The following is an archived copy of a message sent to a Discussion List run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
Views expressed in this archived message are those of the author, not of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
[Main archive index/search] [List information] [Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq Homepage]
News, 10-15/01/03 (6) IRAQI/UN RELATIONS * Iraq's $40b embezzled, says ex-UN official * It is too early to consider attack on Iraq: Annan IMPLICATIONS OF WAR * Medical consequences of attacking Iraq * Forget the UN: Saddam Hussein is the best possible reason for liberating Iraq * Opposing War Is Good, But Not Good Enough * Plan: Tap Iraq's Oil * Sense in liberal portions * Logistics Delay Possible Iraq War Timetable - Paper * U.S. to Retain Baath Party in Post-Saddam Iraq * US may need over 350,000 troops in Iraq: Report IRAQI/UN RELATIONS http://www.dawn.com/2003/01/11/int2.htm * IRAQ'S $40B EMBEZZLED, SAYS EX-UN OFFICIAL by Ashraf Shad Dawn, 11th January DUBAI, Jan 10: A former official of the United Nations accused the world body of misappropriating $40 billion by using funds meant for Iraq's oil-for-food programme. Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary General who was the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad in 1998, says Iraq has sold $60 billion of oil under the programme but received less than $20 billion worth of food, medicine and other utility items. In an exclusive interview, given in Baghdad, to Dubai-based Gulf News, Halliday has blamed the world body for using oil-for- food programme, that destined to provide basic needs to Iraqi people, to "finance a large part of UN system. "I think the Iraqi experience under UN auspices is so incredibly bad, in my view genocidal, that the UN has done irreparable damage to itself," he was quoted as saying in Gulf News. He explained where the $40 billion could have disappeared: "It has gone into Kuwait, to compensation, to pay for Unscom, Unmovic, and military inspections. It has gone to finance the UN presence in this country with its 4,500 personnel. It is paying for some body's establishment in New York, Paris and Rome," he retorted. He described the situation as ridiculous that Iraqis are treated as refugees in their own country and has to feed themselves with their own money. Last week the same newspaper had reported similar accusation by quoting Iraqi commercial sources that blamed UN of embezzling $23 billion by "manipulating the $60 billion oil-for food programme." Dr. Mohammed Mehdi Saleh, Iraqi Trade Minister had charged that the UN committee, that oversees the Iraqi boycotts, "was subject to direct intervention by the American Deputy" of the committee and had accused the committee of stopping contracts worth of $17 billion during the past six years. Denis Halliday has also severely criticized the Security Council describing it as "a body out of control and corrupted by the US." http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_138456,0005.htm * IT IS TOO EARLY TO CONSIDER ATTACK ON IRAQ: ANNAN Hindustani Times, 15th January Press Trust of India, United Nations, January 15: Iraq need not be attacked and can be disarmed peacefully if the international community maintains pressure on Saddam Hussein and inspectors continue their job aggressively, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said. "I am both optimistic and hopeful that if we handle the situation right, and the pressure on the Iraqi leadership is maintained and the inspectors continue to work as aggressively as they are doing, we may be able to disarm Iraq peacefully, without need to resort to war," Annan said. It is too early to consider any military offensive against Baghdad when the inspectors are "just getting up to full speed," he told reporters on Tuesday. Annan said he was opposed to unilateral military action by the US and Britain against Iraq and favoured a second resolution by the Security Council authorising force if inspectors are unable to do their job. "If disarmament were to succeed, that is the end of the story. Otherwise the Council will have to face up its responsibility," he said. "Extremely worried" about possible impact of war on the Iraqi population, Annan said the UN was drawing up plans to meet the requirements of a large number of refugees needing assistance in case of military action against Iraq. There was also some thinking about UN role in the post-conflict structures building, he said, adding currently the focus was on the humanitarian aspect. The UN has experience in building post-conflict structures including in Afghanistan, Kosovo and East Timor he said, adding, however in Iraq's case "we are not assuming anything." The inspectors would prefer proactive cooperation from Baghdad, he said, adding this would be among the topics that are expected to come up when Chief Inspector Hans Blix and Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei go to Baghdad late this week. "If there are unforeseen developments that make the Council determine that there is a breach, then there should be serious consequences" but the situation has not reached that point, Annan said. Asked whether US' military build-up has been helpful, Annan said there is "no doubt" that the American pressure was responsible for getting the inspectors back, something which the UN tried unsuccessfully for four years after they left Iraq in December, 1998. "Iraq agreed to allow them in four days after American President George W Bush called for their return in his speech to the UN General Assembly in September last," he added. But distinction has to be made between pressure and the threat of force and the actual use of force, he said and cautioned the Bush administration against its doctrine of pre-emptive strikes in cases of terrorism, describing it as a "murky area." IMPLICATIONS OF WAR http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/10/10/ED44718.DTL * MEDICAL CONSEQUENCES OF ATTACKING IRAQ by Helen Caldicott San Francisco Chronicle, 10th January As the Bush administration prepares to make war on the Iraqi people -- and make no mistake, it is the civilian population of that country and not Saddam Hussein who will bear the brunt of the hostilities -- it is important that we recall the medical consequences of the last Gulf War. That conflict was, in effect, a nuclear war. During the 1991 Gulf War, the United States deployed hundreds of tons of weapons, many of them anti-tank shells made of depleted uranium 238. This material is 1.7 times more dense than lead, and hence when incorporated into an anti-tank shell and fired, it achieves great momentum, cutting through tank armor like a hot knife through butter. What other properties does uranium 238 possess? First, it is pyrophoric: When it hits a tank at high speed it bursts into flames, producing tiny aerosolized particles less than 5 microns in diameter that are easily inhalable into the terminal air passages of the lung. Second, it is a potent radioactive carcinogen, emitting a relatively heavy alpha particle composed of 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Once inside the body -- either in the lung if it has been inhaled, or in a wound if it penetrates flesh, or ingested since it concentrates in the food chain and contaminates water -- it can produce cancer in the lungs, bones, blood, or kidneys. Third, it has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, meaning the areas in which this ammunition was used in Iraq and Kuwait during Gulf War will remain effectively radioactive for the rest of time. Children are 10 to 20 times more sensitive to the effects of radiation than adults. My fellow pediatricians in the Iraqi town of Basra, for example, are reporting an increase of 6 to 12 times in the incidence of childhood leukemia and cancer. Yet because of the sanctions imposed upon Iraq by the United States and United Nations, they have no access to drugs or effective radiation machines to treat their patients. The incidence of congenital malformations has doubled in the exposed populations in Iraq where these weapons were used. Among them are babies born with only one eye or missing all or part of their brain. The medical consequences of the use of uranium 238 almost certainly did not affect only Iraqis. Some U.S. veterans exposed to it are reported, by at least one medical researcher, to be excreting uranium in their urine a decade later. Other reports indicate it is being excreted in their semen. (The fact that almost one-third of the American tanks used in Desert Storm were themselves made of uranium 238 is another story, for their crews were thereby exposed to whole-body gamma radiation.) Would these effects have surprised the U.S. authorities? No, for incredible as it may seem, the American military's own studies prior to Desert Storm warned that aerosol uranium exposure under battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neurocognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects. Do George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld understand the medical consequences of the 1991 war and the likely health effects of the next one they are now planning? If they do not, their ignorance is breathtaking; even more incredible though -- and alas, much more likely -- is that they do understand, but do not care. Helen Caldicott has devoted the last 25 years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age. NO URL (Sent to list and the Independent's website was down when I looked for it) * FORGET THE UN: SADDAM HUSSEIN IS THE BEST POSSIBLE REASON FOR LIBERATING IRAQ by Johann Hari The Independent, 10th January Why do we need evidence of a stash of anthrax or sarin to convince us that Saddam, the gasser of the Kurds and butcher of Baghdad, should be overthrown? Hans Blix and his UN inspection team issued an interim report in New York yesterday. They have found no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), so war, it seems, will not come this month. Why does this make so many of us on the left relax? What has become of the left which argued that we had a moral responsibility to defend our fellow humans from fascist dictators? By taking the route of hunting for WMD, and only accepting the overthrow of Saddam on those grounds, we have made a crucial mistake. The greatest possible evidence for this is that, while some in the West celebrate today, the Iraqi people will be weeping. Who, you may be asking incredulously, would want their country to be bombed? What would make people want to risk their children being blown to pieces? I wondered this too until, last October, I spent a month as a journalist seeing the reality of life under Saddam Hussein. Strangely, it's the small details which remain in the memory, even now, three months later. It's the pale, sickly look that would come over people's faces when I mentioned Saddam. It's the fact that the Marsh Arabs - a proud, independent people who have seen their marshes drained and been "relocated" to tiny desert shacks - are forced to hang a small, menacing picture of Saddam in their new "homes". It's the child wearing a T-shirt saying "Yes, yes, yes to Daddy Saddam". If Britain were governed by such a man, I would welcome friendly bombs - a concept I once thought absurd. I might be prepared to risk my own life to bring my country's living death to an end. Most of the Iraqi people I encountered clearly felt the same. The moment they established that I was British, people would hug me and offer coded support (they would be even more effusive towards the Americans I travelled with). They would explain how much they "admire Britain - British democracy, yes? You understand?" This evidence is, admittedly, anecdotal, and I would be wary of supporting a war based simply on these impressions. But now there is concrete evidence. The International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based independent think-tank, by no means pro-war, conducted extensive interviews with people in Iraq last autumn, and, as their report explains, "a significant number of those Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candour, expressed their view that, if [regime change] required an American-led attack, they would support it. The notion of leaving the country's destiny in the hands of an omnipotent foreign party has more appeal than might be expected - and the desire for a long-term US involvement is higher than expected." There are important conditions, however, attached to Iraqis' support for the war. They expect it to be quick - one person I spoke to said that "the few soldiers who fight for him will be defeated in a weekend" - as happened in 1991. The extremely unlikely scenario of a protracted, Vietnam-style conflict would almost certainly lead to a change in their attitudes. And, crucially, the Iraqi people expect the Americans to help to rebuild their country after the war. This, surely, is what we should be marching in the streets for - not to oppose a war that will remove one of the world's worst dictators, but to secure a guarantee from Blair and Bush that after the conflict we will stay and help its people to build a peaceful, federal, democratic Iraq. Those who scorn this possibility, either with the racist notion that Arabs are incapable of democracy or with a fashionable cynicism about political progress, should remember that their sneers could equally have been directed towards post-Second World War Japan and Germany. The Japanese had no history of democracy or freedom, and the Germans had only the memories of the disastrous Weimar Republic, but American occupations oversaw their transformations into successful democracies. We must campaign, then, to make sure that Iraq becomes a Japan or Germany and not an Afghanistan, bombed and then starved of the funds it needs to establish stability and basic human rights for its people. There is more hope for Iraq because its people are highly educated, it has a developed infrastructure, and because it would be morally obscene if the profits from Iraq's vast oil reserves did not go towards rebuilding the country. It is time that, in light of the ICG report, we in the West admit that we have misunderstood the Iraqi people's position. We have been acting as though an attack on Saddam would be the beginning of another hideous ordeal for the population, the interruption of an otherwise peaceful situation. In fact, as the ICG report explains, "for the Iraqi people, who since 1980 have lived through a devastating conflict with Iran, Desert Storm, sanctions, international isolation and periodic US-UK aerial attacks, a state of war has existed for two decades already". Do not imagine that if we fail to act, the Iraqi people will be left in peace - quite the opposite. We can act to shorten their suffering. Nor can we criticise this war, as figures such as Tariq Ali have, as an "imperial adventure". The Iraqi people are already living under imperial occupation. The 80 per cent of the population who are Shia Muslims live under the imperialistic rule of the minority Sunni clique with whom they feel no common identity. You might be thinking that if they are all Iraqi, it is not foreign occupation; if so you are misunderstanding the nature of Iraq. This is an artificial state created by Europeans in 1921 at the end of the Ottoman Empire, comprising many divergent groups (Kurds, Shia, Sunni, Christian, Jews and more). We have no reason to believe that they now have a collective national identity, so to be ruled by a Sunni is indeed akin to being under foreign occupation. Would you rather be ruled indefinitely by a totalitarian imperial ruler who will cling to power down to the last bunker, or a temporary American imperial ruler which might offer a democratic and stable future? If your hatred of Dubya overwhelms your hatred of Saddam, then I sympathise - that is the reason why I too once viewed this war with dread and contempt - but I strongly suspect that if you were confronted with the reality of Saddam's Iraq, you would change your mind. Of course, forming an alliance with George Bush is an unpleasant experience, but we formed an alliance with Stalin to defeat Hitler. It is also possible that Bush, like his father, will betray the hopes of the people of Iraq - and we must campaign to prevent this. We do not need Bush's dangerous arguments about "pre-emptive action" to justify this war. Nor do we need to have the smoking gun of WMD. All we need are the humanitarian arguments we used during the Kosovo conflict to remove the monstrous Slobodan Milosevic - and this time, we can act in the certain (rather than probable) knowledge that the people being tyrannised will be cheering us on. http://www.progressive.org/jan03/jabar0103.html * OPPOSING WAR IS GOOD, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH by Faleh A. Jabar The Progressive, 3rd January Getting rid of the Ba'th regime in Iraq has been the cause of my life for almost a quarter of a century. Precisely when the United States found in the totalitarian regime a worthy ally to stem the tide of fundamentalist Khomeini forces in 1979, the leftist movement to which I belonged discovered, so belatedly, it was in the jaws of a rapacious Leviathan. I was a member of the Iraqi Communist Party and the editor of the paper's international and Arab affairs department. I hailed the collapse of the Shah of Iran as a portent of "the end of single-party systems." This did not endear me to the Iraqi government. We got a tip I was blacklisted, and I had to leave in less than six hours! I flew to Beirut on a sunny Sunday afternoon in October 1978 to avoid the horrible fate that thousands of my colleagues had met: torture, rape, or assassination. You had either to be with the Ba'th or you were against it. For a decade or so, we lived like global underground nomads, changing countries, dialects, names, and passports, fake or otherwise. More than 200,000 Iraqis--mostly intellectuals and professionals from the left, liberal, or Kurdish nationalist currents--crossed the border. The world took no notice. Why should it have? I took solace in the writings of German intellectuals who sought refuge outside beleaguered Europe under the Nazi rule. New vocabulary entered our lexicon: exile, identity, alienation, and angst. These were accentuated by a sense of weightlessness, that unbearable lightness of being. New layers of emigrants inflated our ranks to reach an estimated 3.5 million Iraqis in exile in the late 1990s--the crème of the nation. In London, my last home base, aged liberal politicians from the monarchy socialize with middle-aged leftists or rub shoulders with young disillusioned Ba'thists who seek asylum, unified by a sense of loss and desperation. As a young man, Saddam Hussein admired Hitler's system of government. Stalin and his totalitarian model became Saddam's exemplars. Saddam tailored his system along Nazi and Stalinist lines, though it had a number of new features as well. In keeping with Nazi ideals, Iraq's Ba'th system had four main pillars: totalitarian ideology, single-party rule, a command economy (nominally socialist), and firm control over the media and the army. Unlike the Nazi model, the Ba'th version transformed Iraq's traditional tribes and clans into key state institutions. These groups still survive in rural provinces and outlying rural areas. Oil revenues were another cornerstone of the Ba'th system. Massive oil reserves and revenues provided the government with autonomous resources that reinforced its authoritarian tendencies and enabled it to build massive security services. Between 1968 and 1980, the proportionate size of the armed forces to the population rocketed from 3 per 1,000 to 60 per 1,000. Equipped with wealth and manpower, the Ba'th regime ruthlessly destroyed the organized movements of the left, the nationalist Kurds, and the liberal Shi'a movements. Affiliation with the single ruling Ba'th party was almost mandatory. No government employment, higher education, or business was available to nonparty groups or individuals. Playing along, the Westernized middle and upper classes took advantage of expanded opportunities and prospered during the oil boom in the late '70s. Their success exceeded all expectations, despite the restrictions of the command economy. In 1968, Iraq had fifty-three millionaire families; there were 800 such households in 1980, and some 3,000 by 1989. Salaried employees and property owners became powerful social forces. They did not owe their prosperity to a free market system; rather, they were dependent on government employment and contracts. Within the corridors of power and the newly ascendant social classes, tribal or kinship-based groups held strategic positions. A ruling class-clan rapidly developed and maintained a tight grip on the army, the Ba'th party, the bureaucracy, and the business milieus. As the Ba'th regime felt domestically confident, it began to look outward for regional supremacy. The Iraq-Iran war was an outcome of such grand designs. It soon depleted Iraq's human and material resources. In 1988, Iraq emerged from the eight years of war a military giant but an economic dwarf. Global waves of democratic change, above all the demise of single-party systems in Eastern Europe, aggravated the crisis. Reforms were offered but not delivered. Instead, Saddam pursued a new adventure to seize the King Solomon treasures of Kuwait to remedy the woes of the previous war. The climax is known too well. Totalitarianism is a flawed system; it constantly produces its own antithesis. It starts with constructing impersonal institutions but ends up promoting a personality cult; it strives to homogenize the nation, but its assimilative techniques deepen ethnic and cultural cleavages, ripping the fabric of the nation apart; its command economy claims egalitarianism as its ideal, but it actually widens the gap between the rich and the poor, creating crony capitalism; it claims to embrace lofty ideals of progress, yet it destroys civil associations and strives to retrieve outdated traditional value systems; it gives obsessive priority to regime security but actually endangers national security. Such is the story of Iraqi totalitarianism. Iraq's totalitarian system has been a menace to its own people, the region, and the world at large. Leaving the monster in its place is an invitation to future catastrophe. This may sound like an endorsement of the war camp. Not at all. Warmongering is as shortsighted as philanthropic pacifism. The former deliberately neglects the possibilities of a political solution to the problem; the latter does not recognize the existence of the problem. Both are locked in an ideological cage. Warmongering comes largely from the evangelical right, i.e., the new conservatism that imposes a clash-of-civilizations formula on world politics. The tragic events of 9/11 provided an ideal backdrop to Donald Rumsfeld's "leaning forward" argument for aggression. Perhaps the swift success scored by the United States in removing the fundamentalist Taliban regime was--and still is--a catalyst for further experiments in "surgical" removals. But an invasion of Iraq may well prove too costly or degenerate into chaos. The demise of the totalitarian regime, however welcome, will involve and unleash latent, uncontrollable institutional and social forces beside which fantasy will pale. A civil war may begin nobody knows where and end up in nobody knows what. A palace coup might be convenient for the U.S. Administration, but it would be another tragedy for the Iraqi people. War is as pernicious as totalitarianism. Both breed violence and mayhem. Opposing the war in itself is good but not good enough. Letting the Leviathan off the hook is a grave mistake for which we will pay sooner rather than later. Opposing war, which is an instrument of politics, should not lead us to forget the crux of the things political. It is not weapons of mass destruction that count most; what really counts is the political system that controls them. Ignoring this fact by the forces of peace simply serves the war camp. Dozens of nations have chemical and biological weapons. None has deployed them, except Saddam's regime, first against the Iranian forces, later against Iraqi civilians. Governments should be held responsible for such crimes. Ironically, the United States let Saddam get away with no punishment for the actual deployment of chemical and biological weapons back in 1988, but it is now adamant about confronting him for a possible deployment of such weapons in the future. This is the logic of preemption. Yet there is no law, domestic or international, that permits a prosecutor to go after an ex-convict for a future, would-be offense. There is every law to bring a culprit to trial for actually breaching human norms in the first place. In all the decades of struggle and international lobbying, one approach has never been tried: a meaningful political process to disengage the various components of the regime from each other--above all, a drive to split the ruling class-clan. Here's what I think ought to happen. One, threaten Saddam with indictment. Two, give him an alternative for safe passage at the same time; this may create a crack in the ruling class clan. Three, send a list of thirty or so of his aides who are persona non grata and demand that they leave the country with him. This ought to convince the rest of the class-clan members that they are not threatened en masse--only those who were most responsible for the offenses of the regime. Four, encourage this class-clan to oust Saddam into exile and sweeten the deal by offering a mini-Marshall plan. This mini-Marshall plan would be made available provided power was transferred to a civilian, interim government. Such continued pressure, a political onslaught, should be backed by threat of force. A few warning shots may well be sufficient. This would help split the ruling group and embolden the people to take matters into their hands. A painfully slow process of regime disintegration has already been going on, and this political pressure would hasten the process along. An invasion, on the other hand, would wrench matters out of Iraqi hands and would risk untold consequences. By the way, a mini-Marshall Plan would prove far less costly than the projected $100 billion to $200 billion for the war and occupation. It would help rebuild the wrecked nation, and it could help further split the semi-monolithic ruling class-clan and encourage a meaningful change of hands at the top. This, then, could provide sufficient encouragement for a peaceful, or at least less costly, transformation. The present U.S. campaign would achieve nothing of this. It is a military crusade, with diplomacy as a reluctant sideshow. And it is not geared to the interests or participation of the Iraqi people. The reinception of the rule of law is a vital necessity for Iraq. It is also a precondition for any viable, emerging democracy. Such an eventuality will be the best safety net for regional peace and stability. Iraq is a vibrant nation that deserves such a future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Faleh A. Jabar is a research fellow at the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London. His recent publications include "Ayatollahs, Sufis, and Ideologues: State, Religion, and Social Movements in Iraq," and "Tribes and Power in the Middle East," both from Saqi Books, London, 2002. His forthcoming title is "The Shi'a Movement of Iraq," Saqi Books. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ny usoil0110,0,3745888.story?coll=ny%2Dnationworld%2Dheadlines * PLAN: TAP IRAQ'S OIL by Knut Royce Newsday, 10th January Washington -- Bush administration officials are seriously considering proposals that the United States tap Iraq's oil to help pay the cost of a military occupation, a move that likely would prove highly inflammatory in an Arab world already suspicious of U.S. motives in Iraq. Officially, the White House agrees that oil revenue would play an important role during an occupation period, but only for the benefit of Iraqis, according to a National Security Council spokesman. Yet there are strong advocates inside the administration, including the White House, for appropriating the oil funds as "spoils of war," according to a source who has been briefed by participants in the dialogue. "There are people in the White House who take the position that it's all the spoils of war," said the source, who asked not to be further identified. "We [the United States] take all the oil money until there is a new democratic government [in Iraq]." The source said the Justice Department has urged caution. "The Justice Department has doubts," he said. He said department lawyers are unsure "whether any of it [Iraqi oil funds] can be used or has to all be held in trust for the people of Iraq." Another source who has worked closely with the office of Vice President Dick Cheney said that a number of officials there too are urging that Iraq's oil funds be used to defray the cost of occupation. Jennifer Millerwise, a Cheney spokeswoman, declined to talk about "internal policy discussions." Using Iraqi oil to fund an occupation would reinforce a prevalent belief in the Mideast that the conflict is all about control of oil, not rooting out weapons of mass destruction, according to Halim Barakat, a recently retired professor of Arab studies at Georgetown University. "It would mean that the real ... objective of the war is not the democratization of Iraq, not getting rid of Saddam, not to liberate the Iraqi people, but a return to colonialism," he said. "That is how they [Mideast nations] would perceive it." The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of an occupation would range from $12 billion to $48 billion a year, and officials believe an occupation could last 1-1/2 years or more. And Iraq has a lot of oil. Its proven oil reserves are second in the world only to Saudi Arabia's. But how much revenue could be generated is an open question. The budget office estimates Iraq now is producing nearly 2.8 million a day, with 80 percent of the revenues going for the United Nations Oil for Food Program or domestic consumption. The remaining 20 percent, worth about $3 billion a year, is generated by oil smuggling and much of it goes to support Saddam Hussein's military. In theory that is the money that could be used for reconstruction or to help defer occupation costs. Yet with fresh drilling and new equipment Iraq could produce much more. By some estimates, however, it would take 10 years to fully restore Iraq's oil industry. Conversely, if Hussein torches the fields, as he did in Kuwait in 1991, it would take a year or more to resume even a modest flow. And, of course, it is impossible to predict the price of oil. Laurence Meyer, a former Federal Reserve Board governor who chaired a Center for Strategic and International Studies conference in November on the economic consequences of a war with Iraq, said that conference participants deliberately avoided the question of whether Iraq should help pay occupation or other costs. "It's a very politically sensitive issue," he said. "... We're in a situation where we're going to be very sensitive to how our actions are perceived in the Arab world." Meyer said officials who believe Iraq's oil could defer some of the occupation costs may be "too optimistic about how much you could increase [oil production] and how long it would take to reinvest in the infrastructure and reinvest in additional oil." An administration source said that most of the proposals for the conduct of the war and implementation of plans for a subsequent occupation are being drafted by the Pentagon. Last month a respected Washington think tank prepared a classified briefing commissioned by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's influential director of Net Assessment, on the future role of U.S. Special Forces in the global war against terrorism, among other issues. Part of the presentation recommended that oil funds be used to defray the costs of a military occupation in Iraq, according to a source who helped prepare the report. He said that the study, undertaken by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, concluded that "the cost of the occupation, the cost for the military administration and providing for a provisional administration, all of that would come out of Iraqi oil." He said the briefing was delivered to the office of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense and one of the administration's strongest advocates for an invasion of Iraq, on Dec. 13. Steven Kosiak, the center's director of budget studies, said he could not remember whether such a recommendation was made, but if it was it would only have been "a passing reference to something we did." Asked whether the Pentagon was now advocating the use of Iraqi oil to pay for the cost of a military occupation, Army Lt. Col. Gary Keck, a spokesman, said, "We don't have any official comment on that." NSC spokesman Mike Anton said that in the event of war and a military occupation the oil revenues would be used "not so much to fund the operation and maintaining American forces but for humanitarian aid, refugees, possibly for infrastructure rebuilding, that kind of thing." But the source who contributed to the Marshall report said that its conclusions reflect the opinion of many senior administration officials. "It [the oil] is going to fund the U.S. military presence there," he said. "... They're not just going to take the Iraqi oil and use it for Iraq's purpose. They will charge the Iraqis for the U.S. cost of operating in Iraq. I don't think they're planning as far as I know to use Iraqi oil to pay for the invasion, but they are going to use it to pay for the occupation." http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=42622003 * SENSE IN LIBERAL PORTIONS by Mike Wade The Scotsman, 13th January [.....] "There are a lot of people who owe their freedom to the Americans: the Japanese, the Germans, the Bosnians, the Kosovans, the Afghanis - thatıs five. By freedom, I donıt mean some absolute state of bliss, I just mean relief from tyranny." Again, it may be unpopular but he believes the United States has become the sole guarantor of order in the world. Anything else is fantasy. He assumes shopkeeperly mode: "You donıt like the Americans? How about the Chinese or the Russians? Oh, you donıt like either of those either. How about the Europeans? They canıt agree fish quotas in the North Sea, for Chrissake. "These are the cards weıve been dealt." But at this point in history, for Ignatieff the issue has become whether the Americans can continue to offer stability. And here - unlike Hitchens - he is ready to get off the bus to Iraq. Make no mistake, he says, this is a grade Aı odious regime. "But you can just make the case for intervention only if you put together two things - massive human rights violations internally and possession or perspective possession of WMD. Neither on their own is enough to justify coercive military force. To put the two together is like a binary weapon, it begins to justify intervention. "Am I blind to the humanitarian consequences of war? No. But we are talking about lesser evils. It is a very unpleasant set of choices between bad options." So he could accept intervention? Itıs only a qualified yes, for his doubts over Washingtonıs policy persist, particularly in their apparent belief that they can free oppressed Iraqis but leave ordinary Palestinians to their fate. "Itıs not the military problem thatıs difficult. The Americans are probably right to think they can knock this regime off quickly. But nobody is very good at nation building, and nobody knows how to get peace in the Middle East. Unless you put both of those together in the equation, itıs just making trouble. "This is not a kind of religious issue, an issue of anti-Americanism. It is an assessment of an agonising problem in the public policy of major states. Itıs not about the triumph of good over evil, itıs about whether you can use a lesser evil to avoid a greater." He recalls a visit to Gaza in the 1980s, a place ravaged by conflict. All that time and no peace - two decades later, when alleged terrorist cells are found in Edinburgh or North London, the failure to win a settlement in the Middle East causes agonies all over the world. "It took us far too long to realise these places are not on Mars. This stuff ends up, through a chain of consequences we donıt understand, to an Algerian cell by the Hibernian football ground. Or some bunch of weirdoes in Wood Green grinding out castor oil nuts." Exasperation takes hold: "Jesus Christ," he snaps. "The liberal in me understands this - we have surely made a lot of mistakes." http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030113/wl_nm/iraq_usa_ti metable_dc_1 * LOGISTICS DELAY POSSIBLE IRAQ WAR TIMETABLE - PAPER Yahoo, 13th January WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. troops being deployed to the Persian Gulf region would not be ready for a full-scale war against Iraq before late February or early March because of logistical complications involved in putting a large fighting force into place, USA Today reported on Monday. Citing Pentagon officials, the report said the timing of a possible U.S. invasion to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had been pushed back from mid-February mainly because of the complexity of putting a large ground force into the field and getting it geared up for war. A Pentagon spokesman was not immediately available for comment on the report. USA Today reported that another factor contributing to the delay in the timetable for a possible was Turkey had not agreed to host some 80,000 U.S. troops who would participate in an invasion of Iraq. "We need an answer," a defense official was quoted as saying. According to the report, the delayed timetable contributed to the Bush administration's willingness to accept extending U.N. weapons inspections beyond Jan. 27 -- the date when U.N. inspectors are scheduled to give a formal assessment of Iraqi compliance with U.N. disarmament demands. President Bush has said that he has made no decision on whether to invade Iraq over U.S. charges that Baghdad is developing weapons of mass destruction. But Jan. 27 has been viewed by some administration officials as a potential moment of decision on whether Iraq's cooperation has been sufficient to head off military action. http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=1/13/03&Cat=2&Num=024 * U.S. TO RETAIN BAATH PARTY IN POST-SADDAM IRAQ Tehran Times, 13th January TEHRAN -- The United States does not intend to destroy the Baath Party after the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, Japanese and American diplomatic sources said, according to the Japanese Kyodo News Agency. The United States is interested in utilizing the Baath Party's network in its democratization plans in the post-Saddam Iraq, the agency said. The TEHRAN TIMES for the first time reported a couple of weeks ago that the United States prefers a bloodless regime change in Iraq to a bloody war. The United States has handed over the plan to its allies, including Japan, as the main post war plan, Kyodo said, adding that the plan is under consideration by Washington because of its serious doubts about the ability of the opposition in managing the post-Saddam Iraq. In the beginning, the White House had pinned hopes on the Iraqi opposition. The idea of retaining the Baath Party without Saddam came to the fore because of the fear of Iran's influence through a Shiit uprising in the southern Iraq. The U.S. has come to the conclusion that the preservation of the party could help the democratization process in the post-war Iraq, it said. At the same time the U.S. sources announced a meeting of an Iraqi Shiite leader with the White House officials, including Zalmay Khalilzad. Meanwhile, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan told a visiting Turkish official that Turkey will be a major loser of the probable U.S. attacks on Baghdad. The loss will not be confined to economic losses, rather it will include political and security ones as well, he said. http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_137555,001300180001.htm * US MAY NEED OVER 350,000 TROOPS IN IRAQ: REPORT Hindustani Times, 14th January Agence France-Presse, Washington, January 14: The United States may need more than 350,000 troops to wage war in Iraq and subsequently occupy the country, which is more than the administration of President George W Bush thought the task would require, ABC News reported late on Monday. The report, which cited unnamed sources, came as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set in motion the largest surge of US forces in the Gulf region, with orders on Friday that will bring their total numbers there to more than 150,000 in coming weeks. More than 50,000 Marines, including most of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force based at Camp Pendleton, California, and a Marine Expeditionary Brigade from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, received deployment orders, Marine officials said. This military buildup may be just the start of what could end up involving more than 350,000 troops for a war and subsequent occupation of Iraq, the network reported. Sources said the National Guard and reserve callup -- 56,000 troops have already been mobilized -- could also grow well beyond the 263,000 used in the Persian Gulf War more than a decade ago, the report said. The number of troops will depend at least in part on how successful the United States is during the early phases of any war -- whether the Iraqis use chemical weapons and whether there is large-scale resistance, especially by civilians, according to ABC News. Officials said it is quite possible that the United States will be occupying part of Iraq and feeding millions of people while still fighting in other parts of the country, the report pointed out. These complexities notwithstanding, the Bush administration is preparing to take its case for war to the United Nations soon after January 27 -- no matter what UN weapons inspectors say in their report, ABC News reported. _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk