to construct. The inspectors were targeting not … the location of missiles or chemical factories, but … Iraq’s system of weapons concealment”.
There were a series of inspection crises. In May 1996, the UNSCOM inspectors, at that time led by a Russian, Svidovic, were blocked from a number of locations. The head of UNSCOM, Ralph Ekeus, flew to Baghdad and there was an agreement with Iraq’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, that inspections could continue in all locations so long as Iraq had the right to have senior officers present during searches.
In 1997, there was a crisis over the US’s U2 spy planes, used for high-altitude aerial surveillance. The Iraqi regime threatened to shoot them down if their flights continued. At the same time, Russia appears to have put pressure on Svidovic to soften his inspections.
Svidovic was replaced by Scott Ritter, who was denounced by Iraq as a US spy. Ritter, in fact, was on general Schwarzkopf’s staff in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf war. In fact, as one western diplomat commented, ‘most of the weapons inspectors are soldiers, who behave like soldiers’, Because UNSCOM has very limited funds, most of its 160 staff in New York and Baghdad are on secondment from national governments, mostly those which participated in the 1991 military coalition against Iraq. Officially, the inspectors report exclusively to the Security Council. But, as the Washington Post reported, “it is no secret that some of these experts report their findings not only to the commission, but also to their own governments”. (17 February)
It is not the provocative behaviour of the inspectors, however, but the scope and ultimate aim of UNSCOM, which is at the root of the recent conflict. On 29 October the inspectors were ordered to leave Iraq, and the head of UNSCOM, Richard Butler, suspended the inspections.
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A set-back for US imperialism
Within a week, the Clinton administration had decided to launch a massive attack on the Iraqi regime unless Saddam backed down and allowed UNSCOM unlimited access to all locations. In mid-November, US imperialism began to concentrate a massive naval and air force in the Gulf region. Clinton, secretary of state Albright, and other US leaders made it clear that, despite opposition from France, Russia and other Security Council members, they were ready to act independently of the UN. Subsequent reports make it clear that, at that time, the majority of Clinton’s advisors did not believe that Saddam would back down – they were mobilising their forces for military conflict. Only the date remained to be fixed.
Yet despite the apparently overwhelming momentum towards military action, US policy was derailed by Kofi Annan’s mission to Baghdad, which resulted, at least temporarily, in a compromise between the Western powers and the Iraqi regime. How did this come about?
The fundamental factor is the weakening of US power in the Middle East since the Gulf war in 1991. Despite its overwhelming military forces, the US was isolated, with nearly all its 1991 allies (with the conspicuous exception of Britain) exerting pressure to head off air strikes against Iraq. This led to deep misgivings and divisions among Clinton’s strategists. Under the heading ‘Going to the brink: misgivings plagued US plans’, the Washington Post reported that “Clinton’s foreboding grew as he focused on the costs and risks of a bombing campaign”. (2 March)
The Arab regimes which joined the anti-Iraq military coalition in 1991 were not ready to support US military action. In their eyes, the US has not delivered the promised pay-off for their support in 1991, a ‘peace process’ securing substantial concessions from the Israeli state to the Palestinians. On the contrary, Washington has continued to indulge Netanyahu while his government has reneged on the Oslo accords, backing new settlements on the West Bank and the accelerated Jewish colonisation of East Jerusalem. Not even Saudi Arabia, despite Albright’s pleading in Riyadh, would agree to its bases being used for air strikes. Above all, the Arab regimes feared an explosion of mass anger throughout the region if the US massacred a hundred thousand Iraqis.
A prominent member (Leila Sharaf) of the Jordanian Senate summed it up: ‘If the Americans go through with this strike, the whole political and economic situation will be disastrous. Turmoil will not be confined to Iraq alone. It will spill over here, to the West Bank, among the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey. The ripple effects will be far and wide. We cannot afford any more refugees in Jordan: this country already has an unemployment level of 27%. When American generals talk of limiting collateral damage from their missiles, do they think of all this social and political upheaval? Do they have solutions for what will transpire? …”. (International Herald Tribune, 21 February) Arab regimes, like the Saudis, were threatened by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Now they fear that a shattering of the Iraqi state will tip the strategic balance in favour of their non-Arab adversaries, Iran, Turkey and Israel.
In the UN Security Council, France and Russia actively opposed a military strike against Iraq. Only Britain, playing Robin to the US Batman, gave enthusiastic support from the start, sending a token force to join the US fleet in the Gulf. Highlighting the pro-imperialist stance of New Labour, Tony Blair made a much-publicised visit to Washington, expressing servile support for Clinton.
Russia, on the other hand, has been striving to reassert its strategic influence in the Middle East region. Yeltsin has re-established links with Iraq, intervening to soften US pressure on Saddam’s regime. Throughout the weapons inspection crisis, Russia pushed for a diplomatic compromise.
France took a similar position. A powerful motive is French capitalism’s desire to develop trade with Iraq, which depends on economic reconstruction. France has also been developing economic links with Iran, despite US sanctions. Moreover, because of its close links with the Arab countries, especially Algeria, France would feel the heat of a mass explosion of anger provoked by US bombing much more than the US.
As the prospect of a US military strike heightened at the end of January, the hollowness of US policy became increasingly clear. The US military commanders themselves were among the first to ask: “What are the policy objectives?’ After a meeting between the president and the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff (29 January), a senior officer told the press: ‘I don’t think there’s a member of the joint chiefs who wants this (air strikes) to be the way it goes’. This reflected not humanitarian scruples, but concern about the lack of clearly defined objectives and fear of the explosive repercussions in the region.
What would another bombing raid achieve? US strategists confessed it would not eliminate chemical and biological weapons. Existing stocks are hidden, while future production capacity cannot be targeted. As the debate intensified, moreover, questions emerged about Iraq’s actual CBW capacity. Later, for instance, the Independent (7 March) reported a memo from a US businessman who attended a briefing at the US embassy in Kuwait on 3 February. The US ambassador, Larocco, said there were no plans to issue embassy staff with gas masks, because among other reasons, “(Iraq’s) biological and chemical warheads are very ineffective”. At the same time, several scientific experts confirmed that Iraq’s ‘delivery systems’ are extremely limited. Larocco reportedly said that a CBW attack on Kuwait was “an extremely remote possibility”.
Chemical and biological weapons naturally evoke horror for anyone who considers the consequences of their use. But in January-February it became crystal clear that the elimination of CBWs, which could not be achieved through air strikes, was not the real objective of the planned US raid. Many right-wing commentators in the US claimed that the real aim of a raid was – or should be – to kill Saddam. However desirable for US imperialism, however, military strategists pointed out this was extremely difficult to guarantee. During the 1990-91 Gulf war (it has now emerged) at least 80 air raids were mounted with the specific objective of killing Saddam – all failed.
Although Clinton has not disguised his desire to get rid of Saddam’s regime, none of his strategists actually claimed they would be able to bring down Saddam through air strikes. The Gulf war commander, Schwarzkopf, bluntly made it clear that this would be impossible without a land invasion. On Albright’s request, the Pentagon prepared two alternative ground offensives, one to take Basra and the southern oil fields, and the second ‘a full-scale march on Baghdad involving 200,000 to 250,000 troops’. These proposals, reported the Washington Post (2 March), “attracted no support among the president’s advisors”.
Invasion was rejected for the same reasons Bush halted the advance towards Baghdad in 1991: fear of US imperialism becoming enmeshed in an explosive, unwinnable conflict, the effects of which would produce massive social protest within the US. Stripped of political rhetoric, the policy objective adopted by Clinton was to inflict ‘significant damage’ on Iraq’s CBW capacity and on conventional weapons considered to be threatening to Iraq’s neighbours. In reality, the aim was simply to punish Saddam.
“In this world,” commented a Washington Post columnist (Richard Cohen), “you do what you can. Saddam cannot be toppled or killed: he can only be punished. Total war is out of the question and so punitive strikes will have to suffice”. (20 February) At the same time, there was a stream of criticism in the capitalist press.
Public opinion in the US was by no means overwhelmingly in favour of the ‘decisive action’ proposed by Clinton. A CNN survey in mid-February showed that 50% of respondents were against bombing Iraq, with only 41% in favour. Clinton’s claim of popular support was shattered by the crucial ‘town meeting’ held at Ohio State University Campus in Columbus, in the Mid-West heartland. Three of Clinton’s top advisors – Madeline Albright (Secretary of State), William Cohen (Defence Secretary) and Sandy Berger (National Security Advisor) – were met with a barrage of criticism and heckling during the 90-minute meeting. There was a chorus in the baseball stadium of ‘One, Two, Three, Four, We don’t want a racist war!’
‘Bill’s top-guns bomb in the heartland … Bumbling White House policy team stumbles,’ commented the New York Post. ‘Iraq strike gets hoots in the heartland,’ said the Washington Times. [New York Times and Washington Post?] The meeting provided a foreshadowing of the bitter divisions which would be opened up in the US by renewed military action against Iraq. The impact of the meeting was undoubtedly a significant factor in tipping the balance amongst Clinton’s advisors towards acceptance of Kofi Annan’s mission to Iraq. In a meeting of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council on 11 February, the US ambassador, Bill Richardson, forcefully opposed Annan’s mission to Baghdad: ‘You can’t go, you can’t box us in’. On 15 February, however, the US changed its position. Accepting Annan’s visit, Albright had a private meeting with the UN Secretary General, laying down ‘red lines’, the ‘bottom line’ for any agreement: The UNSCOM Weapons inspectors must have access to all sites, operational control of the inspections, and the final say on the issue of compliance. Albright demanded that any agreement must be in writing. Publicly, she commented: ‘It is possible that he (Annan) will come back with something we don’t like, in which case we will pursue our national interests (bomb Iraq)’.
Annan’s deal with Saddam met these basic conditions, while conceding that on visits to the eight presidential palaces inspectors would be accompanied by a group of diplomats. This was, however, much more of a setback for the US than the text of the agreement itself suggests.
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The regional crisis remains unresolved
Faced with a decision on Annan’s agreement, Clinton had no real choice. The US accepted the deal, though Clinton warned that if Saddam reneged on unlimited weapons inspection, the US would resort to air strikes, while of course promising to ‘consult’ the UN. Meanwhile, the US’s naval and air forces will be kept at the ready in the Gulf (between November and February, the mobilisation cost over $600m).
Annan diplomatically praised the US’s decisive show of force, warning Saddam to stick to the agreement. At the same time, Annan is pushing for the Security Council to accept that Iraq can sell $5.2bn of oil every six months, using the proceeds to buy food and medicine. In effect, Annan is diplomatically challenging the US policy of enforcing sanctions for so long as Saddam remains in power. Because of the isolation of the US, the UN Secretary General has been able to play a relatively independent role in this crisis, balancing between the divided Western powers, the various Arab regimes, and Iraq.
France, Russia, and other powers strongly favour the relaxation of sanctions, not least in order to further their own commercial interests. Increasing its oil sales would allow Iraq to import much more food, medicine and other supplies. Given the sharp fall in the price of oil, however, Iraq does not currently have the Capacity to pump enough oil to sell $5.2bn worth in six months, Up until now, the US has blocked technical assistance to Iraq’s oil fields. On 13 Match, however, a UN technical team travelled to the oil fields to assess their requirements. And it now appears likely that, with UN support, the West will allow the required assistance to go through.
Any revival of Iraq’s economy will probably strengthen Saddam’s regime in the short run. This may well lead to renewed conflict with the US. In the US Congress, right-wing Republicans are denouncing the Annan deal as a defeat for the US and are advocating financial and military support for the Iraqi opposition to bring down Saddam. They now appear to be pinning their hopes on former senior members of Saddam’s military command, now plotting in exile. Previous attempts at covert support for the Opposition in Iraq proved bloody failures, yet a new CIA covert action plan to overthrow Saddam was leaked to the press (Guardian, 27 February). Ironically, this coincided with publication of the CIA’s own belated, but damning assessment of its disastrous attempt to topple Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 (Guardian, 23 February).
The US, which will intervene only to defend its own economic and strategic interests, is no more capable of restoring democracy in Iraq than it is of eliminating the international threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons – weapons which the US and its capitalist allies played the key role in developing and supplying to the world’s dictators.
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