In the 13 days that have passed since UNMOVIC head Hans Blix and Mohammed elBaradei of the IAEA pleaded with the UN Security Council to give them more time to complete their inspections of Iraq's suspected Weapons of Mass Destruction programme, the Bush administration has left no stone unturned in its campaign to deny UNMOVIC and IAEA that time and to pave the way for a military onslaught on that country 'within weeks'. Tony Blair has tried to split the European Union by making one-third of its present and soon-to-be members sign a declaration of unity with the US on Iraq. Colin Powell has presented what the US claims are radio intercepts and fresh satellite photographs in support of the US' thesis that Saddam Hussein has been trying to hoodwink UNMOVIC and so is in material breach of the Security Council Resolution 1441. Meanwhile, both Britain and the US have rushed still more troops, planes and ships to the Gulf in preparation for an assault. The message to the rest of the world is clear. The US will not give the weapons inspectors more time and will unleash war soon. It would prefer to do so under the cover of a second Security Council resolution that endorses its position that Iraq is in material breach of 1441. It will do all anyone can reasonably expect to persuade the council. But if some short-sighted and narrow-minded members insist on denying it that cover, it will go ahead unilaterally. In that case, it will be the UN and not the US that will be swept away into the debris of history.
Why is George W. Bush displaying such messianic fervour to destroy one small, desperately poor and already partly-destroyed nation? His answer, now a litany, is that Iraq under Saddam is a threat to its own minorities, its neighbours, the US and the world. Bush has said this so many times that by now he may well believe that. But a close analysis of his charges show that these are either an attempt to delude the rest of the world or worse, delude himself and the American public into acquiescing in the least justified and most coldly premeditated act of war in recent history.
The charge that Saddam is a monster rests almost entirely upon the belief that he used poison gas to commit genocide upon Iraqi Kurds at a place called Halabya in March 1988. President Clinton used this as proof that Saddam could not be trusted to maintain peace with his neighbours and not to resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction in his future struggles with them. Bush adopted this argument uncritically and expanded it to claim that such a leader was a danger also to the US and the rest of the world. At the Security Council, this accusation was repeated by British foreign minister Jack Straw and endorsed by both the French and German foreign ministers. But it now turns out that this charge is almost certainly baseless and that the Kurds at Halabya were killed almost certainly by poison gas unleashed by the Iranian army. This startling disclosure was made on January 31 in an op-ed piece written for the New York Times by Stephen Pelletiere, a former member of the CIA, who in 1989-90 had headed a team that had studied the use of chemical and biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. Pelletiere pointed out that both Iran and Iraq had used poison gas; that the Iranians had attacked Halabya and captured it first. The several hundred Kurds killed by poison gas died during an Iraqi counterattack. He based his surmise that it was the Iranians who had, possibly accidentally, killed the Kurds on the grounds that the latter had been killed by a cyanide gas, the Iranian army's preferred weapon, and not by mustard gas, which was what the Iraqis were using. The Iraqis did not have cyanide gas then and neither unscom nor UNMOVIC (not to mention Israeli intelligence) have discovered any cyanide gases till today.
What is truly reprehensible is the fact that this information had been with the US government since summer 1990, i.e., before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but had been suppressed by the Bush Sr and Clinton regimes because it did not serve their political purposes. The least Pelletiere's revelation should do is to make the international public more wary of American revelations about Iraq, including those made by Powell at the UN.
If Saddam was not quite the monster he is portrayed to be back in 1988, then much of the case for his being a threat to his neighbours and to the rest of the world falls flat. That invalidates Bush's case for pre-emptive action and strengthens the case for resorting to the time-honoured method of deterrence. As of now, even this may not be necessary. Iraq is an utterly exhausted nation, whose national income has been halved, where a third of the population is now below the poverty line and two-thirds no longer have safe drinking water or sanitation. The bulk of the weaponry with its armed forces is 20 years old and despite its efforts to maintain battle-readiness by making purchases of conventional arms through scores of shell companies, Iraq's capacity to wage a prolonged conventional war is in serious doubt.
There is also hard evidence that deterrence would work even after sanctions are lifted and Iraq regains some of its earlier affluence and technological capability. In the 1991 war, when Iraq did have thousands of chemical and biological warheads, it did not use a single one against US troops because of an unambiguous warning from Washington that he would face annihilation if he did so. In the same way, in 1998, when an American attack on Iraq became imminent, Saddam sent a quiet assurance to Tel Aviv that he would not attack Israel even if the US attacked, provided Tel Aviv kept out of the hostilities. These were not the acts of a madman.
So, the closer we come to war against Iraq, the more senseless it looks. One is thus forced to conclude that Bush's real reason for waging it will be not to make the world safer but to tear it apart and remould it to a reborn America's liking.