BY MARTÍN KOPPEL

With solid bipartisan support, the Clinton administration launched a military assault against Iraq September 3.

Under the pretext of protecting the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, President William Clinton ordered two rounds of cruise missile strikes, expanded the imperialist-enforced "no- fly zone" in the south to the edge of Baghdad, and threatened further attacks. He announced that limited oil sales by the Iraqi government were now frozen.

As U.S.-led forces began their expanded air patrols over southern Iraq, a U.S. F-16 warplane attacked an Iraqi radar station September 4.

The White House quickly proclaimed the U.S. military move a success later that day, pointing to the withdrawal of most Iraqi troops from the Kurdish region. Pentagon officials stated, that the expanded no-fly zone would be permanently enforced, setting the stage for further clashes with Iraqi forces.

With war emerging as a decisive question in the presidential campaign - as with previous U.S. elections - Republican contender Robert Dole and other big-business politicians quickly fell in line behind the Democratic commander-in-chief.

While numerous governments in the world criticized the U.S. assault, the sharpest condemnation came from the revolutionary government of Cuba, which termed it a "criminal aggression." Calling the missile strikes an "excessive, unjustified, and arbitrary use of force," Cuban foreign ministry spokesperson Marianela Ferriol stated, "This fresh attack violates the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq."

Washington's "Operation Desert Strike" began in the morning of September 3 when two navy ships and two B-52 bombers fired 27 cruise missiles against air defense facilities in southern Iraq. The warships are part of a U.S. force stationed in the Persian Gulf and the B-52s flew out from Guam, a U.S. colony in the Pacific. Hours later, three navy ships and a submarine in the Gulf launched another 17 missiles.

Clinton also declared a 60-mile extension of the wide swath of territory in southern Iraq where Washington, London, and Paris decreed a ban on flights by Iraqi aircraft following the 1990-91 Gulf War. At that time, claiming to protect the Iraqi Kurds in the north and the largely Shiite population in the south, they imposed "no-fly zones" above the 36th Parallel and below the 32nd Parallel, in addition to a "no drive" zone for Iraqi troops in the south.

As of September 4, Washington widened the southern exclusion zone to the 33rd Parallel - from the Kuwaiti border to the outskirts of Baghdad - barring the Iraqis from using aircraft in half their national territory. U.S. and British pilots are now flying warplanes over this new area, putting two Iraqi airfields and a major training facility under their surveillance.

A U.S. warplane in this area destroyed an Iraqi radar station on the first day of the expanded patrols. U.S. defense secretary William Perry said the radar was bombed because it had "illuminated one of our planes." He later acknowledged, however, that the station was north of the no-fly zone.

A huge imperialist military force remains on alert in the region. The U.S. force includes 300 warplanes within striking distance. Washington has 23,000 troops, including 15,000 sailors and marines, aboard its Persian Gulf fleet. It has another 6,000 troops in the region, mostly based in Saudi Arabia, and thousands more in the area for military "exercises."

The U.S. cruise missiles targeted sites in the Iraqi towns of Tallil, Nasiriya, Kut, and Iskandariya. Despite claims by Clinton that only military facilities were hit, the Iraqi government reported that some residential areas had also been bombed, with six people killed and 26 injured so far.

`Iraq is sovereign country'
In a September 3 interview on CNN, Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz condemned the military attacks and patrols over Iraqi territory. "Now, unilaterally, the United States and Britain have decided to impose another extension of a no-fly zone on a sovereign country," he said. "American and British interference in this matter is illegitimate. This is Iraq."

The Iraqi ambassador to Greece, Issam Saud Khalil, condemned the U.S. missile attacks. He called the U.S. government "the new criminals of the modern age" and "policemen of world disorder."

Washington justified its initial war moves saying it was acting in defense of Kurds after the Iraqi government sent troops into the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. The Kurds, an oppressed people living in parts of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria, have long fought for national self-determination and against repression by the capitalist regimes in all these countries. In Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), led by Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani, have fought for Kurdish autonomy.

Washington - which has always opposed the Kurdish people's fight for an independent state - set up a "Kurdish enclave" in northern Iraq after the Gulf War, seeking to bring the KDP and PUK under its thumb in the hope of undermining the Iraqi regime. In the past two years, however, a struggle for political control has erupted between these two bourgeois parties. In a setback for Washington, the PUK, which had previously aligned itself more closely with Washington, turned to the Iranian government, while the KDP decided to seek support from Baghdad.

The Iraqi government asserts it sent troops at the request of the KDP in its battle with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. As the rival parties fought each other, Iraqi troops seized Erbil August 31, routing the PUK fighters. After Washington's military threats, Baghdad's forces began to pull out of Erbil.

At a September 3 press conference, Clinton stated that Washington was responding to Iraqi repression against the Kurds. He added, however, that Washington's goal was to "increase America's ability to contain Iraq over the long run....When our interest in the security of our friends and allies is threatened, we will act with force if necessary."

In a news conference the same day, Perry said, "The issue is not simply the Iraqi attack on Erbil," adding that the U.S. government did not want to get mired in the factional fighting among the Kurdish groups. Perry emphasized that Washington's priority was "protection of the flow of oil" in the Mideast. The government of Saddam Hussein, he stated, was "a threat to security and stability" in the region.

An unnamed Pentagon official told the New York Times, "This has nothing to do with the Kurds and everything to do with Saddam."

Bipartisan support
The Clinton administration's rapid military escalation in the Persian Gulf received bipartisan support. On September 3 Republican presidential candidate Dole declared, "I stand foursquare behind our men and women in uniform." He added, "I trust this is the beginning of decisive action to limit the power and arrogance of Saddam Hussein."

Speaking to U.S. war veterans, Dole declared, "In matters like this, all of us think not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans."

On the campaign trail, Dole had initially attacked Clinton for "weak leadership." Dole's senior advisor, Sen. John McCain, had mocked "this Administration's feckless photo-op foreign policy." Within 18 hours, however, the Dole camp dropped this criticism like a hot potato, as they concluded such statements "had left the Republican candidate subject to accusations that he was undermining national security interests at a time of crisis," the New York Times reported.

Dole campaign spokesman Nelson Warfield said Dole had telephoned Clinton September 3 to assure him that he would not make any remarks on Iraq "designed to offend the president." Dole would "stand by the president and our troops," Warfield added.

Other Democrats and Republicans fell in step with support for the war effort. Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott has worked with his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Tom Daschle, to draft a resolution supporting the U.S. military moves against Iraq.

Ross Perot, who is running as the Reform Party's presidential candidate, was critical of Clinton's actions. "War is not a place for politicians to create a positive image and get a bump in the polls." He pointed to the problems the current administration has faced in its military interventions in Somalia and Bosnia.

Clinton's war speech
Clinton set the political framework for the assault on Iraq in his August 29 speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he formally accepted the Democratic nomination for president.

"We cannot become the world's policeman," Clinton declared, "but where our values and our interests are at stake and where we can make a difference, we must act and we must lead." He referred to his administration's sending of U.S. troops to Haiti and Bosnia to illustrate the point.

Clinton assailed the governments of Iran and Libya, accusing them of "terrorism." He bragged about the law he had signed imposing sanctions on foreign companies that invest in those countries, which he vowed "will pay a price from the United States."

The president singled out the Cuban government for attack, saying that "Cuba must finally join the community of democracies." Repeating the false claim that Cuba is undemocratic, the Clinton administration has in the past four years taken a number of aggressive measures against the workers and farmers government in that Caribbean nation.

The aggressiveness of the Clinton White House in launching these war moves abroad has been paralleled by its spearheading of the bipartisan assault on the basic social gains of working people at home. At the Democratic Party convention, prominent liberal figures like Mario Cuomo, Edward Kennedy, and Jesse Jackson spoke as critics of Clinton's welfare "reform" law, while urging a vote for the Democratic incumbent as a supposed lesser evil to the Republicans. In so doing, these liberal forces played an important role in greasing the rails for further attacks on workers' social gains - as well as the administration's current military moves.

Near the end of his acceptance speech Clinton made a demonstrative point about "some African-American members of our Special Forces at Fort Bragg," North Carolina, whose doors, he stated, had recently been defaced with swastikas.

Saying that "they do not deserve to have swastikas on their doors," Clinton then asserted, "If I walk off this stage tonight and call them on the telephone and tell them to go halfway around the world and risk their lives for you and be there by tomorrow at noon, they will do it."

White House officials later told the press that even before that speech, the administration had been taking steps that laid the groundwork for the military attack on Iraq. On August 28 Clinton had authorized a diplomatic note warning Baghdad against a military move in northern Iraq. The day after Clinton's speech, administration officials made the first public threat that U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf were "prepared to deploy."

On August 31 the White House approved a plan for a military strike in southern Iraq and the extension of the no-fly zone. The justification for these moves was a 1991 United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that the Iraqi government end repression against the Kurds.

The following day, the administration reported the initial mobilization of the U.S. armada in the Persian Gulf. UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali reported he had suspended a recent agreement to allow Iraq to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months to pay for food and medicine. For the past six years, Iraq has been blocked from selling oil by a U.S.-orchestrated economic embargo.

By Labor Day, September 2, the White House announced its plan to carry out a military assault, which was launched in the early hours of the following morning.

Of the four other governments making up the United Nations Security Council, only London expressed its complete support for the U.S. missile strikes against Iraq. The imperialist governments of Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all backed the U.S. move.

Paris, on the other hand, criticized the Pentagon's military attack. It demanded that Baghdad pull back its forces from the north but called for a resumption of talks to implement the UN resolution allowing Iraq to resume its oil sales. The French government is Iraq's biggest creditor.

The Russian government, which had backed the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 1990-91, called the U.S. air strikes "an inappropriate and unacceptable reaction." Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov stated, "The attacks cannot be supported by anyone at all, except those who put domestic politics including pre-electoral questions above all else." The Chinese government expressed its "grave concerns" about the U.S. actions.

Paris and Moscow opposed an effort by Washington and London to garner support in the UN Security Council for a resolution condemning Iraq.

In the Middle East, only the Kuwaiti regime expressed "full understanding" for the attack, as did the Israeli government. The governments of Egypt and Syria, Washington's main Arab partners during the Gulf War, criticized the U.S. assault and spoke in defense of Iraq's sovereignty. The governments of Iran, Jordan, Libya, and Yemen, as well as the Palestinian Council, all condemned or distanced themselves from Washington's action. The Saudi regime remained silent. And the Turkish regime opposed the suspension of the oil sales.

The governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey refused to allow its bases to be used for the U.S. strikes. Instead, Washington had to fly its B-52 bombers from Guam, halfway around the world.

`Much has changed since Gulf War'
As an article in the September 4 Wall Street Journal put it, "Indeed, much in the region has changed since the U.S. rallied a coalition in 1990 to drive Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait.... The U.S. increasingly may have to go it alone - such as by launching cruise missiles rather than leading an international coalition."

At that time, Washington used Baghdad's invasion of Kuwait as a justification for leading a massive military assault against Iraq. The U.S. rulers' political objectives in the Gulf War, however, were to overthrow the Hussein regime and establish a pro-U.S. protectorate there. Washington hoped to bolster its dominance in the oil-rich region, and to do so at the expense of its imperialist allies which are also its competitors.

What unfolded was a U.S.-organized slaughter that left as many as 150,000 people dead. During the final invasion launched on Feb. 24, 1991, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers were butchered as they fled along the road from Kuwait to Basra, Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of working people were left maimed, homeless, or displaced throughout the region.

But Washington failed to achieve its political goals, ending up with a fiasco on its hands. The U.S. government did not overthrow the Iraqi government; in fact, Hussein outlasted President George Bush. Instead of assuring stability, the war exacerbated all the tensions and conflicts in the Middle East, leading to greater social volatility and setting new, uncontrollable forces in motion.

In the wake of the war, the Kurdish and Shiite populations rebelled against Baghdad. But they were set up by the Bush administration, which after urging them to revolt, allowed Baghdad's forces to massacre them. Washington, London, and Paris sent troops to drive thousands of Kurdish refugees, who were fleeing into Turkey, back into northern Iraq, where the imperialist powers established the current Kurdish "enclave."

The political shifts in the Middle East in the subsequent five years have caused a nightmare for U.S. imperialism. The Iranian government, which remains at odds with Washington, has increased its political influence in the region. On the other hand, most of the U.S. allies have been wracked by increasing instability, as underlined by the June bombing of a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia and the food riots in Jordan in August.

The Turkish government, a long-time reliable U.S. ally, has a new administration that recently signed a trade deal with Iran against Washington's will.

And the Israeli regime, despite its combination of military repression and political negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, has failed to quell the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

In a September 4 article, Times columnist Thomas Friedman commented on the dilemma facing the U.S. rulers today. "The half-finished gulf war and the half-finished Arab-Israeli peace process and the half-baked U.S. containment policies of both Iran and Iraq... have failed to produce a new order the Middle East," he wrote.

"Instead, they have contributed to a regional disorder, in which Washington doesn't have a united front to support its strategies or many partners to help manage its contradictions."  
 
 
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