BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
"The White House decided to prepare the country for war,"
stated an article in the November 23 New York Times. "In a
meeting of Mr. Clinton and his top aides on Nov. 14, the
decision was made to begin a public campaign through interviews
on the Sunday morning television news programs to inform the
American people of the dangers of biological warfare."
This portion of the Times article ran under the subheading, "What five pounds of anthrax can do."
On national television November 16, Defense Secretary William Cohen enacted one of the most sensational tricks of the Clinton administration's propaganda campaign in preparation for war against Iraq. He put a five-pound bag of sugar on the table, declaring that if the sugar were anthrax, it could kill half the population of Washington, D.C.
That weekend, the big-business press featured front-page articles and editorials with headlines such as "Iraq's drive for a biological arsenal" and "The toxic Saddam Hussein." One week earlier, New York authorities conducted a chemical warfare drill in downtown Manhattan, halting traffic for several hours and receiving lots of media coverage. News reports linked it to a possible attack from Iraq.
Washington had earlier declared that it would consider an attack on its U-2 spy planes flying over Iraq's air space, which Baghdad had threatened to shoot down, "an act of war." Cohen told reporters that U.S. retaliation would have meant a "horrendous result" for Iraq.
"As an unarmed U-2 spy plane soared high over central Iraq two weeks ago, President Clinton was poised to order the biggest military operation of his Presidency," said the November 23 Times article.
The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, stated that a military strike would have targeted "many more than dozens" of sites. According to the Times, "these included not only Mr. Hussein's palaces and command and control centers, but also known weapons production sites and the infrastructure supporting them: military bases, roads, power plants, industrial sites."
Clinton set back, war drive continues
By November 17, however, the drive for this massive assault
on Iraq, aimed at weakening and eventually overthrowing Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein and replacing his government with a
regime subservient to Washington, was set back. The Clinton
administration was forced to accept a diplomatic solution
brokered by Paris and Moscow. Its chief imperialist allies,
especially Paris; the Russian and Chinese governments; and most
of the capitalist regimes in the Arab countries opposed
military strikes. It became clear that the coalition Washington
assembled during the 1990-91 war against Iraq had shattered.
Within a few days, Baghdad allowed the team of United Nations arms inspectors, including those from the United States it had expelled earlier, back into the country. As part of the negotiated deal, the Hussein government received promises from Moscow that it would be allowed to increase its sales of oil to $3 billion every six months, up from $2 billion. This ceiling is imposed under the seven-year-old UN sanctions on Iraq, engineered by Washington. A large portion of the export revenues from oil must go to pay "war reparations," and the rest is limited to buying food and medicines. The draconian UN embargo has caused deaths from starvation and malnutrition to more than half a million Iraqi people. Lifting the sanctions is supposedly conditional on certification by the UN arms inspectors that Baghdad no longer possesses "weapons of mass destruction."
Since the UN team restarted inspections November 22, the Clinton administration has once again been using the inspectors to keep the embargo intact and possibly cause a new provocation that could lead to a U.S. military strike. Washington is now demanding that the Iraqi government allow the UN team to enter presidential compounds and other sites that Baghdad has declared off limits. On November 25 Cohen claimed the Iraqi government "continues to evade and deceive" the inspectors and threatened tighter sanctions and military strikes.
The massive U.S. armada assembled in the Persian Gulf remains poised to act. It now includes two aircraft carriers, with about 50 warplanes each, and a dozen ships capable of firing cruise missiles deep into Iraq. In addition, 20,000 U.S. troops are stationed in the region.
At the same time, Moscow and Paris are trying to find ways to ease the sanctions. Baghdad owes the Russian government large debts, which it could only repay with increased oil revenues. And the French government is seeking more investments in Iraq and Iran, in defiance of U.S. policy and in pursuit of the interests of French capitalists.
`American unilateralism'
The setback the Clinton administration suffered gave a
boost to the ultranationalism of incipient fascist forces in
the United States. "France, China and Russia all oppose U.S.
military action, and our Arab allies have defected. With the
exception of the British, America stands alone in the Gulf,"
wrote ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan in a syndicated
column published November 19.
"The mighty coalition George Bush assembled to win the Gulf War is history. And his dream of a New World Order - where the U.S. (aided by allies and sanctioned by the U.N.) would police the planet, arresting outlaws and renegades - is dead," he said.
"The New World Order evanesces as the old world of nation- states reappears. Multilateralism has been discredited: a new era of American unilateralism is upon us."
In the same column, Buchanan described two other recent developments that show the weakening of the Clinton administration, saying, "I believe this fall may rank in historic significance in our time second only to the fall of 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down."
One was the currency and financial crisis sweeping southeast Asia and Japan. Buchanan opposed the "bailouts" of these countries by the IMF and the World Bank, promoting resentment by "U.S. taxpayers" against the bankers. In this and other recent columns Buchanan has been increasingly using the names of the investment bank Goldman Sachs and U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin - clearly Jewish names - to describe these "banking elites."
The other development was the defeat of "fast track" trade legislation that Clinton pushed in U.S. Congress but had to withdraw when it became apparent that he did not have enough votes to win passage. "Defeat of fast track is the first triumph of a blazing new nationalism," he said. "And when the coming tsunami of Asian exports hits America's shores, flooding our manufacturing base, and drowning industries and factories, the day of the economic nationalist will be at hand."