December 17, 2002
Frustrated that Iraq appears to be cooperating with the United Nations' intrusive weapons inspections, the Bush Administration is rushing this week to proclaim that the so-called disarmament effort has failed: that inspections are an empty effort and the 12,000 page Iraqi declaration is insufficient.
It is urgent that the anti-war movement not be lulled into a false sense of optimism because Iraq and the UN are cooperating. Various governments are reporting that they are hopeful that the inspections process can help avoid war. UN General Secretary Kofi Annan went out of his way to say that war is not inevitable.
However, the extent to which the world is voicing cautious optimism about a peaceful solution, is also the extent to which the Bush foreign policy team is racing to dash all hope for such an outcome. There is now an almost perfect inverted ratio between the worldwide clamor for restraint and peace and the Bush Administration's eagerness to publicly announce that war is certain.
By the end of this week, we can expect that Bush will try to announce that Iraq has failed to come clean about its purported weapons program. Then the war mobilization can go onto automatic pilot and the gauntlet will be thrown down to the vacillators: "Are you with Us or Them?" In so doing, the White House will inadvertently reveal a truth known to all objective observers of this conflict -- that the disarmament of Iraq was never really the issue. The nuclear scare was to keep Americans frightened of the "enemy" as the Bush Hawks frantically prepared to wage aggression against a country that possesses 10% of the world's known oil reserves.
The administration has a real objective and a stated objective. The real objective is to wage war against Iraq and conquer and occupy that country. To do so requires 1) overwhelming force and 2) the elimination of dissenting opposition that can derail Bush's dreams of empire. The U.S. has massive force. But it has encountered formidable opposition from people around the world and in the United States. So, the Bush administration shifted its claimed objective from regime change to disarmament, a much more palatable purported objective for public distribution and one that can be embraced by even those who support peace.
The White House wants to get the people of the U.S. behind this claimed objective of "disarmament." Once having done so, the administration can insist that the mechanisms in place for the purported disarmament have failed, or cannot accomplish the task, and that military might is necessary.
There is only one reason that makes the war drive rapidly escalate in the face of the apparent success of the new inspections process: The Bush Administration has never intended the "inspections" process to serve as anything but a trigger for war. This is why the Iraqi cooperation with the inspection process and disclosure has failed to produce even the slightest slowing in the preparations for war and, in fact, has seemed to produce an escalation in the rhetoric from Washington, including recent policy statements confirming Bush's plans for first-use deployment of nuclear weapons. The Washington Post reported that a classified version of the new Bush Doctrine "breaks with the fifty years of counter-proliferation efforts" by planning for the use of nuclear weapons against countries that not only have not attacked the US but that do not themselves possess nuclear capability ("Preemptive Strikes are Part of U.S. Strategic Doctrine," front page, December 11, 2002).
These signals from the White House and Pentagon provide no basis for optimism to believe that the war has been averted. The inspections process, whose true purpose is solely to serve as a trigger for war, at the moment is not providing the political cover that Washington needs to attack Iraq and seize its oil and land.
The warmongers in the Bush Administration will need now to manufacture other circumstances to justify an attack and occupation of Iraq.
The Bush Administration rammed Resolution 1441 through the Security Council for one reason: to provide the diplomatic fig leaf for a US war. To the extent that the process serves as a political restraint, Bush and Co. will scuttle the process.
The Administration now needs a new trigger. It will use the resolution 1441 to create an obvious source of provocation. The U.S. forced language into the resolution that would allow for the forcible removal of Iraqi scientists, government officials, and their families and children to be held incommunicado in other countries and interrogated by U.N. inspectors.
The U.S. wants to abduct Iraqi officials and interrogate them planning that by threat or bribe one will help create the trigger that the U.S. desperately needs and the "evidence" that the U.S. has long claimed to have but has never put up. One need only remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the Pentagon Papers, or even the lie manufactured about the Iraqi army throwing babies out of incubators (put in cite) to judge the quality of results likely produced by this effort.
In the New York Times for December 16, 2002, William Safire urges that Iraqi scientists should be visited at home, removed to other countries by helicopter on the spot, and be threatened that they must provide the right answers in order to "ameliorate sentences at war-crimes trials." And of course, any failure of Iraq to facilitate these abductions will itself be considered "material breach" of the Security Council resolution.
There is really only one restraint that can block the war. It lies within the people themselves. Neither Congress nor the Security Council will stop Bush's dangerous war drive. The optimism of the antiwar forces must be premised on reality. If we can mobilize the millions - in the US and around the world - and ignite a firestorm of activism then the political climate can be changed, and changed dynamically.
Public opinion is Bush's enemy. Time is also an enemy for the warmakers. With each passing the day antiwar momentum grows. The global desire for a peaceful outcome is considered subversive because from that sentiment can emerge a potent mass movement - as happened during the Vietnam era.
With the cooperation of the Corporate-owned media, the White House has attempted to create a false myth of consensus about the war. False polls, false reports and non-stop propaganda have filled the airwaves so that the American people will be paralyzed and confused. Yet people all over the country are talking to their neighbors, co-workers, fellow students, and congregations and learning that they too oppose Bush's war, that there is, in fact, widespread, deep, and passionate opposition to the war.
When hundreds of thousands marched on October 26th, the same corporate media tried to whiteout the sudden emergence of this movement. But they were confronted by overwhelming demand for truth from people across the country and some were forced to correct their coverage.
The peoples movement continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
On January 18, massive protest will again fill the streets of Washington DC and San Francisco. Thousands of cities, towns, college campuses, high schools, religious and civil rights organizations are mobilizing together.
The scenario for January 18th includes a brief rally on the West side of the Capitol Building in Washington DC starting at 11 am, followed by a massive march to the Washington DC Navy Yard -- a massive military installation located in a working class neighborhood in Southeast Washington DC that parks warships on the Anacostia River. We will demand the immediate elimination of US weapons of mass destruction and a people's inspection team will call for unfettered access and a full declaration of U.S. non-conventional weapons systems.
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