Anglo-US Plans to Strangle Iraq

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Anglo-US Plans to Strangle Iraq

Defence Secretary – "a key period of change for defence":
Putting Britain Further on a War Footing

Government Warned over Illegal Attack on Iraq

Urgent Message

Second Diary Posting from Nablus 28/07/02

The US, with Britain as its ideologue and junior partner, is gearing up its war plans to invade Iraq. Details of an invasion plan were leaked earlier this month to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. The leaked plan is essentially a three-pronged attack using land, air and sea-based forces launched from Turkey, Kuwait and Jordan.

The plan, according to the leaks, envisions tens of thousands of marines and soldiers probably invading from Kuwait. Hundreds of warplanes based in as many as eight countries, possibly including Turkey and Qatar, would unleash a huge air assault against thousands of targets, including airfields, roadways and fibre-optics communications sites. Special-operations forces or covert CIA operatives would strike at depots or laboratories storing or manufacturing Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to launch them.

That the US is gearing up to invade Iraq is euphemistically called a "regime change" by the Bush administration. An article in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, the pre-eminent journal of the US foreign policy establishment, called for an invasion, outlining a campaign involving four to six divisions totalling 200,000 to 300,000 troops plus supporting troops, 700-1,000 planes and anywhere from one to five carrier battle groups. The envisioned campaign, including air operations, would not take more than a month, the article calculates euphorically.

One significance of the leak of US war plans is that it appears to send a signal to those who advocate an operation akin to what US forces did in Afghanistan, i.e., use air strikes backed by special operations forces working in conjunction with Iraqi opposition forces and defectors. That approach had backing from key officials, notably Wayne Downing, a retired army general in charge of co-ordinating the war on terrorism. But General Tommy Franks, head of the US Central Command, which would run any military campaign against Iraq, reportedly rejected it because he believed that the opposition was not up to the job. Not long after Downing's plan fell out of favour he announced that he was leaving the government.

The only other country that seems likely to contribute ground forces is Britain itself. It has announced that it was preparing to withdraw a good number of its 2,400 troops from Kosova, hinting that it was preparing for a possible intervention in Iraq.

It has also become clear that the Anglo-US air patrols over Iraq’s so-called "no-fly zones" are serving several functions. Pentagon officials say that regular patrols to enforce the "no-fly" zones over Iraq give military planners valuable intelligence and experience for a possible invasion, reports the Washington Post.

The patrols "keep our skills high on knowledge of the area and keep our competency high in flying over there," said an officer recently returned from the region. "The benefits you get from that – should you decide to do something militarily – are great."

Some Air Force officers called for an end to patrols in the spring of 2001, but senior Pentagon officials believe the missions are an important check on Iraqi military capabilities.

"It keeps the Iraqis from putting a lot of tanks and armoured personnel carriers on the Kuwaiti border," said another official. "They do have some stuff garrisoned in the south, but we know where they are, and if they started to move we'd see it."

US and British pilots have been enforcing the "no-fly" zones in the north and the south since 1991, skirmishing repeatedly with Iraqi air defences.

At the same time, the US and Britain are further raising pressure on Iraq by the use of oil revenues. The battle between Iraq and the US is being fought in oil and dollars as a struggle over trade escalates.

As part of its efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the US is trying to raise the pressure on the Iraqi regime and limit its access to Iraq's oil revenues, which would also undermine Iraq's ability to prepare for possible war.

Baghdad, meanwhile, is attempting to use trade relationships developed under the oil-for-food programme, the exemption to United Nations sanctions, to release some of the pressure and deprive the US of international and Arab support for war.

Iraq is facing a problem caused by Baghdad's oil revenues through the UN programme which have dwindled in recent weeks. The UN says that revenues raised from oil sales in the current six-month phase of the oil-for-food programme are half the level projected.

This decline in exports is in part due to the so-called "retroactive pricing" instituted by the UN earlier this year under British and US pressure, under which buyers of Iraqi oil are told about the price – which must be approved by the UN – only after they lift the oil. Not surprisingly, few companies are willing to take that risk. The aim of the measure has been to force Iraq to drop the surcharge it imposes on companies buying its oil. Iraq has been imposing the surcharge in an attempt to overcome the deleterious effect of the US and British inspired UN sanctions, as these funds were able to go directly into an Iraqi government back account.

Britain and the US focused their attention on the surcharge after failing to convince Iraq's neighbours to help stem the tide of "unauthorised" trade. "This is one of the ways the US is now putting pressure on Iraq," said a western diplomat in Baghdad.

The UN, however, is growing increasingly concerned about the slide in revenues, fearing the impact on the future supply of humanitarian goods. France and Russia, both eager for trade contracts, have been trying to find a compromise at the UN.

Mohammad Mehdi Saleh, the Iraqi trade minister, denounced the new pricing mechanism as "ridiculous". He said that Iraq needs cash to pay for the running of the domestic oil industry and charges that the Britain and the US have refused to approve funds for such purposes.

WDIE vehemently condemns these inhuman and criminal plans to strangle Iraq and overthrow by armed force the head of a sovereign country, in violation of all international law. These facts show where the threat to peace in the world actually comes from. The British government must dissociate itself from Bush’s plans and end its military adventurism and global interventions immediately.

In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute on July 30, the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon outlined what he referred to as the new challenges facing the armed forces. The Defence Secretary said that the events of September 11 last year altered the nature of the Defence Review in ways "we could never have anticipated".

This is a clear indication that the country is being further put on a war footing. According to the so-called Anti-Terrorism Act, an indefinite state of emergency is already declared, which has given the government the powers, not without challenge, to suspend the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights relating to detention without trial.

When the Defence Secretary, as he did in his speech, talks about it being clear that "terrorism (can) achieve strategic goals", it does not take much reading between the lines to understand that Britain and the US are setting their own strategic goals. In the words of Geoff Hoon, the government "have looked at our arrangements for protecting the United Kingdom and at our capabilities for preventing and neutralising the threat at source". "Neutralising the threat at source" means to intervene and carry out aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the name of the "war against terrorism". It also means the attack on the civil rights of foreign nationals in this country, together with further criminalisation of the people’s forces.

Geoff Hoon said that the following were the steps which would contribute to protecting Britain, its citizens and interests:

• new resources to improve the way we gather and analyse the vital intelligence which can give us that early warning;
• development aid, advice and military and civil support; and
• becoming diplomatically or militarily involved more often than before in parts of the world where we have not played an active role in the more recent past.

However, this also involves beefing up the armed forces and their support to become "more flexible" and "more readily deployable". In other words, the "key period of change for defence" is demonstrated to be not to do with defence, except in the Bush/Blair definition of "pre-emptive self-defence" and its self-serving definitions of "terrorism" (or lack of them). This key period of change, presaged by the Chancellor’s increased budget provision for the armed forces, is one where British troops are to be deployed flexibly and at short notice around the world in pursuit of Britain’s strategic interests and those of the US.

The working class and people must condemn these moves to further put Britain on a war footing and the militarisation of the economy, being carried out as the capitalist global crisis becomes ever more profound.

The government's lawyers have reportedly told the Prime Minister that British involvement in an invasion of Iraq would be illegal without a mandate from the United Nations.

The highly confidential advice, reported by the Independent, has led to the Foreign Office advising Tony Blair that a new UN resolution could be the best means of ensuring Russian and Arab support for any move against Saddam Hussein.

But still, Commons deputy leader Ben Bradshaw warned that Saddam Hussein could do "something terrible" if the US and Britain do not act against him.

Bradshaw also defended the Prime Minister for not promising a Commons vote before any military action. "No prime minister in British history has ever allowed their hands to be tied like that and none would. That is simply not realistic," he added.

Opposing such a stand, Tony Benn warned that an attack on Iraq could have the same effect on Tony Blair as the Suez affair had on Sir Anthony Eden, who was forced to resign.

It is extremely ominous and an exposure of the nature of parliamentary democracy that Ben Bradshaw makes it clear that even the House of Commons will have no say in armed aggression against Iraq. Tony Blair’s only concerns are to create the best possible conditions for this criminal act which flies against the trend of history.

Volunteers are required for a mass mail-out on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week to contribute to stopping the war on Iraq. Venue: George Galloway MP's office, Portcullis House, Westminster, London. Contact Stuart Halford for further details on 07712673467

Dear friends,

It seems that many Palestinians in Nablus try to go back their "normal" life. Market is opened, and many people are shopping. But it does not mean that the IDF stopped bombing and shooting. The IDF still harass the Palestinian people's lives in many different ways in Nablus.

For example, the IDF made barricades on many roads so that the Palestinian people cannot move. Today, activists with the International Solidarity Movement removed the road barricades with local people near Iraq Borin village (near Nablus). Mainly local people removed the barricades and the internationals tried to help them... Because of the barricade, water tanks were not able to be delivered to Iraq Borin. How can people survive without water??? This is horrible torture.

Since I came to Nablus, nearly 10 days have passed. I met a lot of new local people and had conversations with them. In order to know about the situation in Palestine, I will talk to more Palestinians here. Everybody here has different lives and experiences, but the common thing amongst them is oppression caused by occupation.

A few days ago, I stayed in Iraq Borin for one night. I visited this village with other ISM activists after we got a piece of news that the military operation was going on in the village. When I arrive in the village, we saw 200 men were collected at the women's centre in the village. Many IDF soldiers were watching them from outside of the centre. These soldiers came to the village to check villagers' ID cards to find "terrorists". Two days before we visited this village, two builders from this village got shot to death by the IDF. Afterwards, the IDF soldiers invaded this village to check the ID cards! We tried to observe what the IDF soldiers were doing against the villagers. The soldiers in front of us were nice to some of the collected men. I think that they pretended to be gentle soldiers in front of us... On the same time, some soldiers shot one of the villagers' house and water tank (we found out it later).

If you come to Nablus, you will see many destroyed houses and buildings. You will see the IDF's tanks and jeeps in many places. This early morning (about 4 am), tank(s) came into the Balata camp where I was sleeping. Fortunately the tank did not open fire, but I am sure that the tank terrorised residents in the Balata camp.

Sky is still sky. It is very beautiful, but under this beautiful blue sky, the IDF attacks and harasses the Palestinian people almost everyday. While many Palestinian children play (…) in the daytime, they hear bombing and shooting sounds.

Take care! Aisa KIYOSUE