Don't bomb Iraq
Don't bomb Iraq
Will McMahon, Hackney North and Stoke Newington CLP, argues that key motives for the latest US attack on Iraq are to send a message to other world powers and test new technologies.
At a recent public meeting in the House of Commons one speaker from the floor put the matter very succinctly. He said that you can't rain down ethical bombs on the people of Iraq. Yet this is precisely what the Labour Government is trying to persuade the public that the war against Iraq will mean.
As Iraqi citizens "duck and cover" in response to more bombings any notion that Labour's foreign policy has an ethical dimension can be rejected. The attack on the people of Iraq only serves to highlight the rank opportunism and cynicism of a Labour leadership which chose with such gusto to ban landmines in the name of civilian casualities and now with equal vigour joins the US in raids that will surely kill Iraqi civilians.
Yes, Saddam is a repressive and murderous dictator, ask the Kurds or the marsh Arabs; and yes -- he probably has the capacity for chemical and biological warfare -- we should know, we gave it to him -- but none of these issues will be addressed by outside military intervention. In fact it is not these issues that the bombing is about at all.
The Iraqis sat in their air raid shelters are not the only one who are supposed to get the message. Washington hopes that the bombs will be heard in Beijing, Moscow and throughout the Middle East. All of the scare-mongering about Iraq's military potential conceals the real fears of western military planners.
Having supplied repressive regimes with the military wherewithal to keep control of oil fields for western multi-nationals for the best part of the twentieth century, planners in Washington are now genuinely worried that a mixture of indigenous expertise and military exchanges with the Russians and the Chinese will create regional powers who can resist plans for global dominance of the United States in the 21st century.
Military journals are focusing on just that technical problem. The latest issue of Janes International Defence Review (January 1998) carries two lengthy articles on the problem as military planners see it. The first, titled "Adding new punch to cruise missiles" begins thus "Earth, rock and concrete are cheap and readily available. This fact is not lost on what the west perceives as the rogue states [that] protect their most valuable military assets by burying them or tunnelling them into mountains.".
The issue for the US and UK is how do you destroy command, communication and control centres if they are deep under ground? Dr. Strangelove had the answer: you build a bigger bomb. These days big bombers with bigger conventional bombs -- no matter how stealthy -- are expensive and can be shot down by increasingly sophisticated air-defences. Now they reckon they have the answer -- adding warheads specialised for the job to long range cruise missiles. Their only problem is that they need to test them to see if they work before they really need them -- this is where the people of Iraq come in.
The second article on "Theatre Ballistic Missiles" (TBMs) points to the fact that, curiously enough, more countries are acquiring TBMs and that the US Navy is now busily engaged in working out how to knock them out of the sky. Military planners expect that by the year 2020 "hypothetical states" in North Africa and the Middle East will have the capacity to drop TBMs on London, Berlin and Paris.
Already there are US warships wandering up and down the Mediterranean tracking Syrian TBM test flights and simulating knocking them out. The same is going on off the coast of Taiwan where the Chinese Government has been testing M9 TBMs.
The beauty of both systems for the US is that they are naval based and so can protect "American Interests" across the globe without either having to deploy ground troops or the tactical nuclear threat for the time being. For the Americans such warfare is called "painless".
As soon as Iraq has been blasted back into the dark ages by the civilised west the guns of US diplomacy will turn unerringly towards Tehran because if there is any serious threat to the US dominance of the Middle East, it comes from the rapidly growing axis between Iran, China and Russia. It is in this perspective that the attack on Iraq must be viewed.
If this sounds a bit apocalyptic then that's perhaps because not now, but maybe a decade down the road, the bombing of Iraq will be seen for what it may well be -- the opening guns of World War Three. No one has yet to show that free-market liberal democracies are not prepared for global war to defend their vital interests. As Andrew Murray puts it in his book Flashpoint: World War Three, these days, as in the past, "Capitalism means war".
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