BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Washington has emerged from its "Operation Desert Fox"
bombing campaign against Iraq politically weaker and even further
away from accomplishing its goal of overthrowing the regime of
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and establishing a U.S.
protectorate there.
With no clear policy that can achieve the aims of the U.S. rulers short of a massive ground invasion of Iraq, and facing possible removal from office, U.S. president William Clinton becomes more dangerous for toilers around the world.
In 1991 nearly 20 governments participated in the U.S.- organized carnage against Iraq. This time only London joined the military operation.
According to the December 22 Washington Post, Clinton administration "strategists" hope that the four-day blitz of bombs and missiles and future attacks will foment rebellion and provoke a coup against Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. There's no sign of this on the horizon, though.
U.S. officials said 450 cruise missiles were launched and more than 650 sorties were flown by warplanes December 16-19, pounding Iraq with the most massive firepower since the 1991 Gulf War. During the first wave of assaults more than one cruise missile was fired every two minutes until sunrise.
Iraqi government officials reported 68 people were killed during the first three nights of air strikes. Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz said 62 Iraqi soldiers died in the attack and 180 were wounded. He said he did not have a total for civilian casualties, although they were "much, much higher." At a December 21 news conference, he called the Clinton administration criminal declaring, "They acted according to the law of the jungle."
While Washington and London called off the bombing supposedly out of "sensitivity" to the Muslim celebration of Ramadan, the holy month was no obstacle to the fourth day of pounding the Iraqi people with cruise missiles. As night fell in Iraq on December 19, U.S. and British fighters and bombers resumed their bombardment for a fourth and final night.
"There has been enormous damage mainly to the civilian infrastructure and to human lives," Iraqi ambassador to the UN Nizar Hamdoon told CNN reporters December 20. The bombs fell on hospitals, private homes, schools, and other civilian sites.
The bombing destroyed a warehouse managed by the UN World Food Program that contained 260,000 tons of rice. The UN Children's Fund said it was drafting plans to repair two hospitals and several primary schools damaged by the military operation. An oil refinery in Basra was also attacked.
At least three post offices in the southern city of Basra were hit. The home of Moueid Salah, next to one post office, was shattered when a cruise missile crashed in his neighborhood December 17. Two of Salah's children were injured in the assault.
Growing hatred of U.S. imperialism
There is a growing hatred among Arab masses in Iraq and
elsewhere in the Mideast of Washington's imperial use of its
military might and the devastating effects of the U.S.-led
sanctions imposed on Iraq.
"I know what is happening and I still blame the United States and Clinton," Yania Attala, a retired schoolteacher in Baghdad, told a reporter. "I used to live very well," she continued. "Now I am reduced to a kind of poverty. Last week I spent four days at home not knowing if I was going to be hit by a bomb. We gave my mother some valium to calm her down, but they didn't help. So how do you think I feel? How would you feel?"
Palestinians on the West Bank burned U.S. flags that had been waved for Clinton just days earlier, and other working people throughout the Mideast demonstrated in the thousands in outrage at the bombing of Iraq (see article on facing page).
Iraq is not the only target of the U.S. aggression in the region. The bombing highlighted the collision course between Washington and Moscow, as the U.S. rulers have moved to expand NATO into eastern Europe, intervened with ground troops in Yugoslavia, and built a ring of pressure along the southern flank of the former Soviet Union. The aim of this military encirclement is to put the imperialists in position to try to overturn the workers states and reestablish capitalist domination in Russia and the region.
To protest the bombing the Russian government recalled its ambassadors from the United States and Britain for the first time in decades. Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov has called for building a "strategic triangle" between Moscow, New Delhi, and Beijing to counter "U.S. hegemony."
The Chinese government also condemned the attack, saying it set a "dangerous precedent" of launching military strikes without the approval of the Security Council. Beijing expressed concern that one day such aggression could be used against China.
Other governments issued statements condemning the U.S. aggression, including the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. South Africa's Department of Foreign Affairs released a statement in behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement on December 18 deploring the "ongoing military actions against Iraq by individual countries without any authorization from the Security Council in flagrant disregard of the United Nations Charter."
Calls to restart `weapons inspections'
The U.S. and British bombing also put a spotlight on
conflicts between the major imperialist powers in the NATO
alliance over dominance in the Mideast. The French government
opposed the military action, as it has every time Washington has
prepared to bomb over the last year. Paris favors lifting the
economic sanctions against Baghdad, which Washington has
spearheaded since 1990. Paris had lucrative trade investments
with Baghdad before the Gulf War.
Immediately after the bombing halted December 20, French president Jacques Chirac said he was "delighted." He offered to "make an important, positive contribution to the necessary way out of the crisis." What he meant was spelled out by Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine the next day. Vedrine called for revamping the United Nations "inspection teams" that were used to provoke the latest crisis and moving "toward a lifting of the embargo."
The Iraqi government refuses to consider allowing the "inspectors" back in to spy on military and other government facilities under the guise of searching for "weapons of mass destruction."
"In all this bombing, not a trace of chemical or biological weapons was detected," said Deputy Prime Minister Aziz. "All this rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction is a big lie."
A former UN "weapons inspector" told the Financial Times December 22 there was no proof that Baghdad was hiding "weapons of mass destruction."
Moscow and Beijing's representatives to the UN Security Council said chief UN spy Richard Butler lied in his report to UN secretary general Kofi Annan, which served as the pretext for launching the air war. China's UN ambassador Qim Huasun called Butler "dishonorable."
"Butler was coordinating, conspiring together with the people in the Clinton administration to try to bomb Iraq and to provide the pretext for them," Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations Nizar Hamdoon asserted on CNN December 20.
Aziz dismissed the French government's proposal to reconstitute a new team of inspectors, as well as calls for firing Butler. "The weapons inspections were killed by the American and British missiles," he said. "How can I receive a suggestion from a party that does not condemn the aggression? How can I discuss a solution if that solution does not include an end to the sanctions?"
Aziz continued, "Richard Butler is a cheap pawn in the hands of the Americans. He is not the issue. The issue is the American and British position during the whole period which prevented the Security Council from making any serious effort to lift the sanctions."
Arab regimes in the Mideast region are feeling stronger pressures from workers and peasants to demand an end to the draconian sanctions. They along with Moscow and Paris call for replacing the oil embargo with "economic and financial controls," the December 23 Wall Street Journal reported.
Washington's Iraq policy decomposing
Meanwhile, Clinton's Iraq policy is disintegrating. The
threats of renewed bombing missions and tightening the squeeze on
the Iraqi masses began immediately. "We have said very clearly
that we reserve the right to use force again," declared U.S.
secretary of state Madeleine Albright on the December 20 NBC
television program "Meet the Press." But what the U.S. rulers
could gain from this is being hotly debated.
Marking a big departure from their usual bipartisan stance on foreign policy, several senior congressmen publicly declined to support the bombing campaign, though they signed a statement "supporting the troops." Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott declared, "I cannot support this military action in the Persian Gulf at this time. Both the timing and policy are subject to question." Earlier in the year Lott said, "Despite any current controversy, this Congress will support the president in full defense of America's interests throughout the world," referring to the then unfolding sex scandal involving Clinton and former White House employee Monica Lewinsky.
"The basic problem is that we don't have a larger strategic policy for Iraq," complained Zbigniew Brzezinski, a national security adviser to former U.S. president James Carter, to the New York Times. "Our policy is either strike them or starve them."
The editors of the Nation magazine likewise described "Operation Desert Fox" as "a smokescreen to cover for the lack of a comprehensible or workable policy toward Iraq." With not a word about the 22 million Iraqi citizens who were showered with cruise missiles and bombs, the liberal editors complained that the UN humanitarian staff were not evacuated before Clinton ordered the murderous bombardment. They criticized the assault for eroding the "rapidly crumbling international support for sanctions," supporting the U.S. imperialists' prerogative to strangle Iraq and violate its sovereignty.
A stalemate has developed between the Clinton administration and Congress over what role the CIA should play in Iraq policy. U.S. government officials say the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has blocked a plan to undermine the Iraqi government because the president does not have a serious plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
"Nobody that I know has a strategy that they think will get rid of Saddam in the next six months or year, unless you are willing to put in a large U.S. ground force there," said an unnamed White House official.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War organized by the Bush administration, ruling-class spokespersons charged that he dropped the ball by deciding to halt offensive operations at the end of February. By conservative estimates more than 150,000 Iraqis were killed. At the time the U.S. rulers thought they had accomplished their aim and would be able to replace the Iraqi government with one more subservient to Washington's commands. An invasion would have led to substantially higher U.S. casualties. Bush later acknowledged that one reason for not continuing the slaughter was fear that the U.S.-dominated "coalition" would shatter.
The U.S. rulers are just as worried today over the political implications of U.S. casualties in a military conflict. The New York Times reported December 23 that Gen. Anthony Zinni of the U.S. Marine Corp. "said for the first time that Iraq's seemingly feeble antiaircraft fire had forced pilots to abort strikes on some sites" during the latest bombardment.