New U.S. Demand for Iraq Inspections in August
Signal Possible Election-Year Ploy
July 5, 2000
The new UN commission for weapons inspections UNMOVIC, is preparing to enter Iraq in August. According to Former U.S. Marine Intelligence Colonel and weapons inspector Scott Ritter the new demand for inspection is a Clinton administration election ploy to provoke an escalation of bombing and a new round of open warfare against the people of Iraq. Ritter told the British newspaper The Independent yesterday that the inspection team clearly had no realistic chance of being allowed into Iraq in August. Ritter was a member of the UNSCOM inspection team that was ejected from Iraq in December of 1998 after carrying out spy operations in collusion with the CIA and collecting target data for U.S. and British military forces.
"The new commission, UNMOVIC, will not be allowed into Iraq in August, three months away from the election," said Ritter. "You have got a Vice President, Al Gore, trailing behind in the polls, and what better way to appear tough and switch attention away to a so-called foreign threat." Gore has said in campaign speeches that he had favored the continuation of all-out war against Iraq in 1998 when President Clinton moved to de-escalate the conflict. Ritter added that he expects the U.S. to draft Britain into the action as well, "to give it the appearance of something multilateral," since the UN Security Council is unlikely to approve military action against Iraq.
Earlier this week, former UNSCOM head Richard Butler also predicted another U.S.-Iraq crisis. In a June 23 interview with Melbourne, Australian newspaper The Age, Butler echoed Ritter by predicting that "we'll probably have another Iraqi crisis on our hands" sometime in the next six weeks.
"These statements indicate that Iraqi lives may once again become cannon fodder for U.S. politics," said Sara Flounders of the International Action Center. "The horrible irony here is that the U.S. has been waging a genocidal war on Iraq non-stop for the past ten years and the media has suppressed this." Flounders said that statement like these from political figures with an insider perspective on U.S. aggression against Iraq were an alarm call for the anti-war and anti-sanctions movement. "It's clear that a major attack may happen very soon," she said, "and we have to be ready to mobilize opposition to this further aggression. The UNSCOM team conducted over 9,000 inspections in Iraq without finding any significant violations. Their expulsion was the Clinton administration's excuse for its 1998 renewal of hostilities against Iraq. Since then more than 21,600 U.S. and British warplanes have flown into Iraqi airspace. In addition to enforcing sanctions that have killed over a million Iraqis since 1990, there has been a bombing or missile attack on an average of once every three days. Now a further escalation is being planned.”
The Pentagon claims that it is merely patrolling the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, and that the bombings are in response to radar locks from Iraqi anti-aricraft weapons. Their targets are mostly civilian infrastructure, including schools, roads, food, power and water facilities, and the oil wells that provide Iraq's only source of income. Pentagon officials admit that there is no strategic relationship between Iraqi "aggression" and these reprisal attacks. None of these activities have the approval of the UN Security Council.
Ken MacLeish, Sarah Sloan
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