Invading Iraq

World Policy Institute
July 2002
By Frida Berrigan

The United States is preparing to go to war with Iraq. Why? To finish the job that President Bush's father started? To force Saddam Hussein to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles? To liberate the people of Iraq?

With the U.S. economy in a tailspin and public attention turning the President Bush's own corporate misdeeds, many think that an attack on Iraq is being planned now to keep the war momentum going and distract attention from the public relations nightmare in Washington. As a staffer for California Democrat Henry Waxman observed, "it certainly is strange that the more the financial scandals approach the White House, the harder and sharper the pans for an attack on Iraq" become.

The Pentagon has a plan to put 250,000 troops in Kuwait, and other neighboring countries (including Jordan, which maintains it has not agreed to U.S. military presence) and then launch a ground attack. Plan B involves a massive air assault followed by deployment of Special Forces commandos to get Saddam Hussein. (..)

Despite the bellicose rhetoric and the drumbeat of war, it seems unlikely the U.S. will undertake an ouster any time soon. There is no international coalition to execute the war. Potential Muslim and Arab coalition partners are preoccupied with the Israel/Palestinian conflict, and Europe (with the exception of Britain) is unsure that it wants to get involved at all.

One French official told the New York Times, that the Americans "are obsessed with Iraq, while we are obsessed with achieving peace." At the same time, some observers suggest that an invasion would be timed to coincide with November Congressional elections in an attempt to ensure Republican successes.

But timing speculations aside, there are questions the American people should be asking and that the Bush administration should be answering. Columnist James Carroll, writing in the Boston Globe, poses a few worth chewing on: "Having lived with Hussein as a mortal enemy for more than a decade, is the urgency of replacing him now a result less of real evidence of increased threat than of the ''us versus them'' mind-set that drives the war on terrorism?

"Does the bellicosity of the Bush administration eliminate the alternatives to war? For example, ''containment and deterrence,'' which worked against the Soviet Union and have so far worked against Hussein, depend on the cooperation of other nations. "Is Bush's chest-thumping war talk, even short of actual invasion, destroying that cooperation?"

The war might not start for a while, but the bombing has already begun. On July 14th, U.S. and British planes bombed what U.S. Central Command termed a "mobile radar unit associated with a mobile surface-to-air missile launcher." An Iraqi military spokesman said that the bombs hit a civilian target, killing five people and wounding seventeen. Since 1998, U.S. and British planes (mostly based in Turkey) have been enforcing the "no-fly zones" in Northern and Southern Iraq.

Source: Frida Berrigan, World Policy Institute, New York
Telephone 212.229.5808 x112, fax 212.229.5579
Web: www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms

 
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Nieuwe Oorlog 2002 | Ander Nieuws week 32-33