BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
The Clinton administration is carrying out a course of
daily provocations, military threats, and frequent air strikes
on Iraq. Unable to crush the Iraqi people despite an eight-year
economic blockade punctuated by military attacks, including
four nights of bombing in December, the U.S. rulers have become
more isolated in their bellicose actions, and also more
dangerous.
Two U.S. F-15E fighter jets patrolling the northern "no- fly" zone Washington enforces fired on what they said was an antiaircraft installation January 11. Almost simultaneously, an F-16 jet launched a missile at another Iraqi air defense facility near Mosul, the fifth and sixth such attack in two weeks. The next two days U.S. jets fired more missiles at sites in the same region, Pentagon officials said.
Defense Department spokesman Col. Richard Bridges claimed the January 11 bombings were acts of "self-defense" because the planes were "illuminated" by Iraqi radar. Since its December 16-19 bombing campaign in Iraq made it impossible to keep using the United Nations "weapons inspectors" to foment provocations against Baghdad, Washington has turned to enforcing the "no- fly" zones - which were imposed over nearly two-thirds of Iraq by the UN Security Council at the U.S. government's insistence - to serve that purpose.
Meanwhile, a U.S. war department spokesman said Washington has placed some of its 15,300 troops in the Arab-Persian Gulf area on maximum alert and may call up its 24,000-strong reserves for new threats against Iraq. The U.S. military brass announced they were doubling the number of warplanes flying over the country daily from eight to 16. U.S. Gen. Anthony Zinni said Washington was beefing up its war machine in the Gulf, adding eight more F-16 fighter jets and four KC-130 aerial tankers. There are 182 jets already deployed in the region and London announced its aircraft carrier Invincible will be added to the imperialist armada as well.
The casual character of the latest bombings, which haven't even made the front page of the New York Times, reflects an attempt by the U.S. rulers to inure working people around the world to the use of their massive firepower. "It's a good day for bombing," Air Force Gen. David Deptula, the U.S. commander overseeing the region, blythly declared in an e-mail message after bombing Iraqi defense sites in the "no-fly" zone last December, the January 8 Wall Street Journal reported.
Washington more isolated
The Clinton administration's war on the Iraqi people has
deepened divisions within the UN Security Council, while
Baghdad has gained more sympathy from Arab peoples across the
Middle East. Washington's pretense that its aim is to "bring
peace" has been dealt a blow from the exposure in the
capitalist media that the UN Special Commission "weapons
inspection" teams were tools of U.S. spy agencies. To counter
its growing isolation, U.S. secretary of state Madeleine
Albright announced plans to visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt later
in January to shore up waning support for the draconian
sanctions and future military actions against the Iraqi people.
"United States officials said today that American spies worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors," began an article in the January 7 New York Times. Three days later the Times editors acknowledged that Washington's snooping in Iraq "was coordinated with the U.N. weapons inspection program, which began after the Persian Gulf War in 1991." Last March a U.S. spy traveled to Baghdad to install eavesdropping equipment to listen in on radio and telephone communications of Iraqi government officials and military facilities. In August, after it became clear that the spying operations would not end, Baghdad prohibited the UN snoops from conducting unannounced "inspections," and charged that the UN spies were deliberately working to maintain the draconian embargo and "to serve U.S. policy against Iraq."
"The United States often acts in a unilateral way," chided French prime minister Lionel Jospin, seeking to capitalize on Washington's political weakening. "I believe there is a need for France to assert itself more on the international scene," he continued, assuring that this was "not because of its power or wanting to teach anybody lessons, but because it has a different way of seeing a certain number international realities."
In an attempt to take the political initiative, Paris called for a "new system of continuous monitoring." The government is pushing to lift the oil embargo in hopes of French oil companies regaining prominent trade deals with Iraq, which sits on top of 10 percent of the Earth's oil reserves.
Reflecting the mounting pressures on Washington, London, the only other participant in the recent imperialist bombardment on Iraq, has also called for a new system that would avoid "creating a new crisis every three months." British prime minister Anthony Blair wrote in a January 12 open letter to the French newspaper Libéracion, "We are holding talks with France and other eminent members of the Security Council to find a formula allowing monitoring to resume in Iraq."
Wary that U.S. military aggression may one day be turned on them, the governments of the workers states in Russia and China are pressing for lifting the sanctions and removing chief UN spy Richard Butler. Moscow and Beijing's representatives to the UN Security Council said Butler lied in his report to UN secretary general Kofi Annan, which served as the pretext for Washington to launch the four-day pounding on Iraq.
"We believe that after all this Mr. Butler cannot remain in the post of chairman of the Special Commission," said Russian foreign ministry spokesman Vladimir Rakhmanin in Moscow.
Seeking to save face, Washington has now upped its claims of the military damage Baghdad suffered in the December "Operation Desert Fox" bombing. Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asserted that between 600 and 1,600 of Iraq's Republican Guard soldiers were killed in the air raids, considerably more than the dozens reported by Iraqi officials.
Despite White House claims of "precision" attacks, the military operation destroyed some of Iraq's civilian infrastructure, according to a survey conducted by two UN agencies. On January 6 Unicef and the World Food Program announced the results from the damage wrought by Clinton's December 16-19 missile and bombing blitz. A water main in Baghdad was demolished, cutting off supply to about 300,000 people.
The missiles destroyed a warehouse containing 2,600 tons of rice, flattened an agricultural school, and damaged at least a dozen other schools and hospitals.
Tensions remain high between Baghdad an the other Arab regimes in the region, especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which have served as bases for U.S. military operations. The Iraqi Parliament passed a resolution January 10 calling for both governments to pay reparations for damages caused by the imperialist air war.