Six Iraqi workers were killed at a veterinary clinic by the attack that also destroyed a residential house and burned down a farm, according to the Iraqi News Agency.

U.S. military officials claimed the missile attack was on an antiaircraft radar installation in the town of As-Salman. But international aid workers who visited the town three days before the assault told the Christian Science Monitor, "There were no anti-aircraft facilities in the area...around the clinic." Aswan Habib, whose cousin was killed by the air strikes, explained, "They say they always hit military targets, but this was a civilian target."

The U.S. warplanes were patrolling the "no-fly zone" over southern Iraq that Washington imposed after the 1990–91 Gulf war. The Iraqi government does not recognize the infringement on its sovereignty and since 1998 has ordered anti-aircraft units to try to shoot down the British and U.S. planes.

The air strikes in Iraq took place three days after the 10th anniversary of the start of Washington's brutal six-week bombing campaign against the country's 23 million people. A number of articles appeared in the big business media commemorating the 1991 bombardment and subsequent 100-hour invasion of Iraq by Washington and its allies.

The allied assault, led by U.S. armored divisions, naval bombardment, and punishing airstrikes slaughtered an estimated 150,000 Iraqis.

Carl Nolte, a reporter who covered the war, wrote in the January 17 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle about the "Highway of Death," where U.S. warplanes trapped tens of thousands of Iraqis fleeing the battlefield in disarray in thousands of vehicles on the road that leads from Kuwait City to Basra in Iraq. U.S. forces systematically and mercilessly bombed them for 48 hours. "It was a traffic jam, bumper to bumper on the road to Iraq, a retreating army that had lost all organization," Nolte wrote. "Vehicles ran off the road, crashed into each other, were bombed, caught fire. The desert was littered with dead trucks and dead men. Television crews filmed the wreckage."

In the wake of the imperialist assault, millions were left homeless and exposed to hunger and disease, and large regions of the country were in ruins. In addition, the economic blockade, which has prevented medicine, foodstuffs, and agricultural implements from being imported, has resulted in acute malnutrition, cholera, and other epidemic horrors in the region.

The U.S. rulers had seized on Baghdad's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to launch a war aimed at removing the government of President Saddam Hussein and installing a protectorate in the country that would police the region for Washington. Because Iraq has the world's second-largest known oil reserves, achieving this goal would have also enabled the U.S. rulers to secure greater control over that crucial commodity.

Washington also aimed to push back the resistance of the Palestinian masses and in the process stabilize and strengthen pro-imperialist regimes in the Mideast. Despite the massive military mobilization, Washington failed to achieve most of these aims.  
 
Gulf war coalition in tatters
Waged behind the facade of a United Nations–sponsored "international coalition," the Gulf war was a U.S.-government operation that instead exacerbated the rivalry and conflicts between Washington and other imperialist powers. It was the first of Washington's wars since World War II in which it sought to use its military might to deal economic and political blows to its rivals in Europe and Japan. Despite claims of a "New World Order" by then U.S. president George Bush, articles on the 10th anniversary of the bombing point to an opposite conclusion.

"Today's 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Gulf war should be the cause for celebration for the US and the impressive coalition it assembled to drive Iraq out of Kuwait," said an article in the January 17 Financial Times. Instead the article noted, "The Gulf war coalition is in tatters and support for sanctions has been diluted."

The Gulf war also intensified the political conflicts between Washington and the workers state in the former Soviet Union, whose government backed the imperialist assault on Iraq. The governments of the workers states in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic participated in the 1990–91 war and all have joined NATO as part of Washington's moves to expand its military presence eastward, a drive opposed by Russian government officials who see the logic of the military expansion.

The Clinton administration's inaugural day bombing and killing of Iraqis was part of a consistent eight-year policy. His administration opened with a massive bombing of the country and expanded the "no-fly zone" to cover all but a small band of the country over the capital of Baghdad. A United Nations survey last year reported the air strikes killed one Iraqi civilian every other day since the end of 1998.

Meanwhile, the U.S. rulers have floated new threats of military action against Iraq under the pretext that Baghdad is producing chemical and biological weapons. "Sadddam Hussein must understand that this nation is very serious about preventing him from the development of weapons of mass destruction," declared Bush in an interview before taking office. His vice president, Richard Cheney, said in a campaign debate last October, "We'd have to give very serious consideration to military action" against Iraq.

A report released January 10 by former secretary of defense William Cohen claimed "some of Iraq's facilities could be converted fairly quickly to production of chemical weapons." Clinton had threatened military force against Iraq whenever Washington deemed Baghdad was developing chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons. It was under this guise that Clinton ordered air strikes on Iraq in 1998.

The report by Cohen was contradicted by unnamed senior government officials who admitted the Pentagon did not have evidence any Iraqi factories, including two reconstructed plants demolished by U.S. and British air raids in 1998, are weapon factories, the New York Times reported January 22. "There is no smoking gun," said one U.S. official.  
 
'Reenergize the sanctions'
The new administration in the White House has indicated it aims to step up its efforts to strangle Iraq through the U.S.-UN embargo imposed on the country in 1990. At his confirmation hearing before the Senate, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell said Washington must "reenergize the sanctions regime" against Iraq.

The 10-year-old sanctions have wrought disaster for the population. "Approximately 250 people die every day in Iraq due to the effect of the sanctions," stated a 1998 UN report. More than 1.2 million people, including 750,000 children have died since the embargo was imposed on the country. The Iraqi people are also suffering from increased cases of leukemia and cancer linked to depleted uranium in bullets and warheads fired by U.S. and British tanks and warplanes. UN officials estimate that more than 300 tons of depleted uranium ammunition is scattered throughout Iraqi territory.

The U.S.-led embargo on Iraq is being undercut by its imperialist competitors and some Arab governments over the past year. The Financial Times noted that "two pillars" of the U.S. rulers' policy on Iraq--maintaining sanctions and enforcing the no-fly zones--"have been crumbling."

Since last fall dozens of civilian flights have arrived in Iraq from several countries in the Mideast. The regime in Syria recently announced the reopening of a pipeline from Iraq, allowing Baghdad to ship out 200,000 barrels of oil a day.

The prospects for lucrative billion-dollar contracts to develop Iraqi oilfields has brought business executives from France and Russia to the country. Even Washington's most steadfast ally, the imperialist rulers in the United Kingdom, are probing for oil deals with the Iraqi government. "We've had low-level, largely technical, discussions about developing oilfields" in Iraq, said a spokesperson from Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil conglomerate.  
 
 
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