The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.33           September 23, 1996 
 
 
Clinton Orders New Attack  

BY MARTÍN KOPPEL

A week after launching two rounds of missile attacks against Iraq, the White House ordered a new bombing. As the Militant went to press, Washington sent stealth bombers to Kuwait and moved four B-52 bombers closer to the Middle East to prepare for an attack that U.S. officials said would be more destructive than the previous ones.

The administration said its military escalation was in response to the firing of an Iraqi missile at U.S. warplanes patrolling northern Iraq, where Washington, London, and Paris have imposed a "no-fly zone" since the Gulf War.

U.S. defense secretary William Perry stated that Washington's attacks would be "disproportionate" to any moves by Baghdad.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns declared, "We reserve the right to take any military action we wish to counter the reconstitution of an air defense system." Pentagon officials said Iraqi forces were repairing anti-air defense facilities destroyed by Washington's September 3 missile strikes in southern Iraq.

The latest military moves came as Clinton's Republican opponents in the presidential race stepped up their criticism of his Iraq policy. In the first week of September, Kurdish forces backed by the Iraqi government consolidated their control over cities in the north of that country. These events fueled a debate in big-business circles on what many commentators described as a fiasco for Washington.

Some of the critics complained that Clinton should have ordered the bombing of the Iraqi army units that moved into Kurdish areas in the north. Others pointed out that the latest setback was rooted in Washington's political debacle in the 1990-91 Gulf War.

Dole and Kemp criticize Clinton
Republican presidential contender Robert Dole, who first chastised Clinton for "weak leadership" and then lined up behind the Democratic president when the bombs began to drop, suggested September 9 that Clinton's assault did not succeed.

Dole's running mate, Jack Kemp, described a "worsening situation" for Washington in Iraq and accused Clinton of "vacillation" September 11. While backing the U.S. attacks on Iraq, Kemp complained that "our alliances are in disarray" and proposed seeking a stronger "coalition" with allied governments.

Sen. John McCain, a Dole campaign adviser, denounced the "abject failure" of Clinton's Iraq policy. Republican senator Richard Lugar called for "more extensive air strikes."

Clinton warned that Republicans should "not let the word war spiral out of hand." White House spokesman Michael McCurry stated that the U.S. government should "speak with one voice and not with discordant voices."

On September 3, U.S. military forces lobbed 44 cruise missiles against targets in southern Iraq. Washington expanded the "no-fly zone" in that area to the edge of Baghdad, enforced by U.S. and British warplanes. Clinton also announced that a United Nations agreement allowing limited oil sales by the Iraqi government was suspended.

Clinton said the U.S. military moves were in response to Baghdad's August 31 troop deployment into the Kurdish "enclave" imposed by Washington in northern Iraq after the Gulf War. On September 4 Clinton proclaimed, "Our mission has been achieved," saying most Iraqi troops had left the Kurdish region. The White House said the new no-fly zone was permanent.

Over the next few days, however, a flurry of news articles and opinion columns in the daily press painted a picture sharply at variance with the White House version. Headlines read: "Iraq- backed Kurds take key town," "Iraq Fills A Power Vacuum," "Not a Victory," "Iraqi Offensive Into Kurdish Zone Disrupts U.S. Plot to Oust Hussein, "How Saddam Survives."

When Washington launched its attack on Iraq, Baghdad's army was already withdrawing from the north and the Iraqi-backed forces of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) had taken Erbil, ousting the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Within days, KDP troops captured Sulaimaniya and other cities controlled by the PUK, now aligned with the Iranian government. Thousands of Patriotic Union followers and other Kurdish civilians fled across the Iranian border. Previously, the PUK dominated about half the Kurdish region, including Erbil and Sulaimaniya, cities of 500,000 and 400,000 inhabitants, respectively.

In Erbil, KDP and Iraqi troops destroyed the headquarters of the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi National Congress (INC), a coalition of opposition groups that Washington has unsuccessfully tried to use since the end of the Gulf War to undermine President Saddam Hussein. Dozens of INC members were arrested and reportedly executed. Washington smuggled a handful of CIA officers out of Erbil into Turkey, while 200 CIA-backed Iraqis from the INC were left stranded in a nearby mountaintop village.

No more coalition
Meanwhile, the Turkish regime announced it would enforce a "security zone" inside Iraqi territory to prevent incursions by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas, who are fighting for an independent Kurdish state in Turkey. Turkish troops have massed along the Iraqi border.

U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher said Ankara had "genuine reasons to be concerned about their border." But Paris, Moscow, and several of Iraq's neighbors balked at the Turkish move as a destabilizing factor. Baghdad threatened to "take every necessary action" to prevent it.

On September 6, Washington and London gave up their effort to pass a resolution in the United Nations Security Council criticizing the Iraqi government for its army deployment in Erbil. They decided not to force a vote - even on a watered- down resolution expressing only "deep concern" - after the Russian government threatened a veto. Moscow said it would only approve a resolution that also criticized the U.S. missile strikes.

Meeting in Ireland September 8, foreign ministers of the European Union called for reinstating the agreement allowing Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil to buy food and medicine.

As the Baghdad-supported KDP routed its rivals in northern Iraq, the White House found itself defending its actions from domestic critics.

Clinton said Washington had "limited" options in Iraq. "I would still like to do more to help the Kurds," he said. "But frankly, if you want the fighting to be ended, the leaders of the various factions are going to have to be willing to go back to the peace table and talk it through."

U.S. defense secretary William Perry stated, "We should not be involved in the civil war in the north. We should focus our actions where our interests are," he asserted, referring to southern Iraq, which borders on oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The day the White House proclaimed victory, the New York Times ran a front-page article titled "A Failed Race Against Time: U.S. Tried to Head Off Iraqis." It stated, "While President Clinton today declared the military retaliation a success, Mr. Hussein has nonetheless achieved a victory of his own: By the time Iraqi tanks had withdrawn under the pressure of United States cruise missile attacks, the Kurdish unity that the United States spent the last five years trying to preserve had been torn apart." The article noted that Baghdad had finally regained control of the Kurdish "enclave."

Washington loses northern enclave
This and other recent news reports have revealed how the U.S. base of anti-Iraq operations in the north collapsed in the months preceding Washington's September 3 assault.

Washington set up the Kurdish "enclave" in 1991 after the Gulf War. At that time it launched "Operation Provide Comfort," a military operation by U.S., British, and French forces that drove hundreds of thousands of Kurds - who had tried to flee into Turkey after the Hussein regime crushed a Kurdish rebellion - back into Iraq.

Washington backed the KDP, led by Massoud Barzani, and the PUK, headed by Jalil Talabani, in exchange for establishing an anti-Hussein base in northern Iraq.

Under pressure from the Kurdish people in their struggle for national self-determination, Barzani and Talabani temporarily put aside their power struggles. Elections in 1992 led to an autonomous Kurdish parliament in Erbil.

The imperialist economic embargo against Iraq, however, hit the Kurdish people particularly hard, causing shortages of basic goods and pushing unemployment as high as 80 percent. The economic squeeze sparked a renewed feud between the bourgeois- led KDP and PUK. They fought over funds from international "relief" organizations and "customs" revenues from the smuggling of diesel and other embargoed goods through the borders with Turkey and Iran. Meanwhile, the capitalist regimes in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq sought mutually conflicting alliances among the Kurdish political factions.

At the same time, the Iraqi National Congress, Iraqi National Accord, and other U.S.-sponsored "resistance" groups failed to generate broad support among the population or in the Iraqi military. This was despite $20 million in covert CIA financing and an INC headquarters in Erbil with a staff of 800.

Fighting between the KDP and PUK broke out in 1994, when Talabani's guerrillas seized Erbil. Repeated U.S. efforts to hold the alliance together collapsed. The PUK then turned to neighboring Tehran for aid. In July 1996, in exchange for allowing its troops to raid northern Iraq and pound Iranian Kurd rebel bases, the Iranian government left the PUK arms and equipment. Alarmed, the Barzani group appealed to Baghdad for help against its rival.

While U.S. assistant secretary of state Robert Pelletreau was belatedly brokering another meeting in London between the two groups in late August, the Iraqi army moved into Erbil to help the KDP take control.

The US. operation in northern Iraq had shattered. Debate in capitalist circles
It was in face of this setback that the Clinton administration launched a missile strike on southern Iraq. Before the dust settled, however, a debate had broken out in the capitalist media on what the military assault revealed about Washington's weakened position in the Middle East today.

A September 8 Washington Post feature article noted that Clinton "advisers said their goal wasn't to gain a `bump' in the opinion polls by ordering military action but to avoid letting opponents say that Clinton was responding indecisively. Some Clinton aides said they had vivid apprehensions of how Iraq could cause problems for the reelection if the crisis in the north were allowed to fester during the campaign season."

Noting that the military operation did nothing to help the Kurds, New York Times reporter R.W. Apple Jr. commented, "It makes sense only when one considers the consequences of a failure to respond to Mr. Hussein's actions." Apple warned that if Clinton's attack did not result in a significant political blow to Baghdad, Washington would end up "strategically worse off."

Some critics argued that Washington should have bombed the Iraqi army in the north, not the south. "The Clinton administration is embarrassing itself by claiming military success," Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal complained in a September 6 op-ed article. "The U.S. missiles landed hundreds of miles from where Saddam attacked. They left him the key player in territory where he could not move before."

"It is against Iraqi tanks and troops directly threatening the Kurds that US air power should be deployed," stated a September 10 editorial in the London Financial Times. "Targets in the south were chosen because that involved little or no risk to US pilots," the British paper noted. The U.S. missile strikes "were a show of weakness."

The September 8 Washington Post article reported that by August 31, top Pentagon officials "quickly convinced themselves that attacking Saddam's troops in the north carried too many risks." For one thing, "The nearest possible staging area for a military operation was Turkey, whose new Islamic-led coalition government would not welcome a U.S. operation from its soil." And "the Kurdish political scene had become hopelessly muddled by the new alignments with Iraq and Iran."

Another limitation was that "Clinton found himself without allies, with the lone exception of Britain," Wall Street Journal columnist George Melloan remarked. "So much for that new world order."

"What did the missiles accomplish? Calamity for U.S. interests," wrote conservative columnist Robert Novak. "Desert Storm's Arab-European coalition is shattered. Saddam is reestablished in northern Iraq. The United States is exposed as a paper tiger for timidly undertaking an operation it should have avoided."

Commentator Phebe Marr remarked in the September 7 New York Times, "In the Arab world support for Iraq... may have been strengthened by the air strikes. Concern is rising about American challenges to Iraq's sovereignty in the north." She added, "At least one American ally, Turkey, will be left weaker; one adversary, Iran, will be left stronger" by the U.S. actions.

Results of Gulf War
One question looming in the debate is why Washington and other imperialist powers have not succeeded in overthrowing the Hussein regime and instead are limited to "containment."

According to a news analysis by Times reporter Elaine Sciolino, the reasons included: the instability of neighboring regimes, Washington's conflicts with European powers, domestic opposition to U.S. casualties, and the lack of "another strongman" to replace Hussein.

"However much...policy makers might wish him gone, they have been paralyzed by what they think the cost would be: another massive war involving American troops; a large-scale, lengthy covert operation, or costly air strikes that would upset nervous allies in the region," Sciolino wrote.

Numerous big-business pundits have pointed out that the source of Washington's current woes lies in the outcome of the Gulf War in 1991.

Richard Haass, a senior official in the National Security Council during the Bush administration, explained in the September 8 Washington Post why the U.S. military did not go into Baghdad. "After we chased his forces from Kuwait, we expected that Saddam would not survive his defeat. The assumption was that returning Iraqi soldiers would turn on him." That, he said, was an "error."

Sciolino stated, "Mr. Hussein may be in power today because of the American decision to end the 100-hour war before destroying Mr. Hussein's elite Republican Guard. The Bush Administration wanted to avoid the impression that the victorious Americans were eager to slaughter the retreating Iraqis."

In a September 2 opinion column, Rosenthal wrote, "George Bush took the advice of Republican Colin Powell to announce the gulf war won and leave Saddam with political and military strength." Washington, he added, threw a "wild roll of the dice in the gulf war, and lost."  
 
 
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