Seeking to create an incident and provoke the Iraqi government, the presidential order directs the CIA to increase support for Iraqi opposition groups and forces inside and outside Iraq, including with money, weapons, equipment, training, and intelligence information, reported Robert Woodward.

As well, the CIA is to expand its intelligence operations inside the country. The U.S. president gave the go-ahead to the deployment of CIA and Special Forces units that would be "authorized to kill Hussein if they were acting in self-defense," Woodward wrote.

Woodward quoted government officials who said that the operations should be viewed largely as "preparatory" to a military strike so "the agency can identify targets, intensify intelligence gathering on the ground in Iraq, and build relations with alternative future leaders and groups if Hussein is ousted."  
 
Meetings with opposition forces
White House officials have held a series of meetings with representatives of opposition forces. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said they include the Iraqi National Congress, the Kurdish Democratic Party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi National Accord, and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq. The highest-ranking official to meet with these groups is Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman.

Since its 1990–91 war, in which the U.S.-led forces killed at least 150,000 Iraqis, the United Nations has maintained an embargo on the country. U.S. and British forces have also enforced a self-declared no-fly zone over the northern and southern parts of Iraq. Washington has launched several punishing air and cruise missile strikes against Baghdad and other major cities over the last decade as well.

But Washington’s imperialist rivals in Europe are increasingly doing business with the Iraqi government. Over the past four years some 185 companies have dropped a total of $2.9 billion of war-related claims in order to get in on lucrative contracts to rebuild infrastructure and supply food and medicines to the country.

In addition, EU ministers announced June 17 they are launching negotiations with the government of Iran over closer economic relations. They hope to rapidly conclude a Trade and Cooperation Agreement as a first step to a free trade accord.

Both of these moves cut across Washington’s campaign to oust Hussein as part of the fight against the countries they have declared to be the "axis of evil"--Iraq, Iran, and north Korea. As well as being capable of building weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems, these countries are not on good terms with U.S. imperialism. Bush declared that the White House will take "preemptive action" against these and other countries it chooses to block from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

"The worst thing that can happen would be to allow a nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction, and then team up with terrorist organizations so they can blackmail the world," said Bush in April. "I’m not going to let that happen.

"I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go," Bush said to journalists. "That’s all I’m willing to share with you."

More recently, in a speech at West Point Bush came back to the theme of the preemptive strike doctrine, saying that "if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."

Vice President Richard Cheney joined the campaign, stating, "A regime that hates America and everything we stand for must never be permitted to threaten America with weapons of mass destruction."

The Bush administration does not say it has proof that the government in Iraq possesses nuclear and biological weapons, or that it may have given any such weapons to al Qaeda.

"It’s not because you have some chain of evidence saying that Iraq may have given a weapon to al Qaeda," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "But it is because Iraq is one of those places that is both hostile to us and, frankly, irresponsible and cruel enough to make this available."

The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. officials now say they "overestimated" al Qaeda’s access to weapons of mass destruction. According to one "intelligence official," the "designs for nuclear weapons" found in Afghanistan "were rudimentary, the sort you’d draw on a cocktail napkin." U.S. troops "found no sign that al Qaeda had managed to acquire chemical or biological weapons or any nuclear material," the Journal noted.

As part of building support for action against Baghdad, U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld met with officials of three Gulf states in June. During his tour Rumsfeld visited U.S. military bases in Kuwait, where there are 8,000 U.S. troops equipped with Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Patriot air-defense batteries, as well as the crews for fighter planes flying over the no-fly zone in southern Iraq.

Numerous articles in the big-business press, citing unnamed Pentagon or White House sources, say that Washington is not planning a full-scale military invasion at this point.

Top military officers say that such an operation would require at least 200,000 troops, while preparations would take up to six months.

CIA director Tenet stated that the job of putting together a proxy army like the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance would be a much more difficult task for the CIA than in Afghanistan, since the Iraqi army is eight times larger than the forces controlled by the Taliban before their downfall. Tenet said that a CIA effort to bring down Hussein without a military assault had only about a 10 to 20 percent chance of succeeding. BR> 
 
Related article:
Oppose U.S. adventure to provoke incident with Iraq
Moves are parallel to ‘preemptive’ bipartisan assault on rights  
 
 
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