RW ONLINE: UN-A Vital Cog in the War Machine\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nUN-A Vital Cog in the War Machine\r\n<\/p>
Revolutionary Worker #1186, February 9, 2003<\/i>, posted at rwor.org<\/p>\r\n
27 January 2003--AWTW News Service. <\/i>Will the United Nations Security \r\nCouncil stop Bush from unleashing a war of mass destruction against Iraq? The \r\nshort answer is no.<\/p>\r\n
On January 27 the UN inspectors gave the Security Council a report on their \r\ndiscoveries after two months of scouring Iraqi military facilities, \r\nlaboratories, private homes, mosques and chicken farms. Instead of a \"smoking \r\ngun,\" they found only 11 old, empty chemical warheads. Saddam Hussein had let \r\nthe inspectors go anywhere they wanted and talk to anyone. All that chief \r\nbiological and chemical weapons inspector Hans Blix could muster against Iraq in \r\nhis report was that it had not provided \"full transparency\" by turning over \r\ninformation on weapons Iraq claims not to have and about which Blix's men have \r\nnot found any evidence. Blix's colleague, Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief atomic \r\nweapons inspector, reported that Iraq had no nuclear weapons programme. When the \r\nreport was first leaked, enraged Bush circles attacked the UN team, calling them \r\n\"the so-called UN inspectors\" as if they themselves were hiding Iraqi weapons up \r\ntheir sleeves. But then the White House decided to make the best of the \r\nsituation. If nothing had been found, they argued (with Blix snivelling \r\nagreement), that only proved that Iraq is hiding something. This is a new low in \r\nlegal standards, even for the United States, where people are routinely put to \r\ndeath on the basis of false evidence, as the governor of Illinois himself \r\nrecently admitted.<\/p>\r\n
The UN ended up agreeing to give the inspectors until February 14 to come up \r\nwith a new report. But what they might or might not turn up will not matter and \r\nwas never the point. Colin Powell, the man reputed to be Bush's most \r\n\"reasonable\"-minded co-conspirator, has already pronounced judgement: \r\n\"Inspections will not work.\"<\/p>\r\n
That is indisputably true--the inspections could never \"work\" in the sense of \r\nachieving the US's aims in Iraq, what it calls \"regime change,\" which means the \r\nreplacement of Saddam Hussein by a more pliant puppet or US General Tommy Franks \r\nhimself. Their aim is to install direct rule over Iraq reminiscent of how \r\nBritain ruled India. That has been the politics of this war--the outcome it \r\nseeks--since Bush first announced his intentions. The American press is talking \r\nseriously about stationing 100,000 US troops in Iraq for years to come.<\/p>\r\n
But in another sense the inspectors and the UN process have \"worked\"--they \r\nhave given the US a chance to claim that it tried to resolve the situation by \r\npeaceful means, without placing the slightest obstacle in Bush's murderous path. \r\nEven the European powers most vocally opposed to Bush, France and Germany, have \r\ndone absolutely nothing to prevent this war and everything possible to \r\nperpetuate the whole UN charade.<\/p>\r\n
When the US first submitted to the Security Council the resolution to send \r\nthe inspectors, France at first refused to go along with it. At that time France \r\nsaid the resolution was a trick because it could easily be interpreted as an \r\nauthorization for the US to launch the war whenever it wanted. France argued \r\nthat only if the resolution explicitly required a second UN vote before any war \r\ncould the US be prevented from doing as it pleased. But France and Germany ended \r\nup accepting Resolution 1441 anyway. Now, as predicted, Bush is arguing that \r\nindeed Resolution 1441 is all the US needs to go to war. This leaves France and \r\nGermany threatening to oppose a second resolution explicitly authorizing \r\nwar--when the Bushites have announced that they have no intention of seeking \r\nsuch a resolution.<\/p>\r\n
UN Resolution 1441, approved by every member of the Security Council, \r\nsanctioned Bush's basic principal that third world nations like Iraq have no \r\nrights that the imperialist powers are bound to respect.<\/p>\r\n
It stripped Iraq of all national sovereignty. It accepted as its starting \r\npoint Bush's big lie that Saddam Hussein represents more of a threat to the \r\npeople of his country, the region and the world than Bush and the other big \r\npowers themselves (and Bush's nuke-wielding stand-in, that great \"man of peace\" \r\nas Bush called him, Ariel Sharon). \"All the Europeans do think that Saddam \r\nHussein has to be disarmed,\" European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solanas \r\nsaid January 26. \"The position of the European Union is not far from the \r\nposition of the United States.\"<\/p>\r\n
All the permanent members of the Security Council have their own nuclear, \r\nchemical and biological weapons. The US has used nuclear weapons twice, killing \r\nhundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On January 26, the \r\nWhite House categorically refused to rule out that it would use them again \r\nagainst Iraq. Yet the UN decreed that these powers can decide what weapons Iraq \r\n(and by implication any other weak country) will be allowed to have. Then it \r\nsent in the inspectors to make a public spectacle of trampling on and \r\nhumiliating Iraq's national dignity.<\/p>\r\n
Of course, in the name of God-given, all-conquering American \"sovereignty,\" \r\nBush never offered the UN and the European countries the chance to veto his war. \r\nAll they could do at the UN was to veto a resolution. But they have not even \r\ndone that much.<\/p>\r\n
Why? To varying degrees, they oppose Bush's plans to make the US the absolute \r\nmaster of the Middle East and thus in a position to dictate to the people there \r\nand the European countries dependent on Middle Eastern oil as well. But they are \r\nafraid of being left out totally when it comes to dividing up the spoils after \r\nthe war. They will settle for half a loaf rather than none. US government \r\nofficials warned once again just before the inspectors' report that France risks \r\nbeing \"marginalized\" from the post- Iraq war Middle East. If France's \r\nTotalFinaElf wants to pump oil in Iraq, which holds the world's second largest \r\noil reserves, it had better not make Bush too mad now. The same threats have \r\nbeen made against Russia (which stands to lose huge amounts of money owed it by \r\nSaddam in addition to its oil investments) and even China, which has a seat on \r\nthe Security Council and its own stakes in Iraqi oil even though it is far from \r\na member of the imperialist club. What is at stake for the European powers is \r\nmuch more than oil money. They risk being frozen out of the exploitation of the \r\nthird world wherever the US has direct control. This is an alliance they can't \r\nafford to be left out of.<\/p>\r\n
The US's close allies in its \"coalition of the willing\" are an international \r\nband of predators: the UK, the former colonial power in Iraq, seeking to obtain \r\nthrough a junior partnership with the US what it could not keep by its own \r\nmilitary means; Spain, ruled by the political heir to US-backed fascist dictator \r\nFrancisco Franco, a country increasingly thriving on Spanish penetration of \r\nLatin America while dependent on the US to enforce the robbery of the Latin \r\nAmerican peoples; and Italy, where Berlusconi governs in coalition with the \r\nsuccessor party to Mussolini's fascists, with historic interests in and designs \r\non the Middle East that cannot prosper without US guns.<\/p>\r\n
But Bush's European opponents are no less predators in their conduct in the \r\noppressed countries of the world. Even more starkly, while talking peace they \r\nare facilitating and preparing the war.<\/p>\r\n
It would be very difficult for the US to wage this war without using Germany \r\nas a staging area for American troops and air missions. But Chancellor Schroeder \r\nhas declared the US's 60 air bases, army bases and other forward facilities it \r\nenjoys in Germany untouchable. In fact, German troops have been assigned to \r\n\"protect\" the 116,000 American soldiers stationed there. From what? Antiwar \r\ndemonstrations? Germany is also helping out in other ways, such as flying AWACs \r\nmilitary surveillance aircraft over Turkey to cover the US invasion force's \r\nflanks, and taking over from the US in leading the occupation of Afghanistan \r\noutside Kabul, freeing up the US for other adventures. German Green Foreign \r\nMinister Joschka Fischer talks as if he opposed US war plans, but he is doing \r\neverything in his power to prevent Germans from doing anything about it.<\/p>\r\n
France's President Jacques Chirac may issue threats about UN resolutions, but \r\nin the previous weeks he told his French armed forces to mobilize for possible \r\nparticipation in the war and sent the nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de \r\nGaulle <\/i>to the Middle East to facilitate French intervention. At the January \r\n27 Security Council meeting, French Foreign Minister de Villepin said that the \r\nquestion was whether or not a war with Iraq would have the \"legitimacy\" of UN \r\nbacking. In other words, if the US accepts giving France what American officials \r\ncalled \"a seat at the table\" when it comes time to divide up Iraq, it will \r\nwillingly take part in the bloodbath.<\/p>\r\n
Looked at in this light, the two week delay the UN Security Council members \r\nagreed on for the next report is not really about a new round of inspections but \r\na new round of behind-the-scenes diplomatic horse trading while the US completes \r\nits troop build up in the Gulf.<\/p>\r\n
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker \r\nOnline
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