The Democratic and Republican parties immediately closed ranks behind Bush as he gave Iraqi president Saddam Hussein an ultimatum to leave his country within 48 hours or face the "full force and might of our military."

Likewise, the parliament of the United Kingdom voted overwhelmingly March 18 for war. By a 396 to 217 margin, British legislators rallied for Prime Minister Anthony Blair’s proposal to join Washington in the full-scale military assault on Iraq and against an "antiwar motion."

Bush’s March 17 televised speech followed a war summit he held with the British and Spanish prime ministers at the Azores islands in the Atlantic. There, the three representatives of the imperialist powers made it clear a war would be launched whether or not it was ratified by the United Nations Security Council. The events highlighted the sharpening conflict between the major imperialist powers--with Washington and London at one pole and Paris and Berlin at the other--over who will control the vast resources and strategic facilities of the Mideast.

With more than 250,000 U.S. and British troops in the Arab-Persian Gulf ready to attack, UN officials ordered the 56 "weapons inspectors" to leave Iraq. The U.S. and other governments withdrew their diplomatic staff out of several front-line countries, telling their citizens to leave the area.

Washington’s war plans, as described by Pentagon officials, call for unleashing 3,000 bombs and missiles in the first two days of an intense air campaign. About 1,000 Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps strike and support planes will be operating from five aircraft carriers and from airfields in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.

Over the past 12 years, U.S. and British planes have gradually devastated Iraq’s air defenses, other military installations, and communications facilities. They have done so by carrying out bombing patrols under the cover of enforcing "no-fly zones" imposed over the nation’s north and south.

In recent weeks the bombings have escalated sharply. These attacks are part of a war that has begun well before the official launching of the offensive. U.S. Special Forces and CIA operatives have been moving freely in the north, preparing the ground for the invasion in territory controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party.

As of March 15, the U.S. military had assembled 225,000 troops in the Gulf region, more than half of whom were assembled in the north of Kuwait, ready to drive across the border into southern Iraq.

Officers of the U.S. Marine Corps will direct a 300-mile push to Baghdad, U.S. officials reported. The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, under the command of the British Royal Marines, has been assigned to take Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city.

Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the U.S. Marines, will have command not only of the 65,000 U.S. marines but the 25,000 British troops stationed there. He will also have more than 150 attack planes and helicopters at his disposal. The British forces and units of the U.S. army will supply some of the tanks and artillery, including rockets, that the marines lack.

The U.S. and British troops that will play the key role in the drive to Baghdad virtually have the north of Kuwait to themselves, the Wall Street Journal reported March 17, adding that "the emirate looks like an occupied land." The Kuwaiti government, it noted, has "even barred its own citizens from the northern half of the country, where some 150,000 American and British troops gear up for war."  
 
All capitalist politicians behind Bush
As the imperialist war moves accelerated, politicians from both big-business parties have rallied behind commander-in-chief Bush. "Those of us who have questioned the administration’s approach, including this senator, will now be rallying behind the men and women of our armed forces to give them the full support that they deserve as it now seems certain we will soon be at war," said Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, following the president’s March 17 war speech.

The capitalist media followed suit. The liberal New York Times editors, while taking issue with what they called Bush’s wrong-headed diplomacy, declared after the March 17 speech, "Once the fighting begins, every American will be thinking primarily of the safety of our troops, the success of their mission and the minimization of Iraqi civilian casualties. It will not feel like the right time for complaints about how America got to this point."

In his March 17 speech, Bush reiterated the main themes of the U.S. rulers’ propaganda campaign to justify a war in the Mideast. He accused the Iraqi regime of possessing "weapons of mass destruction," and argued that it "continues to possess and conceal" them. "Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq," Bush stated, "terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other." He added, "The United States has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security."

Over the past weeks, the Bush administration and its backers have won a majority of U.S. public opinion. According to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll conducted after the president’s speech, for example, seven in 10 people supported the call to launch an attack on Iraq--up from 59 percent two weeks earlier. The figures indicated that "the public’s preference for a UN-endorsed war also has faded into the background following the collapse of efforts" to pass a UN Security Council war resolution, the Post reported March 18.

Many people, including among those who have previously questioned the U.S. government’s course, have been "coming around to the president’s view," the Post indicated.  
 
Conflict between imperialist powers
The drive toward a war in the Mideast has been marked by widening conflicts between Washington and London, on one hand, and Paris and Berlin, on the other, with each imperialist power pursuing its own vested interests in a conflict over control of that strategic region.

The day before Bush’s March 17 speech, the U.S. president held a one-hour meeting with prime ministers Anthony Blair of the United Kingdom and José María Aznar of Spain on an air base in the Portuguese islands of the Azores. Bush emerged from the summit declaring that the Iraqi government had 24 hours to "cooperate fully" with UN resolutions calling for Iraq’s "disarmament." The deadline, he indicated, was a "moment of truth," not just for Iraqi president Saddam Hussein but for the other governments on the United Nations Security Council.

Bush castigated the United Nations, saying it had failed in many conflicts over the past decade--in Rwanda, in Kosova, and now in Iraq.

A March 17 Wall Street Journal editorial noted that the "Azores summit was pitched as offering one more final chance for Saddam Hussein to disarm, but it is closer to the truth to say that its real purpose was offering one more last chance to Jacques Chirac."

Writing in the Newark, New Jersey, Star Ledger, staff writer John Farmer described the immediate targets of the Azores ultimatum as "France and Russia, the two Security Council members that have threatened to veto military action against Iraq, and six smaller uncommitted members."

The day after the Azores meeting, French government officials repeated their threat to veto a U.S.-British resolution approving a military attack on Iraq. "France cannot accept a resolution that sets an ultimatum and envisages an automatic use of force," said Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

Against the U.S.-British proposal, Paris proposed a 30-day deadline for Baghdad to "disarm" before approving an assault on Iraq. German chancellor Gerhard Schröder said the UN "weapons inspectors" should be given more time.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said he was for "solving the problem exclusively by peaceful means. Any other development would be a mistake," he said, "leading to victims and destabilization of the international situation as a whole."

The French government, along with Berlin, opposes the "regime change" advocated by Washington, London, and Madrid. Having concluded hundreds of lucrative trade and investment deals with the Iraqi government, the French imperialist rulers favor "disarmament" under their auspices, carried out with UN cover, rather than by U.S. military action, which would ice out French interests.

Under the United Nations regime advocated by Paris, Iraq has for the past 12 years been subjected to sanctions that have strangled its economy and armed "inspectors" to violate Iraq’s sovereignty at will.

With Paris and its allies on the UN Security Council rejecting the Azores ultimatum, U.S. and British representatives withdrew their resolution approving an invasion.

"The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours," said Bush in his televised speech.

Several governments have lined up with Washington. Prime Minister John Howard of imperialist Australia stated that the 2,000 Australian troops in the region were prepared to join the offensive. The government of Poland said it would place 200 specially trained troops under U.S. command.

In the war zone, "The U.S. military is receiving tangible help from all the Persian Gulf monarchies, Jordan, and Egypt," the Wall Street Journal reported. With the exception of Syria, "most Arab governments--even those that maintain public opposition to the invasion--have quietly positioned themselves to be in America’s good graces after a war."

The regime in Saudi Arabia, which has previously stated that it would not permit its territory to be used by U.S. forces for an invasion of Iraq, has reportedly turned over at least two new airports to the U.S. military, and allowed an expanded U.S. presence at the Prince Sultan air base near Riyadh, the capital.

The Egyptian government, despite huge antiwar protests in that country, has opened the Suez Canal to U.S. forces and permitted overflights by war planes, the Journal reported.

In Turkey, government leaders are scrambling to get back on board the imperialist war train. On March 17, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer joined the country’s generals in calling on the government to allow U.S. troops to use the country as a base for an invasion from the north. On March 1 the parliament had rejected a proposal to station 62,000 U.S. troops there, a vote that caught Washington off guard.

Following that vote, the government said that it would close off the country’s air space to U.S. and British planes in the coming war.

After repeatedly stating that they expected the vote to be reversed, U.S. officials changed tack, saying that a $6 billion "aid" package offered to Ankara in return for the military agreement was off the table. Turkey’s armed forces should not carry out their announced plans of intervening in northern Iraq, they warned, without the go-ahead from Washington.

The Turkish government has already moved substantial forces southward with the aim both of stanching the kind of flow of Kurdish refugees into its territory that was seen in the 1990–91 war, and of blocking any moves that might lead to the formation of an independent Kurdish state. Millions of Kurds live in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, where they constitute an oppressed nationality. In Turkey they are subject to brutal discrimination and even denial of their identity by the government and military.  
 
U.S. collaboration with Kurd leaders
Washington has moved to collaborate more closely with Kurdish armed groups in areas controlled by the Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose leaderships have oriented to Washington to advance their aims. In face of Ankara’s zigs and zags, U.S. officials have also begun to shift their rhetoric, publicly voicing more sympathy with the Kurdish national struggle.

The Azores summit statement, for example, made a point of paying tribute to "all the Iraqi people--its rich mix of Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and all others."

New York Times columnist William Safire, a supporter of the U.S. administration’s course, addressed this development in a March 17 piece. Turkey’s "turnabout has been the unkindest cut of all," he wrote. Advising the White House to withdraw its backing for Ankara’s application to join the European Union, he stated that Washington should "provide arms to the free Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to fight Saddam, ending our foolish policy of demurring to Turkish paranoia about such help leading to an independent Kurdistan."

The way for Bush to answer his critics, Safire wrote, "is to get on with winning the war and to help Iraqis create a dictator-free confederation."  
 
Militarization at home
As it accelerated its war moves, the U.S. government stepped up the militarization on the domestic front. In his March 17 speech, Bush said that increased police and military surveillance and patrols would accompany the war. "Among other measures I have directed additional security at our airports and increased Coast Guard patrols of major seaports," he said.

"The Department of Homeland Security is working closely with the nation’s governors to increase armed security at critical facilities across America," Bush added.

New York City authorities are carrying out a police and military deployment named Operation Atlas. It calls for expanded police patrols and checkpoints at government buildings, hotels, bridges, and tunnels, as well as a request to the Pentagon for combat aircraft to fly overhead. Officials asked the Federal Aviation Administration to restrict airspace over Manhattan. In addition to the gun-toting National Guard troops that are deployed at city subway stations, the city would deploy elite police units with names like Archangel, Hercules, and Hammer, which are heavily armed Emergency Service Unit cops. The cops would use explosive-sniffing dogs to patrol subway cars.
 
 
Related articles:
Editorial: Washington launches slaughter of Iraqi people
Join protests to demand: Bring the troops home now!
Imperialist plunder of Iraq has long history
Washington plans protectorate in Iraq  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home