BY MEGAN ARNEY
Seeking to win public acceptance for wider assaults
against Iraq, Washington has not let up its grinding campaign
of nearly daily bombings on that Middle Eastern nation. In
continued invasions of Iraq's airspace and attacks on defense
facilities, U.S. warplanes killed at least 10 people and
injured dozens the week of February 9-16.
In northern Iraq a U.S. electronic warfare jet fired a missile at an Iraqi defense installation February 15. That same day in southern Iraq, U.S. and British jets attacked four separate Iraqi sites after two of Baghdad's planes flew into the "no-fly zone" enforced by the occupying powers. U.S. forces killed 5 people and injured 22 that day alone.
The U.S. and British governments imposed the so-called no- fly zones, which cover nearly two-thirds of Iraqi territory, after the 1990-91 Gulf War, in which they slaughtered 150,000 Iraqis. Washington has used these zones to assert its "right" to violate that country's sovereignty and try to provoke Baghdad, using Iraq's defensive response as a pretext for its deadly bombings.
Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz commented February 16, "You are being threatened by aircraft who enter your airspace and attack you. If you complain about that, is that a threat?"
Aziz went to Turkey over the February 13-14 weekend, attempting to persuade Ankara to stop letting Washington use the Incirlik air base, in southern Turkey, for its air attacks on Iraq. The Turkish base, where as many as 1,000 U.S. troops and 50 aircraft have been stationed in recent years, is essential to the U.S. government's military operations in northern Iraq, ostensibly to "monitor the no-fly zone."
Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit publicly rejected Baghdad's request. At the same time, the regime in Ankara has continued to maintain cordial relations with the Iraqi government. "Ecevit is under intense criticism for sitting in the lap of the United States and letting the Americans use the Incirlik base for bombing Iraq," noted one commentator quoted by the New York Times. The capitalist rulers in Turkey and Iraq share a common interest - their desire to squash the decades-long struggle by the Kurdish people for their self- determination in their region, which includes parts of what is today Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
The struggle of the Kurds exploded once again into the world spotlight when, in response to the Turkish regime's arrest of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan on February 15, protests by Kurds erupted across Europe, Canada, and Australia. Protesters denounced the fact that Ocalan was detained and kidnapped back to Turkey after he left the Greek embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.
Many Kurds directed their anger at the Greek, Kenyan, Israeli, and U.S. governments for their apparent complicity in Ocalan's arrest. Protesters stormed Greek and Kenyan diplomatic missions in dozens of European cities, from London to Bern to Moscow. Protests also took place in Ottawa, Canada, and in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. In Berlin, Israeli guards fired on dozens of Kurds trying to occupy the Israeli consulate, killing 3 people and wounding 16. Many protests took place in Germany, where half a million Kurds live and work.
Despite U.S. denials of "direct" involvement, the Turkish daily Yeni Yuzyil reported February 17 that Washington had helped the Turkish regime seize Ocalan in return for Ankara's rejection of Iraqi demands to end U.S. use of Incirlik air base for attacks on Iraq.
The explosion of Kurdish protests was an unpleasant reminder to Washington of its fiasco in the Gulf War. Failing to achieve their goal of overthrowing the Iraqi government and installing a reliable client regime there, the U.S. rulers' slaughter in the Gulf only heightened all the conflicts and social instability in the region, from sharpened frictions among the imperialist rivals to the revival of the Kurdish struggle for self-determination, which Washington opposes. The political weakening of imperialism in the Middle East has marked the limits on how far Washington has been able to push its assaults on Iraq.
At the same time, the Clinton administration's continuing provocations against Baghdad and military buildup in the Gulf, along with the uncontrolled forces this confrontation constantly sets off in the region, could rapidly escalate into a broader military conflict.
In one example of this volatile situation, Iraqi vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan demanded February 15 that Ankara stop its support of Washington and London's imperialist war machines or face military retaliation. A few days earlier, Baghdad had issued a similar warning that it might launch an attack on U.S. bases in Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabia that are used to fly imperialist warplanes over southern Iraq.
U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright retorted with typical aggressiveness, "We have made [it] very clear that were there any attacks on our forces or on neighboring countries, our response would be swift and sure."
The big-business media often point to Baghdad's bluster about launching military retaliation as a sign of its weakness and isolation. What the U.S. rulers have consistently underestimated, however, is that despite the inability of the capitalist government in Iraq to take the moral high ground, there is deep and growing hatred among millions of Iraqis for the imperialist brutalization of their nation.
More than two months of bombing
Since Washington and London's four-day bombing blitz in
December, the U.S. government has waged a steady campaign of
bombings. Warplanes have attacked Iraq at least 50 times since
the beginning of the year. One top Air Force official claimed
that the recent weeks of bombings have destroyed more of
Iraq's air-defense system than was knocked out in the hundreds
of attacks last December.
The attacks have not been limited to military targets. Three people were killed and many others injured February 10 when U.S. and British warplanes bombed a civilian building and a fishing jetty in towns in southern Iraq.
A few days later, U.S. Air Force officials nonchalantly announced that a January 25 U.S. missile attack on a residential area near the southern city of Basra, which killed 11 civilians and wounded dozens, had been the result of an electronic "glitch" in an otherwise sophisticated missile system. A senior official added that no U.S. military personnel would be sanctioned for the deaths of the Iraqis.
Meanwhile, demonstrators protested the U.S. and British daily assaults in London February 14. Other protests occurred in Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank town of Ramallah, and the capital city of Sanna, Yemen. Yemeni police arrested more than 16 people, including student leaders.