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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 28 January 1999 Issue No. 413 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 28 January 1999 Issue No. 413
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Focus Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Spying in the name of the UN
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
The Iraqi regime has been warned that Iraq might be exposed to a new round of strikes after Ramadan, an event that is bound to expose the whole region to still greater upheavals -- especially in the light of the scandal over the use to which the great powers have put UNSCOM, the special UN commission crated to ferret out Iraq's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
When sanctions were first imposed on Iraq in the wake of its failed attempt to invade Kuwait, their declared objective was to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and deprive it of sovereignty over wide stretches of its skies to prevent it from bombing the Kurds in the north and the Shi'a in the south. Today the Western powers are openly declaring that their objective is to topple the Iraqi regime, in open defiance of the word and spirit of the UN Charter. It seems that once a state is labelled a 'rogue' state, the western capitals believe they not only have the right, but also the duty, to intervene in its internal affairs, irrespective of established principles on the matter.
Papers as prestigious as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have pointed out that UNSCOM has been acting in the most outrageous and unscrupulous manner. Most of its so-called experts have turned out to be spies for one state or another. Their expertise was less in the field of removing weapons of mass destruction than in the field of electronic surveillance and eavesdropping. Because the electronic codes Iraq used for its research programmes were the same as those used for the exchange of classified information at the highest echelons of state, the UNSCOM spies were able to decipher many of the coded signals relating to Saddam's whereabouts and to the activities of his Republican Guard and other high-level security organs. Thus the search for weapons was actually a cover for all-out espionage in a variety of fields.
This explains the special role played by Israel in UNSCOM's activities. As The Times of London wrote, "Israel's contribution to the activities of UNSCOM is probably the commission's best guarded secret since 1995". Some of those secrets were disclosed by Scott Ritter, a high-ranking member of the UNSCOM team who resigned over policy differences with its executive chairman Richard Butler. According to Ritter, Washington and London relied on Israeli intelligence to pinpoint the locations of Iraq's secret weapons caches, that is, to perform the task for which UNSCOM was created, while UNSCOM's experts concentrated rather on spying on the Iraqi leadership. As mentioned by the French Le Monde, it was no accident that the residence of one of Saddam's daughters was targeted during the raids.
And, despite assertions to the contrary, it was not only Iraq's military hardware that was targeted but also its human potential. According to official western and Iraqi sources, casualties within the military during the four day raids are estimated to be between 1,200 and 1,600. Of course, the real figures cannot be verified and both parties, for different reasons, have an interest in minimising them. Some non-official sources put the casualties as high as ten thousand.
It also seems that Iraq's southern regions were hit particularly hard, presumably in the hope of unleashing a Shi'a insurgency and further destabilising a regime that is already hard pressed to cope with the US-backed Kurdish uprising in the north. Reports coming out of Iraq mention that a number of Iraqi officers stationed in the south have been executed for insubordination and rebellion against the authorities. If the reports are true, this would tend to confirm that the American and British strikes aimed also at dismembering Iraq, a development that would be seen by many Arab regimes as a hostile act directed at them, all the more so in an environment where the cohesiveness of the Arab Mashriq is under threat from Israel, Turkey and Iran.
Another question worth pondering is whether the strikes were also aimed at depleting Iraq's pool of scientific expertise, particularly in the military field. Germany's experience in the aftermath of World War II clearly demonstrated that, as long as its scientific personnel was able to survive, material destruction, however devastating, could not bring it to its knees. The US is aware that as long as Iraq's scientific body remains intact the strikes can only delay, but not eliminate, Iraq's military buildup.
It is also worth noting that the reaction of the Security Council to the revelations made by the press on UNSCOM has been remarkably muted, raising the suspicion that all the great powers are somehow implicated in the scandal. In fact, the only explanation for the extremely restrained reaction to this disgraceful chapter in the history of the UN is that they all used UNSCOM for shady purposes and fear that denouncing any specific party could lead that party to retaliate by exposing the others, thus creating a situation that is counter-productive for all concerned.
In the final analysis, UNSCOM's use of the United Nations as a cover for shadowy and illicit activities is bound to adversely affect the credibility and stature of the world organisation, while its attempt to use the Iraqi situation to further consolidate US hegemony over the Middle East could backfire badly.
With the impeachment crisis in full swing, President Clinton must, more than at any other time, prove himself still capable of making momentous decisions and achieving progress in particularly difficult conflict situations. Netanyahu has exploited Clinton's difficulties to blackmail him and undermine whatever successes he might have achieved with the Wye Plantation agreement. That is why it is so important for Clinton to use Saddam in bringing about more acute disagreements between the Arab parties than those which might emerge between the American and Israeli sides.
Obviously, Saddam will not help the Arab parties out of their present predicament. He is more likely to help Clinton achieve his objective of aggravating inter-Arab contradictions. Actually, the criterion for a successful Arab response is not only the ability to convene an Arab summit that would dissipate inter-Arab conflict, but also to devise a common Arab strategy that would neither confirm Saddam's accusation that the Arab parties have abandoned the cause of the Iraqi people, nor help Washington make the Iraqi people pay for Saddam's misconduct.
