"The Iraqi threat does not keep me awake
at night"
Those
are the words of the recently appointed Israeli Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General
Moshe Yaalon (see Guardian,
27 August). He was much more concerned with the "cancer-like"
threat he perceived from the Palestinians. He was speaking to a private meeting
and didn’t expect to be reported, so we can take this to be his honest
opinion.
Quick-witted
readers will recognise that our Prime Minister’s assessment of Iraq’s
capabilities is somewhat at variance with this. If we are to believe him, Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq is a threat not only to Israel but to the whole world including
Britain (or at least to our sovereign bases in Cyprus).
In
fact, Iraq is going to be attacked by the US and Britain, not because it is
a major threat, but because it is believed that it is not, and therefore it
is relatively safe to attack and the number of body bags will be small.
Many
opponents of war on Iraq have put their faith in the UN Security Council. They
are destined to be disappointed. The likelihood is that neither Russia, nor
China, nor France will cast their veto against the US making war on Iraq. So
the end result will be that the US will get the UN’s blessing for doing
what it has wanted to do all along, that is, unseat Saddam by military intervention.
IRAN
Attacking
Iraq only makes sense as the first step on the road to dealing with the second
element of the "axis of evil", that is,
Iran. Of the three states in the "axis of evil",
only Iran has the potential of becoming a major military power with effective
nuclear weapons.
Ironically,
when the US was in conflict with Iran in the 80s, Iraq was its ally. What is
now described by the US and Britain as unprovoked aggression by Saddam against
his neighbour was then a war against Islamic fundamentalism, which the West
in general and the US in particular supported Iraq. And it would not have been
won without US military assistance, including the stationing of US air force
personnel in Baghdad. Then, Iraq’s use of "weapons
of mass destruction", in this case, poison gas, did not bother the
US one whit. (The gassing at Halabja was an incident in that war.)
Nor
did it bother Donald Rumsfeld. As Ronald Reagan’s Special Envoy to the
Middle East in 1983/4, he met Saddam in Baghdad in December 1983 and played
a key role in the US standing shoulder to shoulder with Saddam in his
"unprovoked aggression" against Iran.
ISRAEL
In the House of Commons this week, the Prime Minister offered an excuse for
ignoring Israel’s breaches of Security Council resolutions while threatening
war on Iraq. He said: "I believe that it is important
that the UN's will is implemented fully" but "the
UN resolutions in respect of the middle east impose obligations on both sides".
That is a barefaced lie. For example, resolution 446 against Jewish settlements
in the occupied territories…
"Calls once more upon Israel, as the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, to rescind its previous measures and to desist from taking any action which would result in changing the legal status and geographical nature and materially affecting the demographic composition of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, and, in particular, not to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied Arab territories."
That
resolution, passed on 22 March 1979, demanded specific, immediate and unilateral
action on the part of Israel, that is, dismantle the existing settlements and
cease building more. Far from taking this action, successive Israeli governments
have expanded the settlement programme and there are now around Jewish 400,000
settlers in the occupied territories.
Perhaps when the Prime Minister is finished with Iraq he will be able to spare some time to see that "the UN’s will is implemented fully" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As he says, it is important.
Published
by Labour & Trade Union Review, 2 Newington Green Mansions, London N16 9BT
28 September 2002
(L&TUR is published monthly, annual subscription £12)