Preemptive Attack On Iraq Now More Likely
It was always a dodgy idea for the unilateralists in the Bush Gang: ask the UN to come down heavy on Iraq. I get the sense they were relying on Saddam to be as obstinate and pigheaded as, well, as they are. In a sense, they are projecting their moral deficiencies onto their enemies. But the damn towelheads won’t play along. The Iraqi talking head, Tariq Aziz, conveyed a letter to the UN with their surrender, and also has been holding press conferences, telling everyone that what’s really at stake here is oil. Many people agree, not least of them these guys in the Washington Post, who point out that currently much of the Iraqi oil drilling concessions have been bought by French, Russian,and other non-US interests. However, in a full-blown war with Iraq, and a newly installed and compliant Iraqi government would would negate these concessions.
All this UN nonsense is damn inconvenient to the war hawks. Were they to allow the UN to work, for multilateralism to succeed, their entire ideology would be upset. To allow damn liberal negotiators to defuse international disputes without violence and warfare was why the UN was founded, and that’s why the ascendent champions of the idea of unchallanged US hegemony cannot allow it to succeed. Sure enough, now I read that Bush and Rumsfeld are getting desperate: they want to hit Iraq now, before the UN can act to send in its inspectors. In their game plan, Iraq cannot be allowed to surrender to the UN, conditionally, but instead must surrender to the US, unconditionally. Only then do Iraq’s oil concessions become spoils of war.
Of course, a ground war within Iraq must also proceed out of military necessity. After 12 years of bombardment by US and British warplanes, Iraq has become one of the poorest countries in the world. Several years ago, US military sources were already confiding that they were running out of suitable targets. “We’re down to the last outhouse,” they admitted.
I do indeed find it ironic that a country which postured so strongly to the Japanese unannounced attack on Pearl Harbour (as part of a Pacific conflict that was motivated chiefly by Japan’s thirst for oil supplies in the face of US embargo) the appetite for preemptive attack should be so strong. Then again, I don’t think the civilians in Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki were given advance warning either.
The argument that Iraq was a sponsor for the World Trade Center attacks also rings hollow, especially considering the latest preliminary report from the US Congress over September 11th. It points out that US intelligence agencies had warnings as far back as 1998 that some “Arabs” would attempt to fly airliners into the Twin Towers. With the benefit of hindsight, they are able to show how awareness of an impending terrorist spectacular was building all through the summer of 2001. But despite this extensive examination, they haven’t found any evidence that Iraq was involved.
As some pragmatic commentators have pointed out, considering that the US is currently under attack from some violent Islamist groups, surely starting a war against a secular, non-Arab, strictly regional, tinpot state such as Iraq can only be a distraction. While US attention is captivated by the phoney War on Terror in Iraq, the real terrorists are under the radar, watching keenly and closely, with intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, and slowly and surely drawing their plans.
