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UN resolution on Iraq

Washington aims to provoke new bombing raids

By Brian Becker and Sarah Sloan

If one were to listen to the Clinton administration you would think that the United Nations Security Council on Dec. 17 had passed a resolution that would fully lift the economic sanctions on Iraq. There is one catch, however: Saddam Hussein's government must first allow the UN to resume inspections.

This catch, though, is a Catch-22. The U.S. knows that Iraq will not agree to allow inspectors back.

The resolution passed by a vote at the Security Council of 11-0, with 4 abstentions. Because of enormous U.S. pressure, no governments vetoed the resolution, but France, Russia, China, and Malaysia abstained. Of the five permanent members of the Security Council, only the U.S. and Britain supported the resolution.

Contrary to assertions by the Clinton administration and the big-business media, this resolution was not an effort to end economic sanctions on Iraq. Instead, Washington calculatingly designed the resolution to maintain U.S./UN economic sanctions. According to the United Nation's own statistics, these sanctions have killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis during the last eight years.

World public opinion deeply opposes this genocide against the people of Iraq. And the U.S. is clearly more isolated in the Security Council than it has been since 1990. But it is a testament to U.S. economic and military power that Washington can dominate and manipulate the UN to maintain sanctions.

Why would Iraq refuse monitoring in exchange for lifting the ceiling on its oil sales? To what do the Iraqis object? Indeed, what makes these terms impossible for any sovereign government to accept?

Iraq refused to accept the resolution because the weapons inspectors are not monitors but are in fact subversive agents sent to Iraq to smash the Iraqi government. Also, Iraq does not want to put its oil wealth under the thumb of neocolonial domination.

The return of the weapons
inspectors

One year ago the U.S. and Britain unleashed Operation Desert Fox, which included four days of intense bombing. The pretext for this bombing blitz was that Iraq was not fully cooperating with the United Nations weapons inspectors. This was a bald-faced lie.

The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) carried out over 9,000 inspections throughout Iraq between 1991 and 1998.

Baghdad had even given special permission for the weapons inspectors to investigate the houses of top Iraqi leaders. Yet the inspectors were suddenly pulled out of Iraq and the bombing campaign commenced in December 1998.

Iraq charged that the inspectors were not hunting for weapons but rather were U.S. spies. Now the U.S. media has revealed that weapons inspection teams had indeed been penetrated by the CIA. They were surveying Iraq's most sensitive areas and relaying this information to the Pentagon to choose targets for its bombing campaign.

Scott Ritter, a former Marine and controversial leader of an UNSCOM inspection team, resigned in August 1998 and revealed the CIA's role in January 1999. He told Frontline, "On our team are nine covert operatives from the CIA's covert activities branch. Now, they're doing the work of UNSCOM, they were part of planning UNSCOM, they provided communications support, logistics support, operational support, the kind of guys you need for these inspections."

During the so-called Operation Desert Fox bombing between Dec. 16 and 19, 1998, U.S. and British warplanes dropped more than 1,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq. The Pentagon has dropped more bombs and missiles in almost systematic bombing attacks during the last twelve months.

Iraq had vowed in December 1998 never to allow the UN weapons inspection teams to return since these teams were actually intelligence operatives dominated by the United States. (Revenues collected through the so-called oil-for-food deal paid the inspection teams' salaries).

U.S. government officials like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have announced publicly that official U.S. policy is to overthrow the Iraqi government. These U.S. officials use polite terms like "regime change." But similar "regime change" policies against the Mossadegh government in Iran from 1950-53, the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, the government of President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1965, the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile from 1970-73, and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s murdered hundreds of thousands of people and established dictatorships that functioned as U.S. puppet governments.

Congress passed the "Iraq Liberation Act," which was signed into law by President Clinton on Oct. 31, 1998. This act has supplied $97 million in covert operations to subvert and overthrow the Iraqi government.

By making the sale of Iraq's oil contingent on Iraq accepting the return of this inspection operation, the U.S. administration was confident Baghdad would reject the UN resolution and it would never be implemented.

Now U.S. officials will be able to go on TV and proclaim that they too "want to end the suffering of the Iraqi people if only Saddam Hussein was not so determined to prevent weapons inspectors to return."

Neocolonial domination
of Iraq's oil

Under the provisions of the new UN resolution, Iraq would not recover its independent and sovereign control over its own economy and oil resources. These provisions place all Iraq's oil revenues into a UN escrow account under the control of the Security Council dominated by the U.S.

The misnamed "oil-for-food deal" used this same mechanism during the last few years. Iraq sells oil, the revenues of which are controlled by the Security Council, and the Security Council then allocates a huge portion of the revenue to a UN Compensation Commission.

Does this money go to the Iraqi people? Less than 50 percent pays for medicine and food. The rest supposedly goes to "compensate the victims of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990."

Who are these victims? On June 25, the UN awarded almost $2.8 billion to several oil companies, including more than $500 million to a subsidiary of Texaco, Inc., for equipment and facilities that were damaged when the U.S. led a 43-day war against Iraq in 1991. These oil companies that make tens of billion dollars a year were paid out of the UN Compensation Commission.

And it's not just these companies. Billions have gone to Western corporations who did business in Kuwait. A huge amount of the revenues also go to Kuwait, which means to the Kuwaiti royal family. As a puppet regime, the Kuwaiti royal family continues to buy vast quantities of expensive U.S. military hardware from its national budget.

Everyone knows that Kuwait has a completely ineffective military and will never independently use these weapons. U.S. weapons sales to Kuwait should be properly understood as a form of welfare for U.S. defense contractors.

The UN resolution mandates control over any Iraq reconstruction effort to supervisory panels. The same Western governments and oil monopolies that are hostile to Iraq precisely because it nationalized its oil resources in 1972 dominate these panels.

At the heart of the U.S.-Iraq conflict is that Iraq used a big portion of its oil revenues for the development of the educational, industrial, medical, and social infrastructure of the country, rather than having these profits repatriated to corporate investors in the United States, England and France.

Ultimately, the U.S. government seeks not only to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein, but to return Iraq to a neocolonial vassal status as existed prior to the 1958 revolution.

Compare with Rambouillet

The U.S. resolution on Iraq is crafted in the same way as the February 1998 Rambouillet "peace accord" was designed--to justify starting the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last March 24. Washington insisted then on terms that it knew the Yugoslav government, and any sovereign government, could never accept.

Section 8 of Appendix B of the Rambouillet Accords stated: "NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters. ..." The Yugoslav government was ordered to agree to the foreign occupation of Kosovo and the granting of unlimited access by NATO to all of Yugoslavia.

As former State Department official George Kinney revealed, the U.S. side "deliberately set the bar too high," knowing that the Yugoslav government could not accept the conditions. That was then used to portray the Yugoslavs as being responsible for the failure to negotiate a settlement.

Similarly, the U.S. crafted the UN resolution to end economic sanctions in a way that they knew that the Iraqi government could not accept.

Paragraph 4 of Resolution 1284 (1999), for example, "decides in particular that Iraq shall allow UNMOVIC [United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] teams immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access to any and all areas, facilities, equipment, records and means of transport which they wish to inspect in accordance with the mandate of UNMOVIC, as well as to all officials and other persons under the authority of the Iraqi Government whom UNMOVIC wishes to interview..."

The objective was to make the Iraqis appear to be the intransigent and unwilling party so committed to its own capacity to build "weapons of mass destruction" that it failed to agree to the terms necessary to end the sanctions that are killing untold numbers of its own people. The UN resolution consequently should be understood as a means to continue sanctions, not to end sanctions.

Copyright © 1999 workers.org