BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
U.S. fighter jets fired air-to-air missiles at Iraqi planes
flying over southern Iraq January 5. The incident was the third
military strike by Washington since the December 16-19 bombing
of Iraq by U.S. and British forces that destroyed schools,
hospitals, grain depots, and private homes as well as military
sites. Meanwhile, Washington has been forced to admit that the
United Nations "weapons inspectors" snooping around Iraq were
in fact spies.
Two U.S. Air Force F-15 jets fired missiles at Iraqi MIG planes and two Navy F-14 jets launched a volley of shots on Iraqi MIGs that flew into the "no-fly" zone Washington has imposed in southern Iraq. The U.S. government established such zones there and in the north of the country after the 1991 Gulf slaughter, supposedly to protect Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south from attacks by the Iraqi military.
After the four-day bombing assault in December, French jets stopped patrolling the southern "no-fly" zone. Paris had ended its participation in enforcing the no-fly zone in northern Iraq in 1996 after Washington launched a bombing attack.
There are mounting pressures on the U.S. rulers to lift the sanctions strangling 22 million Iraqi people. Moscow, Paris, Beijing, and several Arab regimes have called for lifting or easing the sanctions. A UN report issued last April stated that nearly 100,000 more Iraqis die each year in hospitals than died before the sanctions were imposed. "It's not surprising" that many people are "increasingly cynical about American claims that the United States has no desire to hurt ordinary Iraqis," opined an article in the January 3 New York Times.
Baghdad is pressing to capitalize on Washington's political weaknesses by repeatedly asserting the sovereign right to fly its planes in the "no-fly zones" imposed on its territory. Nearly every day since December 23 Iraqi aircraft have flown into the prohibited areas. The Iraqi military has reportedly moved fighter jets and helicopters into the northern and southern zones and nearly doubled the number of surface-to-air missile batteries there.
"Our resistance will continue against any penetration," declared Iraqi vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan December 29, the day after U.S. warplanes destroyed an anti-aircraft battery in northern Iraq, killing four Iraqi soldiers and injuring at least seven others, according to Baghdad. The Iraqi government said it launched surface to air missiles after the U.S. planes attacked first.
On December 30 U.S. fighter jets again fired missiles into Iraqi territory, claiming Baghdad had fired at a formation of 24 warplanes, including British Tornado bombers and U.S. F-16s. That assault killed a peasant and wounded two others.
Ramadan said the U.S. and British air patrols are spying operations and part of imperialist aggression against Iraq, a point Iraqi officials repeatedly made about the UN "weapons inspectors" who provoked the recent round of confrontations. U.S. officials acknowledged January 6 that U.S. spies were part of the "inspection" teams.
According to the January 6 Washington Post, UN secretary general Kofi Annan said he had proof that UN "weapons inspectors" used their so-called arm search program to eavesdrop for Washington on sensitive discussions among Iraqi government officials.
The Boston Globe reported that surveillance equipment permitted the snoops to listen in on radio, cell phone, and walkie-talkie communications by members of the Iraqi security network. Former "inspector" Scott Ritter asserted that last March Washington pushed aside the British and Israeli spy team and took over the operation itself.
Washington floats new bombing plans
Washington has run into a brick wall in its aims to topple
the Iraqi government and replace it with a protectorate
beholden to U.S. interests. Iraq contains some 10 percent of
the Earth's oil reserves - more than any country in the world
except Saudi Arabia, and more than Canada, Mexico, and the
United States combined.
In addition to wanting control of this resource, Washington has sought to create a subservient regime that can police the region for U.S. imperialism, as the Iranian monarch did until he was overthrown by the Iranian toilers in a massive revolution in 1979.
With no stomach for launching a major ground invasion or a sustained bombing campaign, the Clinton administration has resorted to intermittent air strikes on the Iraqi people. The White House has begun to publicly float preparations for bombing the airfields where Iraqi jets took off. "We have those kinds of plans on the shelf," said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton, in response to this suggestion from Sen. John McCain.
Clinton's aggression has posed a dilemma for Arab regimes in the region as political instability intensifies amid growing pressures on them to condemn the punishing sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people. Citing rising temperatures since the December air strikes, London's Financial Times reported January 6 that the U.S. embassy in Cairo alleged it received threats of "imminent unspecified attacks against US interests in Egypt." Following the four-day blitz, anti-imperialist protests numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands erupted in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, and the West Bank.
The 22-member Arab League postponed until January 24 a meeting of Arab foreign ministers to discuss the bombing raids on Iraq. "The meeting would have told the world and the Iraqi population that Iraq's isolation was over," said an Iraqi government official, charging that the governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia sought the delay to defuse rising outrage over the bombing.