BY MEGAN ARNEY
At Washington's behest, the United Nations Security
Council voted unanimously September 9 to end even a pretense
of regularly reviewing strangling sanctions against Iraq. As
a pretext, the council pointed to the Iraqi government's
decision earlier that month to halt further on-site
inspections of its facilities by the U.S.-led UN "weapons
inspectors." Iraqi officials said that move was taken because
of the Security Council's failure to follow through on a
February agreement to begin discussions on lifting the eight-
year embargo.
Since August Washington has stepped up its threats against Baghdad. The Iraqi National Assembly and Revolutionary Command Council voted September 14 and 16 respectively to stop all cooperation with the UN snoop team. Washington immediately called for the UN Security Council to take further action. State Department spokesman James Rubin said Iraq's decision "would constitute yet another flagrant violation of UN Security Council resolutions and a direct challenge to the authority of the Council." Adding insult to injury, Washington will now begin broadcasting Radio Free Iraq into the country in Arabic from Europe.
U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright is set to meet with UN officials in late September to garner support for Washington's next round of aggression against Baghdad. "Should it become clear that the Security Council is not prepared to live up to its obligations in this regard, then... we will have a free hand to act," said Martin Indyk, assistant secretary of state for the Mideast.
Since the 1990-91 Gulf War, the UN Security Council has maintained an embargo against Iraq that has resulted in more than half a million deaths. The supposed search for alleged "weapons of mass destruction" is one of the main pretexts used to justify this continued economic warfare, and is a provocation that Washington has used to justify plans for possible U.S. military intervention. The U.S. rulers would still like to do what they failed to achieve in the Gulf War: replace the government of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein with a protectorate subservient to Washington, which would not only provide control over Iraqi oil but also strengthen U.S. domination in the region and tighten the imperialist encirclement of the workers state in Russia.
On August 26 Scott Ritter resigned as the chief inspector of the UN Special Commission in Iraq. The onetime Marine major, who served on the U.S. Central Command's intelligence staff during the Gulf War and is accused by Baghdad of being a CIA agent, had been part of the snoop operation for seven years.
In congressional hearings, Ritter accused high-level officials within the Clinton administration, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, of being soft on Baghdad. "This means I was wasting my time," Ritter said. "It means we lost the Gulf war."
House Speaker Newton Gingrich asked whether Albright and the Clinton administration had "misled Congress and the American people on our actual policy toward Iraq." He added that if the allegations by Ritter are true, the White House's "tough rhetoric on Iraq has been a deception masking a real policy of weakness and concession."
Albright responded that Ritter did not "have a clue" about Washington's overall policy toward Iraq and she was backed up by several members of Congress. In a speech September 9 Albright again stated that Washington has "not taken any option off the table, including military force" against Iraq. White House officials have pointed to the fact that U.S. warships moved into waters near Iraq in mid-August.
The State Department announced August 27 that Washington has more military force in the Gulf now than it had in February, when the Clinton administration was preparing to launch a military assault on Iraq. Those plans were shelved after the deal brokered by UN secretary general Kofi Annan. Far from ushering in peace and stability, that agreement set the stage for the further provocations over inspections that are unfolding today.