THE PUSH TO WAR

George W. Bush and Co. are pushing ahead with their vindictive drive to war with Iraq, which perhaps presages the most dangerous period for world peace in several generations. The United States seems disinclined to listen to voices of reason from around the world.

JOSEPH HELLER, the author of the epochal anti-war novel Catch 22, perhaps had it right. Former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he has one of his characters say, was no Metternich or Bismarck, benign statesmen who sought recourse to violence only in situations of dire necessity. Rather, in the eagerness with which he visited death and destruction upon the innocent in diverse corners of the globe, he was "an odious schlump who made war gladly".

What the recently deceased Heller would say about the crew of war-mongers that runs the U.S. today must remain a matter of speculation. But from various corners of the world, ordinary and not-so-ordinary people have begun speaking their minds about the war preparations in the U.S., which perhaps presage the most dangerous period for world peace in several generations. And for all that they have to say, the U.S. seems discinclined to listen. It takes something that departs very sharply from the terms of accepted political discourse for the U.S. to sit up and take notice.

Faux references to the Second World War have been a rhetorical staple in the course of the U.S. rush to war. The war-mongers derisively referred to as the chicken-hawks by those who know what war means have invariably been claiming the mantle of the righteous coalition that confronted the Nazi menace in the Second World War. Their persistent evasion of logic, however, suggested to many people, that they had got the analogy wrong. And as the campaigning for the German national elections closed, the country's Justice Minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, made bold to invert the analogy. The war hysteria in the U.S. was a transparent ploy by the George Bush administration to distract attention from domestic problems, she said. It was, in this sense, very much akin to the strategy that Adolf Hitler adopted in pre-Second World War Germany.

Having mentioned the ummentionable, the German Minister retreated into a defensive shell. No, she was at pains to emphasise, she had not compared the personalities of U.S. President George Bush and Hitler, only their strategies of mobilisation. No, she would not withdraw her statement, since she had not said anything that should cause offence.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who has seen his fortunes soar since he took an unequivocal stand against U.S. war preparations, was categorical: nobody who compared the President of an allied nation with a criminal would have a place in his Cabinet. He went no further, neither demanding the Minister's resignation nor offering any apologies of his own.

AS this controversy raged on one side of the Atlantic, the U.S. administration was putting the final touches on a resolution it planned to send to Congress, seeking authorisation to ''use all means'' to enforce relevant United Nations resolutions on Iraq, defend the "national security interests" of the U.S. and "restore international peace and security in the region".

The phrasing of the resolution was preceded by truly bizarre rhetorical convolutions, as different segments of the Bush administration sought to block any threatened intrusion of reason or any possible drift towards moderation. And the resolution bore the imprint of all the arrogance and the dissimulation that the preceding debate had reflected.

Among other things, Bush's resolution states that "Iraq remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability". The Iraqi regime is also alleged to be "actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability". These assertions fly in the face of the finding by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), recorded as far back as 1998, that Iraq had been substantially stripped of its nuclear weapons capability, leaving only a few residual issues for resolution. They are also in contradiction to the repeated assertions by Scott Ritter, who led some of the most intrusive inspections in Iraq before his summary departure from the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (Unscom) in 1998.

When disagreements arise on matters of fact, it might seem a reasonable course to verify. The concession made by Iraq agreeing to permit the unconditional return of U.N. weapons inspectors to its territory, was in this respect a much needed breakthrough but not so for the U.S. In his letter to the U.N. membership, read before the General Assembly by Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq repeated this unconditional offer: "I hereby declare before you that Iraq is clear of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. If there are anyone amongst you who might still worry that the fabrications announced by American officials about Iraq may possibly be true, our country is ready to receive any scientific experts accompanied by politicians you choose to represent any one of your countries to tell us which places and scientific and industrial installations they would wish to see."

What seemed to most audiences to be a constructive basis on which to proceed, was dismissed with venomous contempt by the U.S. administration. With the theological finality that the Far Right has made its characteristic stamp, U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney rejected the offer, ostensibly because he "knew" as a "lie" the assertion that Iraq was free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The boot, though, was on the other foot. It was the U.S. President who had been caught out on numerous occasions as either a serial dissembler or a sloppy and inattentive judge of material evidence. Shortly before opening his three-hour summit meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on September 7, Bush quoted a 1998 report by the IAEA which purportedly said that Iraq was only six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. What the report in fact said was that in 1991 Iraq may have been six months to four years away from nuclear capability, but that this had been completely neutralised by the subsequent regime of inspections.

Bush and Blair, pressing hard on the mystique and the propaganda advantage conferred by classified data, also referred to certain satellite photographs indicating a reconstitution of WMD capabilities by Iraq. But Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA and designated chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic: see box) the successor body to Unscom was quick to puncture that bubble. All that the satellite pictures indicated, said Blix, was that the facilities that were bombed by U.S. and British warplanes during a four-day campaign in December 1998 had been rebuilt. Shortly after a meeting with members of the U.N. Security Council, at which the possible schedule for resuming weapons inspections was reportedly discussed, Blix was decidedly modest in his claims. Satellite imagery could point his team towards potential sites for inspection. They could not give any definitive proof of malevolent intent by the Iraqi regime.

Other elements in the pastiche of falsehood that the U.S. administration has put before Congress for its rubber stamp merit attention. The resolution asserts, for instance, that Iraq has "demonstrated its continuing hostility toward and willingness to attack the United States" by, among other things, "firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and coalition armed forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council".

The reference here is to the continuing provocations by U.S. and British war-planes that routinely undertake air patrols in southern and northern Iraq, bombing indiscriminately and with impunity. Iraq's badly degraded air defences are occasionally known to put up token resistance, since the so-called "air exclusion zones" mandated by the U.S. and the U.K. have no legitimacy. They were imposed without the authorisation of the U.N. by these two countries in 1991, shortly after the Gulf war. France, which was a reluctant partner in the enterprise, opted out in 1998.

As part of routine practice, the White House circulated detailed briefing notes among political allies and official spokespersons, shortly before Bush made his September 12 speech to the U.N. General Assembly. These notes outlined the responses that could be delivered to mediapersons who breached rules of etiquette and asked the awkward questions. "Al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan are known to be in Iraq," said Bush before the U.N. To the expected question about the identity of these terrorists, the official response was: "We know there are Al Qaeda figures in Iraq. We cannot be more specific than that".

This highly non-specific piece of information, verging on fiction, finds a place in the war resolution that the U.S. President has sent to Congress. And the manner in which the Bush administration has chosen to block debate on the issue is another index of the defiance of reason in its push to war.

Observers in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq have reported that in the situation of feudal anarchy that has followed the withdrawal of the central administration, elements of the Al Qaeda seem to have established firm roots there. These are drawn as much from the local Kurdish population as from neighbouring Arab provinces. The proposition was recently put to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi regime could not do much about the situation in the regions that it exercised little authority over. Rumsfeld's reply was astounding: "Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator and it is inconceivable that he cannot be in control of everything that happens in his country."

Immediately after the September 11 attacks last year, Rumsfeld is known to have scrawled a memo to his inner circle of aides, urging them to find ways to use the retributive rage of the moment to target "SH'' apart from "UBL''. The need to go after Saddam Hussein as well as Osama (alternately spelt Usama) bin Laden was cast in terms of the Iraqi President's alleged support for the Al Qaeda network. Ideologues and hacks of the Far Right, notably Richard Perle, James Woolsey and Laura Mylroie, had soon assembled the evidence of Iraqi complicity. There was only one catch, though: all of it proved bogus. Even the loyal Czech government, after promising to unearth evidence of contacts in Prague between Iraqi intelligence and the September 11 mastermind Mohammad Atta, failed to deliver.

This was no more than a minor inconvenience in the U.S.' vindictive drive to war with Iraq. On the evidence of the briefing notes circulated prior to Bush's speech, it is known that the President intended to tell the General Assembly that he had already made up his mind to attack Iraq. This telling locution was, however, withdrawn in the speech as it was delivered, reflecting a tussle between different factions of the U.S. administration that went down to the wire.

Till a few days before the speech, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was insisting on a continuing role for weapons inspectors in Iraq. He told the British Boradcasting Corporation in an interview: "The President has been clear that he believes weapons inspectors should return... Iraq has been in violation of these many U.N. resolutions for most of the last 11 or so years... So as a first step, let us see what the inspectors find, send them back in."

Around the same time, Cheney was expressing complete disdain for inspections, saying that they would only provide "false comfort". It was clear, he said, that Iraq continued to be in possession of WMD, thus making the case for pre-emptive military action virtually irrefutable.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer added his own little voice to the chorus of incoherence, dismissing suggestions that Iraq would allow inspectors back in. He said: "Iraq changes positions on whether it will let the inspectors back in more often than Saddam Hussein changes bunkers." Later he argued, rather incongruously, that Cheney and Powell had "spoken the same". "There is much ado about no difference," he said. When asked if the war plans would proceed even if Iraq did allow inspectors back in, he said: "The policy of the U.S. is regime change, with or without inspectors."

Rumsfeld was playing his own little tune, claiming that he was not sure that inspections would serve any purpose, since it was "unlikely" that Iraq would allow sufficiently vigorous inspections. In testimony before U.S. Congress, he insisted that the issue was not "inspections" but "disarmament", musing out aloud in response to a specific question that the latter objective could presumably be met if Saddam Hussein and his regime were to take themselves out of the way.

Using a carefully honed technique of getting back at the extremists who have persistently undermined his position, Powell put out a leak that he would consider four years in the Bush Cabinet as an adequate length of service. Veterans from earlier Democratic and Republican administrations were, meanwhile, urging the Bush team to get its act together and seek to achieve a degree of public coherence.

Bush's speech at the U.N. was in this context welcomed on all sides as that long delayed moment of clarity. But the effusion of public endorsement lasted precisely three days. Saudi Arabia, sensing the hot breath of the U.S.' growing displeasure, relented early, promising the use of military bases on its territory for strikes against Iraq if mandated by the U.N. Arab League mediators, anxious to avoid a conflagration in the region, weighed in with the advice that Iraq should accede to the resumption of weapons inspections. Seizing the moment of optimal impact, Iraq gave in.

The U.S. was now in the position of pressing for a fresh U.N. resolution to govern the renewed inspections. After insisting for months together that it could invade Iraq and initiate a "regime change" without U.N. authorisation, it was now manoeuvring to secure an instant mandate for war if the weapons inspections encountered the slightest obstruction. "Coercive inspections" was the new mantra floated weapons inspectors backed by massive U.S. military force, empowered to begin hostile actions without notice or warning. As of now three members of the Security Council and the overwhelming majority of global opinion remain opposed to the new stratagem. If they are to give in, it would in effect be, a new low in the U.N.'s rapid descent to irrelevance.

SEPTEMBER 11 was a day of solemnity and remembrance in the U.S. Bush paid tribute to those who had lost their lives last year when terror hit the U.S. out of a clear autumn sky. In the Chilean capital of Santiago,meanwhile, thousands marched on the streets to mark the 28th anniversary of the coup d'etat or "regime change" that had replaced a democratically elected government with a ruthless military dictatorship that killed, by official count, over 3,000 people the following year.

The occasion was flanked on either side by observances of events from the past that were seen in different quarters to have had a bearing on the cataclysm that struck the U.S. last year. On September 2, 2002, Israel and much of the U.S. media marked the 30th anniversary of the Munich Olympics Games raid and the massacre in which 11 Israeli athletes lost their lives. And on September 16, Lebanon observed the 20th anniversary of the massacre at the Sabra and Shattila refugee camps near Beirut, in which uncounted thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were slaughtered by Christian Phalangist militiamen operating under the benign oversight of the Israeli Defence Forces, and its commander in the Lebanon theatre, General Ariel Sharon.

As Powell plunged into the diplomacy that would secure for the U.S. the authority for war in Iraq, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was sending in his tanks and bulldozers to demolish every remnant symbol of Palestinian political autonomy. Having incarcerated the Palestinian population in their homes for years together, he was launching perhaps the climactic act in his vendetta against the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. His immediate predecessor Ehud Barak, though, had no time for the travails of the man with whom he had pursued peace negotiations for two years. He was too busy cheering on the U.S. in its war enterprise. "President Bush's policy of ousting Saddam Hussein creates an extraordinary standard of strategic and moral clarity", he wrote in The New York Times. He added: "Millions in the Middle East, including many Iraqis, are praying that the in-depth, genuine and so typically American public debate that is developing before our eyes about Iraq will not dilute this clarity".

About the only element of clarity that the rest of the world could discern in the situation was that the Iraqi people are damned either way, as the Palestinians have been for five decades. The U.S. imperial diktat, enforced for so long through regional proxies and detached techniques of economic and diplomatic coercion, now requires a massive military incursion into the heart of the Arab world.