IRAQ: update on Iraq from the International Action Center
GIV c/o Gerhard Lange
December 1999
By Brian Becker and Sarah Sloan
If one were to listen to the Clinton administration you would think
that the United Nations Security Council on Dec. 17 had passed a
resolution that would fully lift the economic sanctions on Iraq.
There is one catch, however: Saddam Hussein's government must first
allow the UN to resume inspections.
This catch, though, is a Catch-22. The U.S. knows that Iraq will not
agree to allow inspectors back.
The resolution passed by a vote at the Security Council of 11-0, with
4 abstentions. Because of enormous U.S. pressure, no governments
vetoed the resolution, but France, Russia, China, and Malaysia
abstained. Of the five permanent members of the Security Council, only
the U.S. and Britain supported the resolution.
Contrary to assertions by the Clinton administration and the big-
business media, this resolution was not an effort to end economic
sanctions on Iraq. Instead, Washington calculatingly designed the
resolution to maintain U.S./UN economic sanctions. According to the
United Nation's own statistics, these sanctions have killed more
than 1.5 million Iraqis during the last eight years.
World public opinion deeply opposes this genocide against the people
of Iraq. And the U.S. is clearly more isolated in the Security Council
than it has been since 1990. But it is a testament to U.S. economic
and military power that Washington can dominate and manipulate the UN
to maintain sanctions.
Why would Iraq refuse monitoring in exchange for lifting the ceiling on
its oil sales? To what do the Iraqis object? Indeed, what makes these
terms impossible for any sovereign government to accept?
Iraq refused to accept the resolution because the weapons inspectors
are not monitors but are in fact subversive agents sent to Iraq to
smash the Iraqi government. Also, Iraq does not want to put its oil
wealth under the thumb of neocolonial domination.
The return of the weapons inspectors
One year ago the U.S. and Britain unleashed Operation Desert Fox, which
included four days of intense bombing. The pretext for this bombing
blitz was that Iraq was not fully cooperating with the United Nations
weapons inspectors. This was a bald-faced lie.
The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) carried out over 9,000 inspections
throughout Iraq between 1991 and 1998.
Baghdad had even given special permission for the weapons inspectors
to investigate the houses of top Iraqi leaders. Yet the inspectors
were suddenly pulled out of Iraq and the bombing campaign commenced in
December 1998.
Iraq charged the inspectors were not hunting for weapons but were U.S.
spies. Now the U.S. media has revealed that weapons inspection teams
had indeed been penetrated by the CIA. They were surveying Iraq's most
sensitive areas and relaying this information to the Pentagon to choose
targets for its bombing campaign.
Scott Ritter, a former Marine and controversial leader of an UNSCOM
inspection team, resigned in August 1998 and revealed the CIA's role
in January 1999. He told Frontline, "On our team are nine covert
operatives from the CIA's covert activities branch. Now, they're doing
the work of UNSCOM, they were part of planning UNSCOM, they provided
communications support, logistics support, operational support, the
kind of guys you need for these inspections."
During the so-called Operation Desert Fox bombing between Dec. 16 and
19, 1998, U.S. and British warplanes dropped more than 1,000 bombs and
missiles on Iraq. The Pentagon has dropped more bombs and missiles in
almost systematic bombing attacks during the last twelve months.
Iraq had vowed in December 1998 never to allow the UN weapons inspection
teams to return since these teams were actually intelligence operatives
dominated by the United States. (Revenues collected through the so-
called oil-for-food deal paid the inspection teams salaries).
U.S. government officials like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
have announced publicly that official U.S. policy is to overthrow the
Iraqi government. These U.S. officials use polite terms like "regime
change." But similar regime change policies against the Mossadegh
government in Iran from 1950-53, the Arbenz government in Guatemala in
1954, the government of President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1965, the
democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile from
1970-73, and the Sandanistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s murdered hundreds
of thousands of people were murdered and established dictatorships that
functioned as U.S. puppets.
Congress passed the "Iraq Liberation Act," which was signed into law by
President Clinton on Oct. 31, 1998. This act has supplied $97 million in
covert operations to subvert and overthrow the Iraqi government.
By making the sale of Iraq's oil contingent on Iraq accepting the return
of this inspection operation, the U.S. administration was confident
Baghdad would reject the UN resolution and it would never be implemented.
Now U.S. officials will be able to go on TV and proclaim that they too
"want to end the suffering of the Iraqi people if only Saddam Hussein was
not so determined to prevent weapons inspectors to return."
Neocolonial domination of Iraq's oil
Under the provisions of the new UN resolution, Iraq would not recover
its independent and sovereign control over its own economy and oil
resources. These provisions place all Iraq's oil revenues into a UN
escrow account under the control of the Security Council dominated by
the U.S.
The misnamed Oil-for-Food Program used this same mechanism during the
last few years. Iraq sells oil, the revenues of which are controlled by
the Security Council, and the Security Council then allocates a huge
portion of the revenue to a UN Compensation Commission.
Does this money go to the Iraqi people? Less than 50 percent pays for
medicine and food. The rest supposedly goes to "compensate the victims
of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990."
Who are these victims? On June 25, the UN awarded almost $2.8 billion to
several oil companies, including more than $500 million to a subsidiary
of Texaco, Inc., for equipment and facilities that were damaged when
the U.S. led a 43-day war against Iraq in 1991. These oil companies that
make tens of billion dollars a year were paid out of the UN Compensation
Commission.
And it's not just these companies. Billions have gone to Western
corporations who did business in Kuwait. A huge amount of the revenues
also go to Kuwait, which means to the Kuwaiti royal family. As a puppet
regime, the Kuwaiti royal family continues to buy vast quantities of
expensive U.S. military hardware from its national budget.
Everyone knows that Kuwait has a completely ineffective military and
will never independently use these weapons. U.S. weapons sales to
Kuwait should be properly understood as a form of welfare for U.S.
defense contractors.
The UN resolution mandates control over any Iraq reconstruction effort
to supervisory panels. The same Western governments and oil monopolies
that are hostile to Iraq precisely because it nationalized its oil
resources in 1972, dominate these panels.
At the heart of the U.S.-Iraq conflict is that Iraq used a big portion
of its oil revenues for the development of the educational, industrial,
medical, and social infrastructure of the country, rather than having
these profits repatriated to corporate investors in the United States,
England and France.
Ultimately, the U.S. government seeks not only to overthrow the
government of Saddam Hussein, but to return Iraq to a neocolonial
vassal status as existed prior to the 1958 revolution.
Compare with Rambouillet
The U.S. resolution on Iraq is crafted in the same way as the February
1998 Rambouillet "peace accord" was designed--to justify starting the
U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last March 24. Washington insisted
then on terms that it knew the Yugoslav government, and any sovereign
government, could never accept.
Section 8 of Appendix B of the Rambouillet Accords stated: "NATO
personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft,
and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access
throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters.
..." The Yugoslav government was ordered to agree to the foreign
occupation of Kosovo and the granting of unlimited access by NATO to
all of Yugoslavia.
As former State Department official George Kinney revealed, the U.S.
side "deliberately set the bar too high," knowing that the Yugoslav
government could not accept the conditions. That was then used to
portray the Yugoslavs as being responsible for the failure to negotiate
a settlement.
Similarly, the U.S. crafted the UN resolution to end economic sanctions
in a way that they knew that the Iraqi government could not accept.
Paragraph 4 of Resolution 1284 (1999), for example, "decides in
particular that Iraq shall allow UNMOVIC [United Nations Monitoring,
Verification and Inspection Commission] teams immediate, unconditional
and unrestricted access to any and all areas, facilities, equipment,
records and means of transport which they wish to inspect in accordance
with the mandate of UNMOVIC, as well as to all officials and other
persons under the authority of the Iraqi Government whom UNMOVIC wishes
to interview "
The objective was to make the Iraqis appear to be the intransigent and
unwilling party so committed to its own capacity to build "weapons of
mass destruction" that it failed to agree to the terms necessary to end
the sanctions that are killing untold numbers of its own people. The UN
resolution consequently should be understood as a means to continue
sanctions, not to end sanctions.
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>> Further Informations about Iraq and Palestine:
>> http://giv.de.cx
>> http://user.exit.de/giv/index.htm
>> http://soziales.freepage.de/irak/index.htm
>> http://www.germany.net/teilnehmer/101,88843/index.html
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