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Clinton's attack on Iraq
Military aggression and political diversion
By the Editorial Board
17 December 1998
The launching of US air and missile attacks on Iraq is a measure
both of the desperation of the Clinton administration and of the
criminal recklessness and bellicosity of American imperialism.
Thousands of Iraqi lives are to be sacrificed, for the short-term
goal of preserving Clinton's presidency, and for the long-term
goal of maintaining US dominance in the oil-rich Middle East.
The timing of the attack, on the eve of the impeachment debate
and vote in the House of Representatives, is clearly bound up
with the political crisis of the Clinton White House. As he has
throughout this political crisis, at every point when his presidency
has been threatened, Clinton has sought to appease his right-wing
opponents with the threat or use of military force.
In February, after the eruption of the Lewinsky affair, amid
a media barrage aimed at forcing his resignation, Clinton seized
on a conflict with Iraq over the activity of United Nations weapons
inspectors to go to the brink of military action. In August, only
three days after his testimony before the grand jury convened
by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, Clinton launched cruise
missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan.
After going to the brink with Iraq again on November 15, Clinton
was widely denounced by congressional Republicans when he called
off planned air strikes, with B-52s already in the air headed
for Baghdad. Republican senators openly called for the US government
to set as its goal the overthrow and murder of Saddam Hussein.
Only a few days ago, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, who is spearheading
the impeachment drive, baited the White House over its failure
to oust the Iraqi leader.
If the timing of the attack is based on political expediency,
however, the military action flows directly and inexorably from
American policy in the region. For nearly eight years, since the
end of the Persian Gulf war, the United States has maintained
a death grip over this largely devastated and militarily defenseless
country. The sanctions regime imposed through the United Nations
has killed an estimated half a million children, depriving them
of food, medicine and other basic necessities.
The official pretext for the economic embargo, the claim that
a country largely without electric power and running water was
nonetheless stockpiling nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,
is an utter fraud. No evidence that Iraq currently possesses weapons
of mass destruction has ever been presented by the US or the US-controlled
UNSCOM inspectors. Instead, Iraq has been required to do the impossible--prove
the nonexistence of such weapons in a territory the size of Texas
with a population of 20 million people. There have even been demands
that Iraq rid itself of the "capability" of producing
such weapons, which would mean, given the flexibility of modern
technology, that Iraq must revert to pre-industrial conditions.
It is a measure of the cynicism of the American political establishment
and the corporate-controlled media that Clinton's lies about a
trivial matter, his affair with Monica Lewinsky, have been declared
an impeachable offense, while his repetition of gross, obvious
and, in the full sense of the word, criminal lies about Iraq is
accepted and endorsed. Indeed, if any of Clinton's Republican
opponents were the occupant of the White House, the lies would
be just as brazen and the military aggression just as flagrant.
In the propaganda of 1998, "weapons of mass destruction"
occupies the same place that the "domino theory" and
the Gulf of Tonkin resolution occupied during the Vietnam War.
And the former antiwar protester of the 1960s seeks to save himself
through the slaughter of innocent Iraqi people.
The latest confrontation with Iraq was deliberately instigated
by UNSCOM, which functions quite openly as an instrument of the
US government, regularly reporting on its spying activities to
the American CIA. Its most provocative action, taken last week,
was an attempt to invade the Baghdad headquarters of the ruling
Ba'ath Party. Under conditions where the CIA is seeking to organize
both the overthrow of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq and the assassination
of Saddam Hussein, UNSCOM officials knew that Iraqi authorities
would block an inspection, thus creating the pretext for American
air strikes.
The real driving force of the US military intervention against
Iraq is the effort by American imperialism to assert its strategic
interests in the region. Joined only by its most loyal international
stooge, the British Labour Party government of Prime Minister
Tony Blair, the US government is seeking to secure for American
corporate interests the lion's share of the profits in the exploitation
of the two greatest reservoirs of oil on the planet, the Middle
East and Central Asia.
There is an ominous logic to the American military moves against
Iraq. While little information is yet available, there have been
reports of "heavy and sustained bombing" and of air
strikes against the positions occupied by Iraq's Republican Guard,
the principal conventional military force which survived the gulf
war onslaught. Such measures, which have nothing to do with concern
for "weapons of mass destruction," would be carried
out for the purpose of clearing the way for the invasion and military
occupation of Iraq by US ground troops. Indeed, no other military
action could be envisioned to carry out the declared goal of US
foreign policy, which Clinton reiterated in his Wednesday night
speech, the establishment of a new, US-dominated government in
Baghdad.
In addition to the longstanding US designs on the Persian Gulf,
which were the basis for the Bush administration's decision to
go to war over Kuwait in 1990-91, the Clinton administration has
been deeply involved in jockeying for control of the breakaway
republics of the former Soviet Union that surround the Caspian
Sea, which are believed to have the largest untapped gas and oil
reserves in the world.
A bitter struggle is raging between the major capitalist powers
over the location and control of the pipelines that will deliver
these resources to the world market. Seeing potential advantages
in the dismemberment of Iraq and the stationing of American troops
so close to the new oilfields, both the Clinton administration
and its Republican adversaries now embrace the goal of overthrowing
and removing Saddam Hussein, which was rejected by George Bush
in 1991 as both unfeasible and undesirable from the standpoint
of US interests.
It is these fundamental economic and strategic considerations,
and not Clinton's political maneuvers, which are at the root of
the aggression against Iraq. Once again it is being made clear
that the basic threat to world peace is American imperialism,
and its demented belief that with B-52s and cruise missiles it
can do as it pleases anywhere in the world.
Whatever the immediate outcome of the assault on Iraq--and
there is no doubt that what is unfolding is a colossal human tragedy--the
drive by American capitalism to war must lead ultimately to disaster,
not only for its victims overseas, but for the working class youth
who will be mobilized to kill or be killed for the profit interests
of the corporate and financial elite. Yet the latest US military
actions proceed without a single dissenting voice in the political
establishment, without any critical examination by the subservient
mass media. Working people must oppose these military strikes
and demand an end both to the aggression against Iraq and to the
continued US/UN policy of starving the Iraqi people.
See Also:
Political coup gathers strength
Clinton's groveling emboldens right-wing push for impeachment
[12 December 1998]
New threat of air strikes
US moves B-52s towards Iraq
[12 December 1998]
New Caspian oil interests
fuel US war drive against Iraq
[16 November 1998]
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