18 - 24 October 2001
Issue No.556
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 October 2001 Issue No.556 |
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Send in the hawks
Though Britain insists that no wider war is expected, hard-line American officials seem to be working towards just that, writes Michael Jansen
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has made clear that any military moves against Iraq would have to be thoroughly discussed "with Arab partners" ahead of an operation. But the warning has fallen on deaf ears at the Pentagon among what is called the "Wolfowitz cabal".
Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, responded to the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon by stating that the US should think of "ending states who [sic] sponsor terrorism." Fixated on Iraq, Wolfowitz and other "cabal" members are promoting a plan for the US occupation of southern Iraq and the installation of the opposition grouping known as the Iraqi National Congress as the government in that area. US ground troops would then seize the oil fields there and use the proceeds of oil exports to finance the Congress and the Kurdish opposition.
To secure acceptance of their plan, the Pentagon hawks have been trying, by hook or by crook, to make a connection between Baghdad and the alleged perpetrators of last month's attacks. Soon after Mohamed Atta was identified as the organiser of the operation, the CIA claimed that Czech intelligence had evidence showing that Atta met several times in Prague with an agent of Iraqi intelligence called Ahmed Samir Al-Ahani, a former consul subsequently expelled by the Czechs for activities not compatible with his status as a diplomat. The Czechs are said to be examining the possibility that Atta also met last spring with a former director of Iraq's external intelligence service, Farouk Hijazi, who has allegedly met with militant leader Osama Bin Laden, the prime suspect in the US terrorist assault.
On 19 and 20 September, the Defence Policy Board, a bipartisan grouping of security experts which advises the Pentagon, discussed options and agreed that the US should focus on Iraq once the military operation in Afghanistan is over. Both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz took part in the consultations. The 18-member board consists of a collection of former office holders: House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director (1993-95) James Woolsey, Vice President Dan Quayle and Richard Perle, the arch hawk once employed in defence. The fact that the board's "formers" are out of the loop of policy-making and free of post-operational responsibility appears to have made them all the more aggressive on the Iraq issue. According to The New York Times, the State Department was not briefed on the board's activities and current Secretary of Defence Colin Powell was apparently "quite distressed."
After this meeting, Wolfowitz sent Woolsey to Britain to look for evidence that Ramzi Youssef, convicted in the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, was in fact an Iraqi agent named Abdul-Basit, a Kuwaiti national who studied in Swansea, Wales, in the 1980s. Woolsey is said to be compiling material implicating Iraq and claims that Iraq provided fake passports for all 19 of the alleged hijackers involved in the US strikes.
On 7 October the US circulated a letter to members of the Security Council stating that "We may find our self-defence requires further actions with respect to other organisations and other states." On the same day, US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte, another hard-liner, delivered a second letter to Iraq's senior envoy. In this missive the Bush administration warned that the US would launch military strikes against Iraq if it attempted to assist anti-US forces in Afghanistan or move against its neighbours or domestic opponents.
"There will be a military strike against you and you will be defeated," Negroponte told the Iraqi envoy Mohamed Al-Douri. The next day, Al- Douri informed the US mission that Baghdad had no intention of initiating military action against anyone. Iraq has repeatedly denied any links with Bin Laden. Undeterred, Rumsfeld threatened to attack Iraq if there is evidence that Baghdad is involved in the numerous cases of anthrax, one fatal, mushrooming in the US.
On 10 October President George Bush placed Abdul-Rahman Yassin, an Iraqi, on the US list of the 22 most wanted terrorists for his role in the 1993 bombing incident. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation had detained Yassin and subsequently set him free. The CIA- funded Iraqi National Congress claims he is living in Iraq.
An Iraqi defector now living in the US, former army captain Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, told The Washington Post's conservative writer Jim Hoagland that members of an elite unit called Saddam's Fighters had been trained for airliner hijacking and assassination at a facility in the Salman Pak area of Baghdad. Another defector claimed that "Islamists" had been training on a Boeing 707 as recently as September 2000. On 14 October, the London paper The Observer reported that US investigators have named Iraq as a possible source of the anthrax bacterium which has infected several people in the US. According to The Observer's CIA and Pentagon sources, the fact that an airborne form of the disease was used in Florida suggests the involvement of a state with sophisticated apparatus to process, or "weaponise," the spores. However, US health officials deny that the anthrax spores used to infect people in the country are of the type used in biological warfare.
Perhaps more significantly, Richard Butler, who formerly headed the UN weapons monitoring mission in Iraq, has said that there is "nothing to back up the accusation against Iraq" on the matter of anthrax. Butler's assertion has considerable weight because he adopts a very aggressive stance against Iraq. And yet, these unproven and, perhaps, wild accusations are being used by the Wolfowitz cabal to convince international public opinion of Iraq's involvement in order to make it impossible for cool heads in the Bush administration to resist calls for the renewal of major military action against Iraq.
All Arab leaders have repeatedly and in unambiguous terms rejected an offensive against Iraq. Even the world's foremost elder statesman, former South African President Nelson Mandela, has warned the US and its ally, Britain, against "avoiding the UN and taking unilateral [bilateral] action."
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