Nieuwe pagina 1

- IRAQ: Joint NGO Statement Signed by Save the Children UK, CARE International UK, Christian Aid, CAFOD, Tearfund, Help Age International, Islamic Relief and 4Rs. (23/9/2002)

- California Federation of Teachers Resolution Against War on Iraq (21/9/2002)

- WHERE: AL-MANSOUR PEDIATRIC WING, SADDAM TEACHING HOSPITAL- WHEN: 10AM, TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 24TH

- Diplomacy? If you want to know how George W Bush will go about getting international support for war, look at how his father did it 12 years ago. (19/9/2002)

- Bush Economic Aide Says Cost of Iraq War May Top $100 Billion

- SOS - By Eduardo Galeano

- MEDIA ALERT: MASS MEDIA STOKE THE FIRES OF WAR (18/9/2002)

- Will it be the war of the thieves? (17/9/2002)

- A semantic game by Scott Ritter (12/9/2002)

- Two Belgian deputies to visit Iraq on peace mission next week (13/9/2002)

- "Rambo" Bush does not scare Iraqis (13/9/2002)

- Iraq: Bush's Address 'Full of Lies' (13/9/2002)

- Syrian army chief says US wants to "impose hegemony" on Mideast (13/9/2002)

- Bush administration "the scariest" in history: Nobel Peace laureate (13/9/2002)

- US must go through UN before action on Iraq: China's Li (13/9/2002)

- Iraq says it helped Kurdish rebel leader fight Al-Qaeda terrorists (13/9/2002)

- Iraq would "teach US lesson" if it attacked, rejects Bush conditions: Aziz (13/9/2002)

- Security Council members start consultations on Iraq (13/9/2002)

- 3 Groups Already Squabbling Over Oil-Flush North Iraq Should Hussein Be Toppled. (12/09/2002)

- The US Media: A Weapon of Mass Deception (12/09/2002)

- Iraq says will repel any attack with knives, stones. (12/09/2002)

- Bush speech UN 12/9/2002

- THE SECRETARY-GENERAL KOFFI ANNAN ADDRESS TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY (12/9/2002)

- Arab League: Iraq Strike Would 'Open Gates of Hell' (5/9/2002)

- American warplanes attack an air defense target (5/9/2002)

- U.S. BUILDUP ESTIMATED AT 100,000 TROOPS, 1,000 MILITARY PLANNERS (4/9/2002)

- Iraq Opens Reported Weapons Site to Media (4/9/2002)

- MEDIA ALERT: HOW TO LEGITIMISE WAR - IRAQ AND THE BRITISH MEDIA (September 4, 2002)

- Iraq denies seeking nuclear weapons, calls for Arab volunteers (2/9/2002)

- Powell Keeps Low Profile on Iraq

Iraq States Its Case, By MOHAMMED ALDOURI (17/10/2002)

After so many years of fear from war, the threat of war and suffering, the people of Iraq and their government in Baghdad are eager for peace. We have no intention of attacking anyone, now or in the future, with weapons of any kind. If we are attacked, we will
surely defend ourselves with all means possible. But bear in mind that we have no nuclear or biological or chemical weapons, and we
have no intention of acquiring them.

We are not asking the people of the United States or of any member state of the United Nations to trust in our word, but to send the
weapons inspectors to our country to look wherever they wish unconditionally. This means unconditional access anywhere, including
presidential sites in accordance with a 1998 signed agreement between Iraq and the United Nations - an agreement that ensures respect for Iraq's sovereignty and allows for transparency in the work of the inspectors. We could never make this claim with such openness if we did not ourselves know there is nothing to be found.

Still, we continue to read statements by officials of the United States and the United Kingdom that it is not enough that Hans Blix,
head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, and his team of inspectors have unconditional access.
They say this is because the Iraqi government may be hiding weapons that will not be found, or is moving weapons from place to place, or is developing new weapons in roving vans or in underground locations.

The United Nations officials with whom our government has worked on these matters know that these concerns have no foundation. In December 1998, when the United Nations weapons inspection team left Iraq on the orders of Richard Butler, the chief United Nations arms inspector at the time, it had exhausted all possibilities after seven years of repeatedly examining all possible sites; only small discrepancies existed.

It is now widely conceded that Iraq possesses no nuclear weapons and that we could not develop them without building facilities that could be spotted by satellite. Since 1999, we have allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit Iraq. If it wishes, it
can inspect any building anywhere. The agency's inspectors will find nothing untoward.

Scott Ritter, who led many United Nations inspections, has said that he questions whether Iraq possesses biological weapons. Mr. Ritter also has been on CNN in recent months explaining that his inspection team destroyed plants that could produce chemical weapons. If these plants were reconstructed, Mr. Blix and his team would quickly find them out. Building such weapons costs billions of dollars and requires enormous facilities and huge power sources. The idea that such projects could be moved around in trucks or stashed away in presidential palaces stretches the bounds of imagination.

It is my belief that the American people are not aware of this history because, in my opinion and the opinion of my government, no
American political figure has been seriously interested in discussing these matters with our government. The United Nations was created in 1945 to provide a forum for nations in conflict to come together to work out their disagreements. It was designed expressly for the purpose of making the use of force an absolute last resort.

For more than 11 years, the people of Iraq have suffered under United Nations economic sanctions, which have been kept in place largely byAmerican influence. According to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, these sanctions have caused the death of more than 1.7 million of our citizens. The embargo has been so severe that we have been prevented from importing chemicals needed for our sewage, water and sanitation facilities.

At the same time, the last three American presidents have stated that these sanctions could not be lifted as long as our president, Saddam Hussein, remains the nation's leader.

Iraq is not a threat to its neighbors. It certainly is not a threat to the United States or any of its interests in the Middle East. Once
the United Nations inspection team comes back into my country and gets up to speed, I am confident that it will certify that Iraq has
no weapons of mass destruction - be they chemical, biological or nuclear. Such certification, we hope, will remove the shadow of war
and help restore peace between our nations.

Mohammed Aldouri is the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations.

IRAQ: Joint NGO Statement
Signed by Save the Children UK, CARE International UK, Christian Aid, CAFOD, Tearfund, Help Age International, Islamic Relief and 4Rs.

23 September 2002 - Based on the experience of our agencies and their partner organisations on the ground in Iraq we, the undersigned organisations, fear that a new war on Iraq risks deepening and extending the current humanitarian crisis: creating large numbers of civilian casualities and extending human suffering. We have serious concerns about a new war for the following reasons:

* There is a high possibility of large numbers of civilian casualties. Aerial bombardment, followed by the ground war that would be necessary to achieve the stated aim of some major powers of "regime change,' would place large numbers of civilians - particularly in densely populated urban areas - in grave danger.

* Years of war and sanctions have already created an extremely vulnerable population whose ability to cope with any additional hardship is very limited. This includes children, who make up almost half of Iraqi society, widows, the elderly and the poor. Child mortality rates have risen by 160 per cent under sanctions. According to UNICEF: 'If the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been 500,000 fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole during 1991-1998.' (UNICEF, 1999).

* Extensive and prolonged conflict risks undermining the essential supply of food and medicine to Iraqi civilians. The populations in the Kurdish North and the Centre/South already rely on monthly, imported food rations under the Oil-for-Food Programme. These rations last only three weeks on average. If the ration is cut in an emergency, monthly salaries of $3-$6 on average would be insufficient to purchase food from local markets. 30 per cent of children are already chronically malnourished (UNICEF, 2002). If the war is prolonged the risks of serious disruption of, and access to, local markets for essential food supplies will rise.

* Extensive and prolonged conflict would threaten key infrastructure. Water quality is already very poor for many Iraqis and the prime contributory cause of death for children. Risks of major health problems caused by further disruptions to water supplies and erosion of water quality would increase significantly if pumping stations and sewage treatment plants ceased functioning. Electricity infrastructure is vital for these installations, as well as for hospitals, but could become a military target - as occurred during the Gulf War - in any new conflict.

* Iraq already has approximately 700,000 internally displaced people. Increased conflict could lead to massive population displacement with catastrophic consequences if these people's access to food is cut off, or they find themselves trapped at closed borders. The heavily mined border not only poses a threat to those fleeing conflict, but will cause major impediments to providing humanitarian supplies from external sources. A winter campaign would add to humanitarian problems, as this region would be heavily snowbound.

* Conflict has wider humanitarian implications. The wider repercussions of war will be felt throughout the region. We are concerned that the war could destabilise the region, and sow the seeds of future humanitarian crises.

We urge the British government not merely to take effective steps to avoid exacerbating the current humanitarian crisis, but to seek ways to improve the humanitarian situation, while pursuing a diplomatic solution to the current crisis. The current focus on the government's 'dossier of evidence,' weapons inspectors and Iraqi disarmament should not detract from the urgent need to address the humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding in Iraq for the past 12 years.

For more information contact:
* Carolyne Culver, Save the Children UK on 00 44 7976 374146
* Kaye Stearman, CARE International UK on 00 44 7788 106890
* Sue Bishop, Christian Aid on 00 44 7974 256726
* Martha Clarke, CAFOD on 00 44 7779 804254
* Sarah Graham-Brown, Help Age International on 00 44 20 8348 7924
* Adrian Sutton, Islamic Relief on 00 44 7773 784709
* Angela Freebury, 4Rs on 00 44 20 8667 1323

California Federation of Teachers Resolution Against War on Iraq

Passed by the CFT State Council on September 21, 2002

Whereas, the United States and Britain have been bombing Iraq on a virtually continuous basis since the end of the Gulf War, and

Whereas, the Bush administration has presented no credible evidence that Iraq has intentions of harming the citizens of this country or that Iraq presents a threat to the United States, and

Whereas, the Bush administration is seeking any pretext to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation, in violation of international law, and

Whereas, a war with Iraq would require the re-direction of vital resources and funds to a destructive, senseless, and illegal goal while
further strengthening an administration that has restricted the civil liberties of its citizens, and

Whereas, this administration is using the so-called "War on Terrorism" to distract the American people from the vital issues they confront,

Therefore, be it resolved that the California Federation of Teachers goes on record as strenuously opposing the Bush administration's march toward war with Iraq,

And be it further resolved that the California Federation of Teachers urge its members and affiliates to get involved with organizations
working toward stopping the Bush administration's march toward war with Iraq.

WHERE: AL-MANSOUR PEDIATRIC WING, SADDAM TEACHING HOSPITAL- WHEN: 10AM, TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 24TH

American Anti-War Activists to Distribute Medicines to Baghdad Hospitals

Baghdad, Sept. 24-American anti-war activists with the Iraq Peace Team arrived in Iraq Sunday and will be distributing medicines to the primary teaching hospital for Baghdad on Tuesday. The seven activists (Barbara Lubin, CA; Nathan Mauger, WA; Danny Muller, IL; Bill Quigley, LA; David Smith-Ferri, CA; Leah Wells, CA; Henry Williamson, SC) brought between US$20,000-$30,000 worth of medicines.

The medicines were purchased and donated in the US and Jordan, and will be given to the Al-Mansour Pediatric Wing of Saddam Teaching Hospital at 10 a.m. Included are antibiotics, prenatal vitamins, adult and children's vitamins, antihistamines, and chemotherapy, hypertension and anti-nausea medications. IV catheters, syringes, alcohol swabs, rubber gloves and other medical equipment will also be donated to the hospital.

Henry Williamson, a practicing paramedic, supervised the purchase of the most of the medicines. "We offer these medicines as a gift of peace in hope that alternatives to Bush's insatiable desire for war will be sought by all nations." he said. Williamson served three tours of duty in the Vietnam War as a combat medic and volunteered to serve in the Gulf War. He first traveled to Iraq in 1998. Williamson will be staying in Iraq for several months with Iraq Peace Team.

In addition to giving the hospital medicines, Iraq Peace Team activists will meet with doctors and patients and talk about what kind of supplies are needed in hospitals across Iraq. US/UN-imposed sanctions have devastated the Iraqi economy, and blocked necessary medical supplies from reaching the hospitals. As a result of sanctions, according to UN agencies, thousands of Iraqi children die each month from otherwise easily treatable illnesses.

Iraqi hospitals are trying to prepare for massive casualties from another US-led military assault on the country. "We are still lacking so
many items, and so many companies still refuse to make contracts with Iraq," said Dr. Louai Atif Kasha'a, director of Saddam Teaching Hospital.

"In this hospital, and this is a teaching hospital in the capital, we have a child die every day and sometimes two," said former administrator Dr. Mahmoud Mehi in December 2001. "Image what it is like outside the capital and in their rural areas?"

Iraq Peace Team is a project of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the sanctions on Iraq. The goal is to place hundreds of
international activists in major Iraqi cities before and during another attack. Activists will document and report on the humanitarian
consequences a new war would have on ordinary people living in Iraq.

Diplomacy? If you want to know how George W Bush will go about getting international support for war, look at how his father did it 12 years ago.

by John Pilger; New Statesman; September 19, 2002

The making of a United Nations fig leaf, designed to cover an Anglo-American attack on Iraq, has a revealing past. In 1990, a version of George W Bush's mafia diplomacy was conducted by his father, then president. The aim was to "contain" America's former regional favorite, Saddam Hussein, whose invasion of Kuwait ended his usefulness to Washington.

Forgotten facts tell us how George Bush Sr's war plans gained the "legitimacy" of a United Nations resolution, as well as a "coalition" of Arab governments. Like his son's undisguised threats to the General Assembly, Bush challenged the United Nations to "live up to its
responsibilities" and condone an all-out assault on Iraq. On 29 October 1990, James Baker, the secretary of state, declared: "After a long period of stagnation, the United Nations is becoming a more effective organisation."

Just as Colin Powell, the present secretary of state, is busily doing today, Baker met the foreign minister of each of the 14 member countries of the UN Security Council and persuaded the majority to vote for an "attack resolution" - 678 - which had no basis in the UN Charter.

It was one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the United Nations, and is about to be repeated. For the first time, the full UN Security Council capitulated to an American-led war party and abandoned its legal responsibility to advance peacefuland diplomatic solutions. On 29 November, the United States got its war resolution. This was made possible by a campaign of bribery, blackmail and threats, of which a repetition is currently under way, especially in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In 1990, Egypt was the most indebted country in Africa. Baker bribed President Mubarak with $14bn in "debt forgiveness" and all opposition to the attack on Iraq faded away. Syria's bribe was different; Washington gave President Hafez al-Assad the green light to wipe out all opposition to Syria's rule in Lebanon. To help him achieve this, a billion dollars' worth of arms was made available through a variety of back doors, mostly Gulf states.

Iran was bribed with an American promise to drop its opposition to a series of World Bank loans. The bank approved the first loan of $250m on the day before the ground attack on Iraq. Bribing the Soviet Union was especially urgent, as Moscow was close to pulling off a deal that would allow Saddam to extricate himself from Kuwait peacefully. However, with its wrecked economy, the Soviet Union was easy prey for a bribe. President Bush sent the Saudi foreign minister to Moscow to offer a billion-dollar bribe before the Russian winter set in. He succeeded. Once Gorbachev had agreed to the war resolution, another $3bn materialised from other Gulf states.

The votes of the non-permanent members of the Security Council were crucial. Zaire was offered undisclosed "debt forgiveness" and military equipment in return for silencing the Security Council when the attack was under way. Occupying the rotating presidency of the council, Zaire refused requests from Cuba, Yemen and India to convene an emergency meeting of the council, even though it had no authority to refuse them under the UN Charter.

Only Cuba and Yemen held out. Minutes after Yemen voted against the resolution to attack Iraq, a senior American diplomat told the Yemeni ambassador: "That was the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast." Within three days, a US aid programme of $70m to one of the world's poorest countries was stopped. Yemen suddenly had problems with the World Bank and the IMF; and 800,000 Yemeni workers were expelled from Saudi Arabia. The ferocity of the American-led attack far exceeded the mandate of Security Council Resolution 678, which did not allow for the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and economy. When the United States sought another resolution to blockade Iraq, two new members of the Security Council were duly coerced. Ecuador was warned by the US ambassador in Quito about the "devastating economic consequences" of a No vote. Zimbabwe was threatened with new IMF conditions for its debt.

The punishment of impoverished countries that opposed the attack was severe. Sudan, in the grip of a famine, was denied a shipment of food aid. None of this was reported at the time. By now, news organisations had one objective: to secure a place close to the US command in Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Amnesty International published a searing account of torture, detention and arbitrary arrest by the Saudi regime. Twenty thousand Yemenis were being deported every day and as many as 800 had been tortured and ill-treated.

Neither the BBC nor ITN reported a word about this. "It is common knowledge in television," wrote Peter Lennon in the Guardian, "that fear of not being granted visas was the only consideration in withholding coverage of that embarrassing story." When the attack was over, the full cost was summarised in a report published by the Medical Education Trust in London. More than 200,000 people were killed or had died during and in the months after the attack. This also was not news. Neither was a report that child mortality in Iraq had multiplied as the effects of theeconomic embargo intensified. Extrapolating from all the statistics of Iraq's suffering, the American researchers John Mueller and Karl Mueller have since concluded that the subsequent economic punishment of the Iraqis has "probably taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all weapons of mass destruction in history".

Today, the media's war drums are beating to the rhythm of Bush's totally manufactured crisis, which, if allowed to proceed, will kill untold numbers of innocent people.

Little has changed, and humanity deserves better.

Bush Economic Aide Says Cost of Iraq War May Top $100 Billion (Wall Street Journal)

Laurence Lindsey, President Bush's chief economic adviser, estimates the cost of an all-out war with Iraq at between $100 and $200 billion dollars, or between 1% and 2% of our GDP. Additionally, the National Priorities Project reports that government sources estimate the costs of rebuilding Iraq at $50 billion (although President Bush says that will not be the United States' responsibility.) On top of all this, how much will it cost to support an occupying army in Iraq after the invasion?

In the midst of a long economic slump, where is all this money going to come from? It can only mean one of three things: cut-backs in defense spending, cut-backs in social programs, or inflating the growing federal deficit. Will the taxpayer get fleeced while the Oil Companies profit from their post-war control of Iraqi oil. Given that only Britain and Israel have shown strong support for a US attack on Iraq, US taxpayers can expect to be asked to pay for the bulk of the war.

SOS - By Eduardo Galeano

translated by Francisco Gonzalez]

Who gets the water? The monkey with the stick does. The unarmed monkey dies of thirst. This prehistory lesson opens the film "2001: A Space Odyssey". Now, for the 2003 odyssey, President Bush announces a military budget of one billion dollars a day. The arms industry is the only sure investment: some arguments are irrefutable, whether at the upcoming Earth Summit in Johannesburg or at any other international conference.

The powerful nations that own the planet are in the habit of reasoning by means of bombardments. They constitute power--a genetically modified power, a gigantic Frankenpower that humiliates nature: It exercises its freedom to turn air into filth, and its right to leave humanity homeless; it refers to its horrors as errors; it crushes whomever stands in its way; it is deaf to all alarms and it breaks everything it touches.

The oceans are raising, and the low lands are forever buried under water. This may sound like a metaphor for economic development as it stands now, but what it actually describes is a picture of the world as it will be in a none too distant future, according to the scientists consulted by the United Nations.

For more than two decades, the predictions of ecologists were met with either mockery or silence. Nowadays, scientists concede they are right. And on June 3, 2002, even President Bush was forced to admit, for the first time, that disasters will occur if global warming continues damaging the planet. Journalist Bill McKibben has commented that the Vatican now also acknowledges that Galileo was not wrong. But nobody is perfect: At the same time, Bush announced that, in the next 18 years, the United States will increase the emissions of toxic gases by 43 per cent. After all, he presides over a country of machines that roll along eating petroleum and vomiting poison. At the end of last year, Bush made an appeal to solidarity, and he was able to define it: "Let your children wash the neighbor's car."

The energy policy of the world's leading country is dictated by earthly business that claims to obey the high heavens. The late Enron Corporation (deceased by fraud), which was the main counseling firm for the government and the chief financer of Bush's and most senators' campaigns, used to issue divine messages. Its CEO, Kenneth Lay, used to say: "I believe in God and I believe in the market." Its previous leader had a similar motto: "We are on the side of angels."

The United States engages in environmental terrorism with complete remorselessness, as if God had granted that country an impunity voucher because it has stopped smoking.

"Nature is already very worn out," wrote the Spanish friar Luis Alfonso de Carvallo. He wrote this in 1695. If he could only see us now!

A great part of the surface of Spain is losing its soil. The soil moves away, and sooner rather than later sand will move in through the window cracks. Only 15 per cent of the Mediterranean forests remain standing. A century ago, forests covered half of Ethiopia, which is now a vast desert. The Amazonian region of Brazil has lost forests the size of France. At the rate we are going, Central America will soon start counting its trees the way a bald man counts his few remaining strands of hair.

Erosion drives Mexican peasants away from the countryside and from the country. The more the soil is degraded, the larger the amount of fertilizers and pesticides that are needed. According to the World Health Organization, these chemical aids kill three million farmers every year.

As human tongues and human cultures die away, so do plants and animals. According to biologist Edward O Wilson, species disappear at the rate of three per hour. And not only because of deforestation and pollution: large-scale production, export-oriented agriculture and the standardization of consumer products are eliminating diversity. It is hard to believe that barely a century ago there were more than 500 varieties of lettuce and 287 kinds of carrots in the world. And 220 varieties of potatoes in Bolivia alone.

Forests are scalped, the land turns into a desert, rivers are poisoned, the polar ice caps and the snow of mountain peaks are melting away. In many places the rains have stopped completely, while in others it rains as if the sky was falling. The world's climate has become insane.

Floods, droughts, cyclones, uncontrollable fires--they are all becoming increasingly less natural, although the media insists, against all
evidence, on describing them as such. And the fact that the United Nations named the 1990's as the "International Decade for the Reduction of Natural Disasters" sounds like some kind of morbid joke. ¿Reduction? That was the most disastrous decade of all. There were 86 catastrophic events that left more people dead than even the very deadly wars that took place during the same period. Almost all of the dead (96% to be precise) were in the poor countries, the ones that the experts insist on calling "developing nations".

With devotion, with enthusiasm, the South imitates and exacerbates the worst practices of the North. And the North does not export its virtues, but rather its worst faults, so the poor countries adopt the American veneration for the automobile and the associated scorn of public transportation, as well as all the mythology of free markets and consumer society. The South also receives with open arms the filthiest factories, the most detrimental to nature, in exchange for salaries that make slavery seem rather appealing in comparison.

And yet the North consumes, on average, ten times more petroleum, gas and charcoal per person than the South, where only one in 100 people own an automobile. A charting of environmental feasting vs. fasting practices shows that 75% of the world's pollution is caused by 25% of its population. This minority does not include, of course, the two hundred million who live without drinking water, or the hundred million who go to sleep every night with an empty stomach. It is not "humanity" that is responsible for gobbling up the natural resources, or for laying waste to the air, the soil and the water.

Power merely shrugs its shoulders: When this planet stops being profitable, I'll move to another one.

Beauty is beautiful only if it can be sold, and justice is just only if it can be bought. The planet is being murdered by the way of life we are supposed to emulate, just as we are paralyzed by machines invented to expedite movement, and we are isolated by cities created for assemblage.

Words lose their sense, as the green sea and the blue sky--painted by the courtesy of algae that have produced oxygen for millions of years--lose their color

Those points of light that shine at night--are they spying on us? The stars twinkle with astonishment and fear. They can't manage to
understand how this world of ours, still alive, continues to turn round and round, working so feverishly on its own annihilation. And sheer fright causes them to flicker when they see that this world is already invading other celestial bodies.

MEDIA ALERT: MASS MEDIA STOKE THE FIRES OF WAR - (Medialens)

News broadcasts and column inches are rapidly saturating with the rhetoric of war. The fate of the Iraqi people hangs in the balance. Iraq has now backed down in the face of overwhelming US/UK threats to launch a massive attack on that devastated country, and has offered unconditional access to UN weapons inspectors, as confirmed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The lives of tens of thousands, perhaps more, depend on whether the Washington administration, and its faithful cheerleaders in London, will back off from illegal and immoral preparations for 'war' in Iraq. Now, more than ever, our press and broadcasters should be holding western power to account.

However, the signs are that the British media are taking their lead from the warmongering position of the US and British governments. In an online BBC news article on September 17, deceptively titled 'UN divided over inspections offer' - the division was between the US/UK and everyone else - the thrust of the story was that America had 'dismissed the [Iraqi] offer as a cynical ploy' with 'UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw insisting a new UN resolution on Iraq is still necessary' .
[BBC news online, September 17, 2002; <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2263162.stm>].

But a White House spokesman made clear that weapons inspections is +not+ the central issue, despite repeated obfuscation in the media to the contrary: 'This is not a matter of inspection', the spokesman said. 'It is about disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi regime's compliance with all other Security Council resolutions.'

The truth, virtually ignored by the BBC and the mainstream generally, is that the real issue is about dominance of oil markets and supply, and about punishing a whole nation for the sins of its 'evil dictator', previously a friend of the west. On the rare occasion when the BBC +does+ make reference to oil as a possible factor in the bellicosity of the US/UK, that viewpoint is attributed to the Iraqi 'regime' (rather than, say, rational western commentators), with the implication that such a notion is not to be taken seriously. For example, in the penultimate paragraph of a long online news story today, the BBC reports that '[Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister] Mr Aziz said the US was bent on war with Iraq, and that its true motive was hunger for Iraqi oil.'
[BBC news online, September 18, 2002; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2265638.stm ]

Moreover, the BBC continues to suppress understanding of the circumstances surrounding the departure of UN weapons inspectors from Iraq in December 1998:

"UN inspectors left Iraq four years ago after complaining of obstruction from the Iraqi authorities. Since then, Iraq has refused to allow inspectors to return."
[BBC news online, September 17, 2002; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2263162.stm ]

These words, or similar phrases, frequently recur in mainstream reports. Even more insidious are those reports that claim that "Saddam kicked out the inspectors" - a phrase that the BBC, at least, now avoids (though the BBC's Tom Mangold repeated the myth in a recent Times article, "How Saddam hid his deadly bio arsenal ", September 13, 2002). The truth, as we have noted in previous media alerts, is that the UN weapons inspectors were not expelled by Saddam Hussein. They were withdrawn on 16 December 1998 by United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) executive chairman Richard Butler at the urging of the United States government, immediately prior to the US/UK bombing of Operation Desert Fox.

Iraq's reluctance, till now, to let weapons inspectors return is somewhat understandable, given former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter's admission that members of his inspection team were engaged in espionage work for the US and Israeli governments. As the admirable Robert Fisk notes in today's Independent:

"Back in 1996, the Iraqis were already accusing the UN inspectorate of working with the Israelis. Major Scott Ritter ... was indeed - as an inspector - regularly travelling to Tel Aviv to consult Israeli intelligence. Then Saddam accused the UN inspectors of working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it emerged, was using the UN's Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's government communications. And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", it turned out that virtually every one of the bombing targets had been visited by UN inspectors over the previous six months. Far from being an inspectorate, the UN lads - though they didn't all know it - had been acting as forward air controllers, drawing up an American hit list rather than monitoring compliance with UN resolutions."
[http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=334318]

Given its underlying agenda of punishing Iraq, maintaining US 'credibility' as the sole world superpower, and ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil, the Bush administration refuses, unsurprisingly, to guarantee that the readmission of weapons inspectors back in would avert a US attack. Indeed, as reported in the Daily Telegraph on 12 July this year: "[O]ne senior British diplomat conceded that it was extremely unlikely that Saddam could satisfy the Americans. "The bar is somewhere between extremely high and impossibly high," he said.'

The coordinated war rhetoric from the US and UK in response to Iraq's unconditional offer bears out this tragic realpolitik. Bush has urged the UN Security Council not to be "fooled" by Baghdad's offer to readmit the weapons inspectors, claiming the Iraqi leader has "delayed, denied, deceived the world". Meanwhile, the BBC provides prominence to warmongers such as the former British Prime Minister John Major who declared Iraq's unconditional offer "an old chestnut", when interviewed on the agenda-setting Radio 4 "Today" programme this morning. Undeclared to the listening public, Major is a board member of the American Carlyle Group, a $3.5bn defence contractor that has strong ties to the Bush family.

Media Lens agrees that Iraq's offer has to be approached with caution and scepticism. But there is now a reasonable prospect, at least, of the threat of war receding. Our concern is that at this crucial juncture the mainstream media, in particular the BBC, is giving prominent coverage to aggressive establishment politicians in the west, many of whom are associated with earlier war crimes that have been presented to the public as instances of "humanitarian intervention" and "maintenance of international security" in Kuwait, Kosovo, Afghanistan.

One of our Media Lens readers recently wrote to Richard Sambrook, the BBC's director of news, challenging the BBC to be more questioning of the Bush and Blair agenda, before "they drag us into a genocidal, neverending war". Sambrook responded on September 5:

"Our role as impartial journalists is to examine all the points put forward based on what information we know, or are able to acquire in future, including briefings and news conferences from the UK and US Governments, the UN and others. It is certainly not our position to blindly follow any line as fact, be it from the government or any other body. However, it is of course our duty to report what they are saying - on and off camera - as the British people's democratically elected leaders. It is also important to understand that the Government, through its intelligence network and channels of international diplomacy, is privy to much more information about Iraq than we are.

"Our correspondents in the region and at Westminster - some of our most experienced and seasoned journalists - do their best to break through the rhetoric. You'll appreciate that our access in Iraq is limited. No journalist has free reign to roam that country and report what s/he likes, and of course access to government officials there is near impossible."

Media Lens notes with interest Sambrook's implicit admission that because the British government has considerable powers at its disposal - its 'intelligence network' and 'international diplomacy' - then the government should be given due deference in terms of coverage and credence. Do Sambrook and the BBC make any allowance for the possibility that such powers, acting alone or as a "faithful friend" of the United States, are far from being benign or even neutral?; that such powers may, in fact, be at the disposal of elite state-corporate interests that have a long and dishonourable history of subjugating, terrorising and killing people around the globe? Honest and rational appraisal of the evidence to date yields a categorical "no".

To "report" what the government says - "on and off camera" - is not the role of "impartial journalists"; it is, rather, the role of public relations officers and propaganda agents. "Report" is a deceptive misnomer. "Propagate", "echo" and "channel" would be more accurate. To disseminate, day after day, the views of powerful politicians, in coverage that is almost devoid of substantive analysis and rational challenge, is to support the destructive agenda of established power. And when such power is intent on launching attacks that will intensify the misery of an already suffering nation (and perhaps others that may be drawn into the conflict), then the mass media itself is complicit in illegal and immoral war plans.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to:
Richard Sambrook, director of BBC news: richard.sambrook@bbc.co.uk
Jonathan Munro, head of newsgathering, ITV news: Jonathan.Munro@itn.co.uk
Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Roger Alton, editor of The Observer: roger.alton@observer.co.uk
Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent: s.kelner@independent.co.uk
Tristan Davies, editor of the Independent on Sunday: t.davies@independent.co.uk
Copy all your letters to editor@medialens.org
Feel free to respond to Media Lens alerts: editor@medialens.org
Visit the Media Lens website: www.medialens.org

Will it be the war of the thieves?

Michel Collon

Today, El Pais (Spain) explains this very cynically : "EE.UU. will share Iraqi oil with the countries who will participate in the war".

If Paris and Moscow take part in the agression, they will receive a (small) part of the cake, i.e. a few contracts with the new regime, "made in Washington". If not, they will be excluded. So everybody admits it is a colonial war, to plunder the raw materials.

It is also a war against "friends-rivals" : France and Europe, Russia... Because of the economic crisis, the rivalry will become deeper and deeper. Bush is openly blackmailing about the E.U. access to oil.

But the danger goes further. Actually, Washington fears to lose the control of Saudi Arabia (N° 1 oil reserves in the world). Anxious because of the growing dissatisfaction of the Arab world, Washington wants therefore to take complete control of the N° 2 in oil reserves.

This would allow the US multinationals to make the prices lower and declare economic war to OPEC (OPEP), i.e. a lot of "too independent" countries : Iran, Venezuela... If these countries lose their revenues, Washington hopes to bring them on their knees and impose its globalization.

War is also against the Palestinians. Because Iraq already proposed to boycott oil exports as a pressure against Sharon's policy. Venezuela and others are ready to accept.

But Rambush's war has another dimension: China also signed contracts with Baghdad. CIA asserts that China with its fantastic growth might reach the same economic level as the USA around 2015 or 2020. Blocking its access to the oil of Middle East, and also to the gas of Central Asia (war against Afghanistan), installing military bases everywhere is the preparation of economic, political and military blockade against China.

What a wonderful world, Mr Bush!

Blackmailing so openly and cynically is not a sign of force but a sign of moral isolation and weakness. So everybody in Europe may now ask to his government: are you really going to march in this war of the thieves ?

--Michel Collon
michel.collon@skynet.be

A semantic game by Scott Ritter (12/9/2002)

Scott Ritter, the UN arms inspector who resigned in 1998 in protest at US manipulation of the UNSCOM mandate was in Baghdad this week to deliver a message to the Iraqis: allow the inspectors back or risk the destruction of Iraq. Al-Ahram Weekly interviewed him in Baghdad
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your 1999 book on Iraq was entitled Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem Once and For All. What about the game now, has it come to an end?

Personally I never played any game. Endgame is a term used by political scientists when they speak of a situation where the players pursue the conflict to the bitter end. I gave my book that title because I was dealing with US and UN involvement in Iraq, trying to find out how both players were going to exculpate themselves from that situation.

The endgame option is the choice of the American government, which is at war with Iraq. I find this unacceptable -- a choice that has no support in international law, and that cannot be justified by the facts on the ground given the extent of the disarmament programme carried out in Iraq. Speaking about an endgame strategy does not mean I am here to play a game, I am not playing any games.

Iraqis early discovered the nature of the UNSCOM game -- a US game played under the UN umbrella. Now it is natural to ask what is the next move?

Allowing the inspectors back in Iraq without any conditions. This way you can bring the Iraqi issue to an end and lift the economic sanctions. If you do this Iraq will regain normal relations with the world and enjoy better economic conditions.

But how can Iraq be sure that the new inspectors will not engage in spying activities on behalf of the US?

There is no way to ensure that. The best way I could see, based on my discussions with officials in various countries, is that UN inspectors have to be honest brokers. Their mandate is one of independent and objective monitoring, you cannot ensure that none of the observers is a spy but you can make sure that they do not overstep the Security Council mandate.

Could you elaborate on how did UNSCOM overstep this mandate in the past?

UNSCOM was manipulated by the US, especially under the lead of Richard Butler, the second executive director of UNSCOM. From 1997-1998 Butler stopped being a man objectively carrying out the will of the Security Council and became the head of a US-controlled UNSCOM, carrying out the will of the US and the UK. When you enter that kind of buddy-buddy relationship, when you become such buddies you give your buddy the green light to misuse and abuse the relationship.

How can inspectors such as Butler be avoided?

Let us concentrate on the basics first. Unless Iraq unconditionally allows the inspectors back, there will be a war and Iraq will be destroyed.

Let us play a semantic game, whereby it is understood that inspectors must return or there will be a war. Now, there are some governments saying that if Iraq allows the inspectors back, they will make sure that those inspectors do not overstep their mandate.

It is the only way. Can anybody guarantee the success? No.

But Rumsfeld has said the issue is no longer one of inspectors returning...

Donald Rumsfeld does not speak on behalf of the Security Council, or even for the whole US administration. He speaks for Donald Rumsfeld. What he said exposes the hypocrisy of the Bush administration regarding the present situation in Iraq.

The Bush administration says on the one hand that a strike against Iraq is necessary because of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and in the same breath it says that the issue of the inspectors no longer matters. This suggests WMD are not the issue. What is the issue then? Why are they advocating war? They tell the American public that war against Iraq is necessary because Iraq, with its WMD, poses a threat to US security.

The only way out of this situation is to allow the inspectors back, so that they can tell the world that Iraq has no WMD. Only when they say so can the American public discover that a war against Iraq is not a war in defence of the interests of the Americans, but is a war waged to further the interests of the Bush administration.

If the inspectors are allowed back, how much time do you think they will need?

Hans Blix, the director of the UNMOVIC said that his team could reestablish basic facts regarding Iraq's WMD within six months. After that, he will set forth outstanding issues that need to be resolved. If you have honest brokers overseeing this work then the inspectors will focus on the scientific and technical aspects. This process will not allow the return of the political game as before with the US.

I myself believe that if the inspectors are allowed back, within six months you will start seeing the positive results. Before a year the economic sanctions will be lifted.

Do you seriously believe that?

There is no other way but hope. Or else within six months Iraq will be destroyed.

In an interview with Swedish Radio Rulf Ekeus said that the new inspectors will be equipped differently. What did he mean? Are they going to be armed?

With the establishing of UNSCOM in 1991, the UN proposed to have armed soldiers escorting the inspectors but that proposal was turned down. Inspectors must be provided with all the facilities and must enjoy the cooperation of the Iraqi government. If the Iraqi government chooses not to cooperate, the inspectors should be withdrawn and the Security Council should come up with other solutions, including military force.

But inspectors with arms, this is a prescription that will never succeed.

You were one of the toughest UNSCOM inspectors. What had changed your position?

I have always worked for peace, even when I was in the Marines and during the [Second Gulf] war. I think it is great when one fights a just war. As an inspector, I was working under the mandate stipulated by UN Security Council resolutions .

Interviewed by Nermin Al-Mufti

Security Council members start consultations on Iraq

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 13 (AFP) - The five permanent members of the UN Security Council began Friday consultations on Iraq following US threats to take unilateral action against Baghdad for allegedly developing weapons of mass destruction.
   The foreign ministers of the United States, China, France, Russia and Britain discussed Iraq at a working lunch with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said.
   "The ministers agreed that Iraq's non-compliance with Security Council resolutions is a serious problem and that Iraq should implement the resolutions," Ivanov told reporters.
   "Today we started consultations to decide how the Security Council of the United Nations can implement all the resolutions."
   US President George W. Bush addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday and told the world body that the United States was ready to move against Iraq even if it had to do it alone.

"Rambo" Bush does not scare Iraqis

BAGHDAD, Sept 13 (AFP) - "He thinks he's Rambo, but he doesn't frighten us, " said Anwar Hassan, who like many Iraqis poured scorn on US President George W. Bush's diatribe against Iraq from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly.
   "Bush targets all Arabs," said Hassan, puffing his water pipe in a Baghdad cafe after Bush warned Iraq Thursday night to disarm or face a US military strike.
   "We're ready for war any time and we'll teach the Americans a lesson," added the father of four, describing himself as a businessman "who makes enough money to eat, drink and go out."
   "Under the banner of combating terrorism, the Americans want to destroy peoples, as they did in Afghanistan," said Hassan, who like others in the cafe had "heard of" Bush's speech after official television refuted it without detailing its content.
   An old television set alternately aired video clips of Arab singers and songs extolling President Saddam Hussein as men played cards, dominoes or backgammon.
   Mohammad Amin, 23, came to the cafe to kill time, for want of better entertainment.
   "Bush is threatening President Saddam Hussein because he is the only leader in the world who stands up to the United States," said the fine arts student.
   "If there is a war, I will fight," added Amin, a volunteer in the "Jerusalem army" formed by Saddam to "liberate Palestine."
   "With their arms and technology, the Americans are trying to lay their hands on the world's resources," he argued.
   A few meters from the cafe, a huge poster of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere outside the Semiramis movie house showing Hollywood's "Pretty Woman" seems out of place in a country where anti-American feelings run so high.
   "We have nothing against American movies, because we draw a distinction between the US government and the American people," explained the cinema's manager, Saad Samir.
   "Though tickets sell for just 1,000 dinars (50 cents), only 25 to 30 people turn up for each showing," he lamented.
   As far as he is concerned, Bush is a "thug who kills Iraqis every day."
   "The Americans don't want a regime that upholds Arab interests. They want a puppet regime," he maintained.
   Opposite the cinema, hairdresser Hassan Shaddad, 28, was disheartened by the sight of his empty salon.
   "Business is usually not so bad at the start of the weekend on Thursday," he said.
   "Bush wants to control the world, but his threats don't frighten us," said Shaddad, affirming his readiness to "comply with whatever President Saddam Hussein orders Iraqis" to do.
   "The Americans claim to fight terrorism whereas they are the biggest terrorists in the world," said Giliana Hanna, who sells liquor in a nearby street.
   "Bush's warplanes bomb Iraq every day in the north and south (no-fly zones), but they don't scare us," said Hanna, 48, before handing a young customer a bottle of locally-produced gin.
   "Local products sell much better than imported ones because there is a huge difference in prices. A bottle of Iraqi whisky goes for 2,000 dinars (one dollar), compared to 22,000 dinars (11 dollars) for a Johnny Walker," he explained.
   "Dear friend, your place is in our hearts, not in our account books," says a placard designed to deter clients who would forget their debts after a few drinks.

Iraq: Bush's Address 'Full of Lies'

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- President Bush's speech to the United Nations was "full of lies," Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said Friday in Baghdad's.
In Thursday's speech before the U.N. General Assembly, the president had warned Iraq it must grant access to U.N. weapons
inspectors or face military action.
"Bush's speech was full of lies and fabrications," Aziz told reporters in the Information Ministry building after giving an interview to an Arabic television channel.
Aziz's remarks echoed those issued shortly after Bush spoke Thursday by Baghdad's U.N. ambassador.
"He chooses to deceive the world and his own people by the longest series of fabrications that have ever been told by a leader
of a nation," said Ambassador Mohammed Al-Douri.
Aziz said he would hold a press conference later to comment further on the speech. He did not give a time or date. In what was seen as a major initiative to prepare for a showdown with Iraq, Bush told the United Nations that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had been defying U.N. resolutions for long enough.
"If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately and decisively to hold Iraq to account," Bush said.
"The just demands of peace and security will be met or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also
lose its power."
U.N. Security Council resolutions passed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War say Iraq must eliminate weapons of mass destruction
and the means to produce them, and that the U.N. sanctions on Iraq cannot be lifted until it has done so.
Iraq has refused access to U.N. weapons inspectors, who are charged with verifying such elimination, since 1998.
"If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material," Bush said.
He said Saddam must stop supporting terrorism, persecuting minorities and trading oil illegally for other goods. It must also account for a U.S. pilot and soldiers from other nations missing since the Gulf War, he said.
Iraq claims it has eliminated its weapons of mass destruction and fulfilled the other requirements of the Gulf War resolutions.

Syrian army chief says US wants to "impose hegemony" on Mideast

DAMASCUS, Sept 13 (AFP) - Syria's army chief of staff blasted the United States for intensifying its threats to strike Iraq amid Arab opposition, charging that Washington wants to "impose its hegemony" in the Middle East, in remarks published Friday.
   At the same time, the daily newspaper of the country's ruling Al-Baath party warned that an attack on Iraq would be viewed as an attack on all Arabs.
   "Syria is at the head of those who oppose this US policy that bypasses the United Nations and wants to impose its hegemony on all the region," General Hassan Turkmani said in the official press.
   The United States is "intensifying its threats to strike Iraq despite Arab and international opposition," he added.
   The Al-Baath newspaper, meanwhile, took a swipe at US President George W. Bush's UN General Assembly speech on Iraq a day earlier, warning in an editorial that "an aggression on Iraq will be considered as aggression on all Arabs."
   It described the Bush speech as "a series of warnings against Iraq and the United Nations" enjoining "the international organization to adopt a resolution that would give a free hand to the United States in launching an internationally endorsed attack on Iraq.
   "He used the podium of the international organization to turn the world in favor of an attack against an Arab country that has suffered from an embargo for years," the paper added.
   Al-Baath said it was the first "American speech before the United Nations to insist on one issue and ignore the real problems that worry the Middle East and the world, Israel's permanent aggression and its occupation of (Arab) territories."
   The paper complained that Bush had echoed the need to establish an "independent and democratic Palestine, but did not define the mechanisms to get there."
   Bush warned Baghdad that the United States would work with the UN Security Council "for the necessary resolutions" to force Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction.
   Without laying down a deadline, he demanded Iraq implement UN disarmament resolutions and repeated his vision for a Palestinian state living peacefully    alongside Israel.
   For his part, Turkmani complained that Washington was "finding pretexts for the illegal acts of the Israeli government of (Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon that is violating the human rights" of Palestinians.
   This has "encouraged Israel to continue its crimes against the Palestinians while benefiting from the events of September 11 to justify its policies and accuse Arabs and Muslims of terrorism," he said.

Bush administration "the scariest" in history: Nobel Peace laureate

OSLO, Sept 13 (AFP) - The administration of US President George W. Bush is the most frightening in the history of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams said Friday, denouncing US unilateralism.
   Williams, the coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) who shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize with her organization, said Bush's administration was "the scariest administration of the US history".
   "He is worse than Reagan, worse than Nixon. He sees the world in black and white," the US activist told reporters in Oslo following the publication of a report on landmines.
   Williams said she was opposed to a US attack on Iraq, which she qualified as "a violation of international law".
   "May any country justify a military invasion by calling it a pre-emptive action?" she asked. "It's illegal."
   "What's interesting is to see what the other countries' reaction will be. Shouldn't they join together and do something about it?," she asked.
   She said the US, the only western country that has not ratified an international treaty banning landmines, was as a result no better than Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the countries Bush qualified as an "axis of evil" earlier this year.
   Washington has stopped production, use of and trade in landmines, which each year kill between 15,000 and 20,000 people.
   So "why not take the last step then?," Williams asked. Williams slammed Washington's unilateralism, saying the "US has redefined
multilateralism: (telling the world) 'you all must accept my point of view'." She said the September 11 attacks on the US have "made people afraid of speaking out."
   "Nobody stands up and asks: are we threatening world peace?".
   "If we are so committed behind the representative governments, why are we not doing more in Afghanistan? There is no real effort for consolidating the Afghan government of (President Hamid) Karzai. I believe it's cosmetic," she said.
   Asked meanwhile whether she had any ideas about the identity of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, to be announced on October 11, Williams said: "At least, I don't support one of the nominations."
   A right-wing Norwegian MP has nominated Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to mark their efforts to combat terror and promote peace.

US must go through UN before action on Iraq: China's Li

MANILA, Sept 13 (AFP) - China's number-two leader Li Peng said here Friday that the United States must seek approval from the
United Nations before taking any military action against Iraq.
   "We believe fighting terrorism should be conducted under the leadership of the United Nations," Li told a news conference in
Manila, where he is on a four-day official visit.
   China is one of five countries with veto powers in the UN Security Council, the same body that authorized the US-led military
coalition that drove out Iraqi troops who occupied Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.
   Britain has backed the threat of its fellow Security Council member the United States to Iraq to disarm or face military action.
   France said it is not ruling out joining the attack if made under the council's mandate, while Russia, the fifth permanent member of the council, said the potential for a political and diplomatic solution to the crisis is "far from exhausted".
   Li, the chairman of China's legislature the National People's Congress, spoke a day after US President George W. Bush issued what
was generally seen as an ultimatum to Iraq during a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York.
   "We rely on the United Nations to fight terrorism and certainly all kinds of counter-terrorism activities must go through the
necessary procedures of the United Nations," Li said.
   "At the same time we also urge the Iraqi side to abide by the UN resolutions and restore the inspections for weapons of mass
destruction in that country."
   In Beijing on Friday, the foreign ministry said China was willing to "play a positive and constructive role" through the UN
mechanisms to solve the Iraq crisis.
   China's Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan, in New York to hear Bush address the UN meeting, said the Iraq issues "should be resolved
within the framework of the United Nations and... relevant UN Security Council resolutions should be abided by in an earnest
manner," according to the official Xinhua news agency.
   Bush on Thursday gave the UN a final chance to confront the "grave and gathering danger" Iraq poses, warning that US "action
will be unavoidable" otherwise.
   Bush told the delegates they must end Saddam Hussein's "decade of defiance" towards UN resolutions aimed at stripping him of
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, or become irrelevant to world affairs.
   In an apparent gesture in getting Beijing's support against Iraq, in recent weeks Washington has agreed to treat an obscure
China-based Muslim separatist group as a terrorist organization, and backed a UN move to add the group to a list of al-Qaeda supporters.
   Adding muscle to Bush's rhetoric, the US Central Command on Wednesday announced plans to move 600 staff and a deployable
headquarters to the Gulf state of Qatar.
   Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said in Dubai on Friday Baghdad would "teach (the Americans) a lesson" if they attacked and
Iraq did not accept the conditions spelled out by the US leader in his UN speech.

Iraq says it helped Kurdish rebel leader fight Al-Qaeda terrorists

DUBAI, Sept 13 (AFP) - Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said Friday that Baghdad, far from "supporting terrorism" as President George W. Bush has claimed, had given rebel Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani weapons to fight militants linked to the Al-Qaeda terror network in northern Iraq.
   Whatever "remnants" of Al-Qaeda are in Iraq can be found in the province of Suleimaniya, which is held by Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and outside Baghdad's control, he told Dubai-based Saudi-owned MBC television.
   "Why didn't US officials question Talabani about the Islamist radicals when he recently met them in Washington?" Aziz asked.
   The PUK leader, whose faction shares control of the Western-protected Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), had sought Baghdad's help to combat the Al-Qaeda extremists and "we gave him weapons and equipment," Aziz said.
   The PUK has clashed in recent months with Islamist extremists in the part of Iraqi Kurdistan it controls, pushing them back to Biara, which borders Iran.
   A PUK spokesman told AFP in May that the extremists were affiliated with "Ansar al-Islam" (Supporters of Islam), which comprises a number of groupings, including 200 to 300 members of the so-called Jund al-Islam (Soldiers of Islam).
   The fundamentalists are suspected of being responsible for a series of recent incidents, including bomb blasts, in the Kurdish enclave, which has been off limits to the Baghdad government since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
   Aziz rejected the charge that Iraq supported terror because it gave financial aid to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, saying the Palestinians were not terrorists but freedom fighters, and Baghdad was "proud" to help them.
   The Iraqi official was commenting on Bush's speech to the UN General Assembly on Thursday in which he warned that US military action was "unavoidable" unless Baghdad scrapped probibited weapons it allegedly possesses.

Iraq would "teach US lesson" if it attacked, rejects Bush conditions: Aziz

DUBAI, Sept 13 (AFP) - Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said on Friday Baghdad would "teach (the Americans) a lesson" if they attacked and that Iraq did not accept the conditions spelled out by US President George W. Bush in his UN speech.
   But while rejecting the "unconditional" return of UN arms inspectors, Aziz told Dubai-based Saudi MBC television it was up to the Iraqi "leadership" to formulate Baghdad's "final positions" on the current standoff over its alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
   "We do not accept President Bush's conditions. He wants to control Iraq ... America wants to control Iraq's and the (Gulf) region's oil, fully not partially," and by extension dominate Europe and Japan, Aziz charged.
   The United States wants to use its power to "redraw the map of the (Middle East) region and carve up its states, starting with Iraq, in order to secure Israel," Aziz said.
   However, he added that he would not spell out Iraq's final positions on the current standoff, because Iraq "has a leadership that decides" policies.
   Bush Thursday gave the United Nations a final chance to confront the "grave and gathering danger" Iraq poses, warning that US "action will be unavoidable" otherwise.
   "The just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power," he sternly told the UN General Assembly.
   Bush laid out five demands of President Saddam Hussein. He must scrap his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs and stockpiles, end support for terrorism, cease persecution of the civilian population, free or account for non-Iraqi citizens missing since the 1991 Gulf War and end all efforts to circumvent UN economic sanctions.
   Vowing that the Iraqis would "fight bravely" if attacked by the United States, Aziz repeated that Baghdad had no chemical or biological weapons and said Bush had failed to come up with evidence that it was seeking to obtain nuclear material.
   "Where's the proof" that Iraq is seeking to build nuclear weapons, Aziz asked, adding that the United States had not proved it had made a single seizure of nuclear material destined for Iraq.
   An "unconditional" return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq "would not solve the problem," said Aziz, whose country has repeatedly said the resumption of arms inspections hinged on a "comprehensive settlement" of outstanding issues with the UN Security Council.
   Dragging out arms inspections in Iraq before the inspectors withdrew in December 1998 had become akin to a "business", Aziz charged.
   Moreover, Iraq had only managed to put off US military strikes from the spring of 1998 to December 1998 when it sought to resolve a crisis over weapons at the time by allowing Western diplomats into presidential sites hitherto barred to inspectors, Aziz said.
   Asked if this meant Iraq believed a US strike was "inevitable" whatever it did, Aziz said: "We hope it is not inevitable, but we are preparing for the worst. If it doesn't happen, then thanks be to God. And if there is something we can do to ward off aggression, we will do it." The Iraqi official said it was obvious that Iraq would "lose a war" with a far superior US power.
   "But we are not waging war. We would be defending our country." If the Americans were to come to fight "face-to-face, man-to-man, we will fight bravely and teach them a lesson," he said.
   Aziz scoffed at the suggestion that Iraq could meet the fate of Afghanistan, where a US-led military campaign toppled the Islamist Taliban ruling militia late last year.
   "Iraq is a strong, advanced country, and its government has been at the helm for 35 years ... We are not the Taliban," he said, noting that Iraq had survived "unprecedented bombing" by a US-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War.
   As to Bush's claim that the Iraqi regime had "lost its legitimacy," Aziz said it was the US president who had won office by "a handful of dubious votes."
   Aziz spent most of the interview with MBC trying to rebut what he called Bush's "shameless lies" to the General Assembly.
   These included the charge that people "unaccounted for" since the Gulf War and thought held by Iraq included non-Kuwaitis. "No one has ever inquired about them," he said.
   Another was the whole range of Bush's claims on Iraq's weapons programs.
   Former US president Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had themselves boasted of having destroyed facilities they said produced biological and chemical weapons during the December 1998 US-British bombing blitz on Baghdad, he remarked.
   Iraq had proceeded to rebuild these installations for purely "civilian pursuits," Aziz said.
   Its banned missiles were all "accounted for," in the words of then UN chief inspector Rolf Ekeus, as far back as June 1995, he said.
   The Iraqi official recalled that Baghdad had invited members of the US Congress to send a "fact-finding mission" to Iraq "along with experts and
equipment" to find out if there was cause for "genuine concern" about Iraq's arms programs, but the invitation was "turned down by the White House" before Congress had a chance to consider it.
   As to the charge that Iraq was trying to circumvent UN sanctions, Aziz said it was an extraordinary accusation given that all imports into Iraq had to be approved by the UN sanctions committee and that US forces were monitoring all possible accesses to transit routes into the country.

Two Belgian deputies to visit Iraq on peace mission next week

BRUSSELS, Sept 13 (AFP) - Two Belgian Socialist deputies are to make an official visit to Iraq next week on a mission to promote peace and dialogue, the Belga news agency reported Friday.
   Veronique de Keyser, a member of the European Parliament's foreign affairs commission, and Patrick Moriau, member of the Belgian parliament, said they had decided to "respond favourably" to an invitation from Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarek Aziz.
   They are due to arrive in Iraq on Sunday and remain until the following Wednesday.
   They should be joined in Iraq by several US congress members as well as several Spanish deputies, Moriau told AFP.
   Moriau belongs to a pressure group campaigning for an end to economic sanctions against Iraq.
   He said he wanted to promote a diplomatic solution to the current crisis in order to avoid "massacres" in Iraq and the risk of further destabilisation in the Middle East.
   He warned the region could be "set on fire" by strikes on Iraq.
   De Keyser visited Iraq last year on a two-week observation mission.
   She said in a statement, she was acting as a "partisan of peace, dialogue and the respect of international law and the decisions of the UN and the Security Council."

Iraq says will repel any attack with knives, stones.

BAGHDAD, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Iraq warned the United States on Thursday it was ready to repel any invasion with every weapon at its disposal, even kitchen knives, sticks and stones. Speaking only hours before U.S. President George W. Bush was due to address the U.N. General Assembly on Iraq, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said Iraq still hoped to avoid any attack.

"But if we are attacked, we will choose our own means by using everything at our disposal, even sticks, kitchen knives, our hands and stones," he told Reuters in an interview before leaving for New York to attend the General Assembly meeting.

"We shall never let those Zionists invade our country," he said. Washington accuses Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil" seeking
weapons of mass destruction, and Bush's speech comes amid mounting speculation that the United States is preparing to attack Baghdad to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Bush will deliver a toughly worded challenge to the United Nations in his speech, saying it must force Iraq to disarm or risk irrelevance.

Implicit in Bush's message will be that the United States stands ready to act on its own, but aides involved in preparing his speech said Bush would not be delivering an ultimatum, essentially giving the United Nations a last chance to act.

U.N. arms experts, who began work in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait, left Iraq in December 1998 ahead of a U.S.-British campaign to punish Baghdad for its alleged failure to cooperate with them.

Sabri said Iraq was ready to accept weapons inspections in line with U.N. resolutions, restating Iraq's position that the inspectors'
return must be part of a comprehensive solution that includes lifting of sanctions imposed for Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in 1990.

The United Nations insists weapons inspectors return unconditionally and be allowed full access to Iraqi facilities. "We look to the return of inspectors within the (U.N.) Security Council's resolutions, and if the return is done in accordance with these resolutions and to serve the purpose of the United Nations, we have no problem with that," Sabri said.

Under the U.N. resolutions, the crippling 12-year-old sanctions on Iraq will be lifted once Baghdad destroys its weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq has said for years that such weapons have been destroyed and has branded U.S. and British claims that it is rebuilding its banned weapons programmes as "lies".

"The return of inspectors is part of one resolution and there are other resolutions...and we want all these resolutions implemented not
only one part," Sabri said.

Sabri said Washington was manipulating the issue of weapons inspections as a pretext for launching military action and extending
its inflluence in the Middle East that would ultimately give it control of the region's oil.

"The matter has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. The aim is to control this region and to weaken all Arab countries and make Israel number one (as) the ruling and dominating force in this region.

"The United States wants to control oil of the region, controlling Iraqi oil, Saudi oil and Gulf oil so as to be the first power to
decide economic growth rate," he said.

Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabia.

Bush speech UN 12/9/2002

THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates, and ladies and gentlemen: We meet one year and one day after a terrorist attack brought grief to my country, and brought grief to many citizens of our world. Yesterday, we remembered the innocent lives taken that terrible morning. Today, we turn to the urgent duty of protecting other lives, without illusion and without fear.

We've accomplished much in the last year -- in Afghanistan and beyond. We have much yet to do -- in Afghanistan and beyond. Many nations represented here have joined in the fight against global terror, and the people of the United States are grateful.

The United Nations was born in the hope that survived a world war -- the hope of a world moving toward justice, escaping old patterns of conflict and fear. The founding members resolved that the peace of the world must never again be destroyed by the will and wickedness of any man. We created the United Nations Security Council, so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, our resolutions would be more than wishes. After generations of deceitful dictators and broken treaties and squandered lives, we dedicated ourselves to standards of human dignity shared by all, and to a system of security defended by all.

Today, these standards, and this security, are challenged. Our commitment to human dignity is challenged by persistent poverty and raging disease. The suffering is great, and our responsibilities are clear. The United States is joining with the world to supply aid where it reaches people and lifts up lives, to extend trade and the prosperity it brings, and to bring medical care where it is desperately needed.

As a symbol of our commitment to human dignity, the United States will return to UNESCO. (Applause.) This organization has been reformed and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights and tolerance and learning.

Our common security is challenged by regional conflicts -- ethnic and religious strife that is ancient, but not inevitable. In the Middle East, there can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides. America stands committed to an independent and democratic Palestine, living side by side with Israel in peace and security. Like all other people, Palestinians deserve a government that serves their interests and listens to their voices. My nation will continue to encourage all parties to step up to their responsibilities as we seek a just and comprehensive settlement to the conflict.

Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions. In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destructive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides within many nations, including my own. In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction, and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.

In one place -- in one regime -- we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.

Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped -- by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.

To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.

He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge -- by his deceptions, and by his cruelties -- Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.

In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities -- which the Council said, threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.

Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime's repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents -- and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.

In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise. Last year the Secretary General's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwait, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for -- more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.

In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism, and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise. In violation of Security Council Resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder. In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American President. Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of September the 11th. And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.

In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.

From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

United Nations' inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.

And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf War. We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.

Today, Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program -- weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, an accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance. Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.

Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N. Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that it can inflict mass death throughout the region.

In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with Security Council resolutions. In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials. He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself, and to buy arms for his country. By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens.

In 1991, Iraq promised U.N. inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading, and harassing U.N. inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely. Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the Security Council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations. The Security Council again renewed that demand in 1994, and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations. The Security Council renewed its demand three more times in 1997, citing flagrant violations; and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behavior totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.

As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq, four years for the Iraqi regime to plan, and to build, and to test behind the cloak of secrecy.

We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.

Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one. We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming.

The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?

The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with the international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq. And it could open the prospect of the United Nations helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis -- a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty, and internationally supervised elections.

The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.

We can harbor no illusions -- and that's important today to remember. Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He's fired ballistic missiles at Iran and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel. His regime once ordered the killing of every person between the ages of 15 and 70 in certain Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. He has gassed many Iranians, and 40 Iraqi villages.

My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge. If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced -- the just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

Events can turn in one of two ways: If we fail to act in the face of danger, the people of Iraq will continue to live in brutal submission. The regime will have new power to bully and dominate and conquer its neighbors, condemning the Middle East to more years of bloodshed and fear. The regime will remain unstable -- the region will remain unstable, with little hope of freedom, and isolated from the progress of our times. With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September the 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.

If we meet our responsibilities, if we overcome this danger, we can arrive at a very different future. The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. These nations can show by their example that honest government, and respect for women, and the great Islamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond. And we will show that the promise of the United Nations can be fulfilled in our time.

Neither of these outcomes is certain. Both have been set before us. We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress. We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather. We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand. And, delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand, as well.

Thank you very much.

3 Groups Already Squabbling Over Oil-Flush North Iraq Should Hussein Be Toppled.

ANKARA, Turkey, Sept. 11 - While the Bush administration has yet to decide whether to attack Iraq, rival ethnic groups in the north of that country are already squabbling over the spoils of any future war.

Their focus is Kirkuk, a city with vast reserves of high-quality oil so close to the surface that in one area natural gas escaping from the ground has been on fire since antiquity. Iraq's Arabs control the city, but both ethnic Kurds and the Turkmen minority claim it as their own and all three groups want power over it and its oil if Saddam Hussein falls.

"We will have control of this city; that is what we are fighting for," said Mustafa Ziya, the Ankara representative of the Iraqi Turkmen
Front, a coalition of 26 Turkmen groups vying for representation in a post-Hussein Iraqi government. They have the backing of Turkey, which has yet to voice support for American military action against Iraq but wants a finger in the Iraqi pie should the Bush administration make a successful move.

Yet, the Kurdish Democratic Party, the more powerful of two Kurdish groups that control northern Iraq, is determined to make Kirkuk the political capital and economic heart of a Kurdish federal state in a future Iraq. It has already drafted an Iraqi constitution outlining such a state with Kirkuk as its most important city.

"Kirkuk is a Kurdish city," said Safeen Dizayee, the K.D.P.'s representative in Ankara. "Even the Ottoman archives show that."

The brewing battle suggests that any fighting inside Iraq will not end with Mr. Hussein's ouster and that the United States may be drawn into mediating Iraqi factional disputes or risk unleashing a blood bath if it succeeds in unseating the current government.

The dispute also puts the Bush administration between rival groups on whom it would have to depend in any war. The United States is likely to use Turkish air bases to attack Iraq and is expected to ask for support from the northern Iraqi Kurds, whose forces number in the tens of thousands.

The Kirkuk dispute flared last week when the K.D.P.'s leader, Massoud Barzani, was quoted in a German newspaper as saying that he would "never allow Turks to take over even a millimeter of our soil," and that if Turkey invaded northern Iraq, his fighters would turn the territory into a "graveyard for Turkish soldiers."

Those comments, which Mr. Barzani has since said were "distorted" by the press, prompted the deputy speaker of the Turkish Parliament on Friday to suggest that Ankara declare an autonomous region in northern Iraq for the Turkmen minority, a Turkic people with historical ties to Turkey and who are Iraq's third-largest ethnic group. That region would include oil-rich Kirkuk.

Already, Turkey has threatened to intervene in northern Iraq if the Kurds there declare an independent state or attack the Turkmen
minority in any battle for Kirkuk that might follow possible American action. Turkey has soldiers in northern Iraq, although the deputy
governor in charge of the only land crossing between Turkey and Iraq has denied reports that the country had moved another 1,000 troops across the border in recent days.

Kirkuk lies at the southwestern edge of the Kurds' traditional homeland and was peopled by Turkmen groups during the Ottoman empire. The city was still under Ottoman control at the end of World War I, when the British seized it for its oil and later incorporated it into Iraq. The Kurds have long argued that it is their territory and want the economic power that it would give a Kurdish federal state.
The Kurds occupied Kirkuk after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, only to be routed by Iraqi troops a few days later in what became a devastating mass exodus of Kurds from the region until the United States and Britain gave them protection by creating a "no-flight zone" north of the 36th parallel. That zone does not cover Kirkuk, however, which has remained in Mr. Hussein's hands and is a principal source of his income today under the United Nations' food-for-oil program. The program allows the export of a limited amount of crude oil from Kirkuk and Iraq's other major oil-producing region, in the country's south.

In an attempt to change the ethnic makeup of the Kirkuk area, Mr. Hussein has settled Arabs in the city and pressured the Kurdish and Turkmen groups alike to change their legal ethnic identity to Arab or lose their right to own property or even to live in Kirkuk. The Arab majority will certainly try to retain control of the region if Mr. Hussein is removed.

Turkey, which produces little oil of its own, has its own economic interests at stake. A long line of Turkish tanker trucks cross the
border daily on their way to Kirkuk to fill up with Iraqi oil, a technically illegal trade outside the United Nations oil-for-food program that is tolerated by the United States and its allies because of the damage the Turkish economy has suffered from the economic
sanctions against Iraq.

Turkey also opposes Kurdish control of Kirkuk because that would strengthen Kurdish autonomy and, they say, encourage the estimated 20 million ethnic Kurds in Turkey to also demand autonomy. Turkey has fought a 15-year war with Kurdish separatists in the southeastern part of its country and many Turks remain convinced that the fast-growing Kurdish minority harbors a desire for a Kurdish state within Turkey or even an independent Kurdistan.

"A federal state in northern Iraq will be the first step on the way to an independent Kurdish state," said Umit Ozdag, chairman of the
conservative Turkish policy institute, Asam. "And it will be impossible to establish a federal state divided on ethnic lines without blood."

Sevket Bulent Yahnici, an official with M.H.P., one of the parties in Turkey's governing coalition, put it more bluntly: "If the Kurds
declare a separate state in northern Iraq, we will be forced to invade."
Source: THE NEW YORK TIMES 12/09/2002

The US Media: A Weapon of Mass Deception (12/09/2002)

by Gordon Arnaut
http://www.mediamonitors.net/

Reading the US media's reporting on the Iraq question is very informative. Not because the coverage is so fact-filled, but because it so clearly illustrates just how propagandized and subservient the US press has become.

Headlines everywhere scream of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," and television talking heads endlessly repeat the word "threat," in relation to Iraq. Even the New York Times, which has been less enthusiastic about saber rattling than much of the rest of the media, offers plenty of rhetoric about alleged Iraqi "arsenals," and supposed links to terrorism.

Rivers of ink have been spent hyperventilating about the supposed Iraqi threat, but how much actual evidence has been presented? Where are the facts?

Very few have been forthcoming. Rarely if ever has rhetoric so disproportionately outweighed facts in what is supposed to be an independent press. In Saturday's Times, for example, several pages of coverage were devoted to the case the Bush administration is now presenting for an unprovoked attack on Iraq. A front page headline mentioned Iraqi "Arsenals of Weapons," while an inside headline mused about why Iraq stands out in Bush's "Axis of Evil."

But if a reader was hoping to see any actual facts revealed, he was in for a letdown. After extensive quoting and paraphrasing of Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, and, to a lesser extent, Secretary of State Colin Powell, all of whom repeated the well-worn, stock accusations against Iraq and Saddam Hussein, the Times finally weighed in with the "evidence." It seems that Iraq had attempted to
buy thousands of aluminum tubes. Yes aluminum tubes. Fortunately, the forces of good were able to intercede and stop the shipment before it ever happened.

Whew! Close call. I guess we better annihilate Iraq right now to make sure it doesn't happen again. I mean, one of these days Saddam might actually succeed in getting his hands on aluminum tubes, and then what? Then we'll all be up the river without a paddle, and facing certain annihilation, as the Bush team is now warning. "Imagine a Sept. 11 with weapons of mass destruction," the Times quoted Rumsfeld as saying. "It's not 3,000, it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."

If you are wondering how aluminum tubes will lead to this doomsday scenario, the Bushites are happy to explain. You see those are "specially designed" aluminum tubes, which can be used as components of centrifuges, which are machines that can be used for enriching uranium. Really? Or, just maybe, as Freud might have said, sometimes an aluminum tube is just an aluminum tube.

And if that "evidence" wasn't enough to convince you, the Times followed the aluminum tubes revelation with another hard-hitting piece of journalism: Dick Cheney says there is a "credible, but unconfirmed" intelligence report that Mohamed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met "at least once" with a senior Iraqi intelligence official, in Prague.

Now just how stupid do Dick Cheney and The New York Times think the American people are? I guess we are supposed to take this bit of innuendo at face value? From a guy whose trigger finger has been twitching in plain view for months now?

And this, in a nutshell, was the Times' big bushel of facts on the Iraqi threat: Aluminum tubes and a completely unsubstantiated report of an alleged meeting between a hijacker and an Iraqi-says Dick Cheney. In all, these "facts," took up about one inch of newsprint real estate, while several yards were devoted to the drum beating of Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest.

This says a lot about the kind of press that America now has. Even more revealing are the questions that the media have chosen to suppress. For example, why do you see hardly any mention of the ongoing air raids that the US and Britain have been inflicting on the Iraqi people for more than a decade? Is this just business as usual? And I would like to see just one article explaining the legal basis for those no-fly zones in the first place. (There is none; they have never been approved by the UN.)

Another big question that has been swept under the rug has to do with the CIA spies that were exposed as part of the last weapons inspections team. Clearly, this was a deception that should have been enough to completely discredit the entire US position on Iraq, but the whole thing was shrugged off by the media like so much confetti. In the current debate-such as it is-this inconvenient little episode is never even mentioned any more.

And what about the most crucial question of all? Is Iraq a threat, or not? The media refuses to even allow this into the debate. By not asking this question, the media is saying, in effect, "The question of Iraq being a threat is beyond debate. So let's move on to the how and when of this war."

This is completely opposite to what the objective facts in the case tell us. There is indeed much to debate as to whether Iraq poses any threat or not. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter has brought to light key facts that point in the direction that Iraq is no threat at all. But Scott Ritter is only one man. In a truly independent-minded media, reporters would be falling over themselves to pick up this story and run with it. Thousands of questions could be asked, hundreds of sources unearthed, and dozens of revelations brought to light. The only trouble is, it might expose as so much rubbish the Bushites' entire yarn about Iraq.

And we couldn't have that could we? Not in a media culture where kowtowing to the ruling class takes precedence over honest reporting and journalistic duty.

Mr. Gordon Arnaut contributed above article to Media Monitors Network (MMN) from Canada. He is an independent journalist who is currently making a documentary film on the breathtaking dishonesty of the Western media.

THE SECRETARY-GENERAL KOFFI ANNAN ADDRESS TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
New York, 12 September 2002
Mr. President,
Distinguished Heads of State and Government,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
We cannot begin today without reflecting on yesterday''s anniversary –– on the criminal challenge so brutally thrown in our faces on 11 September 2001. The terrorist attacks of that day were not an isolated event. They were an extreme example of a global scourge, which requires a broad, sustained and global response. Broad, because terrorism can be defeated only if all nations unite against it.
Sustained, because the battle against terrorism will not be won easily, or overnight. It requires patience and persistence. And global, because terrorism is a widespread and complex phenomenon, with many deep roots and exacerbating factors. Mr. President, I believe that such a response can only succeed if we make full use of multilateral institutions. I stand before you today as a multilateralist –– by precedent, by principle, by Charter and by duty.
I also believe that every government that is committed to the rule of law at home, must be committed also to the rule of law abroad. All States have a clear interest, as well as a clear responsibility, to uphold international law and maintain international order.
Our founding fathers, the statesmen of 1945, had learnt that lesson from the bitter experience of two world wars and a great depression. They recognised that international security is not a zero-sum game. Peace, security and freedom are not finite commodities –– like land, oil or gold –– which one State can acquire at another''s expense. On the contrary, the more peace, security and freedom any one State has, the more its neighbours are likely to have. And they recognised that, by agreeing to exercise sovereignty together, they could gain a hold over problems that would defeat any one of them acting separately.
If those lessons were clear in 1945, should they not be much more so today, in the age of globalisation?
On almost no item on our agenda does anyone seriously contend that each nation, or any nation, can fend for itself. Even the most powerful countries know that they need to work with others, in multilateral institutions, to achieve their aims.
Only by multilateral action can we ensure that open markets offer benefits and opportunities to all.
Only by multilateral action can we give people in the least developed countries the chance to escape the ugly misery of poverty, ignorance and disease.
Only by multilateral action can we protect ourselves from acid rain, or global warming; from the spread of HIV/AIDS, the illicit trade in drugs, or the odious traffic in human beings.
That applies even more to the prevention of terrorism. Individual States may defend themselves, by striking back at terrorist groups and the countries that harbour or support them. But only concerted vigilance and cooperation among all States, with constant, systematic exchange of information, offers any real hope of denying terrorists their opportunities. On all these matters, for any one State –– large or small –– choosing to follow or reject the multilateral path must not be a simple matter of political convenience. It has consequences far beyond the immediate context. When countries work together in multilateral institutions –– developing,
respecting, and when necessary enforcing international law –– they also develop mutual trust, and more effective cooperation on other issues. The more a country makes use of multilateral institutions –– thereby respecting shared values, and accepting the obligations and restraints inherent in those values –– the more others will trust and respect it, and the stronger its chance to exercise true leadership.
And among multilateral institutions, this universal Organisation has a special place.
Any State, if attacked, retains the inherent right of self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter. But beyond that, when States decide to use force to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, there is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations. Member States attach fundamental importance to such legitimacy and to the international rule of law. They have shown –– notably in the action to liberate Kuwait, twelve years ago –– that they are willing to take actions under the authority of the Security Council, which they would not be willing to take without it.
The existence of an effective international security system depends on the Council''s authority –– and therefore on the Council having the political will to act, even in the most difficult cases, when agreement seems elusive at the outset. The primary criterion for putting an issue on the Council''s agenda should not be the receptiveness of the parties, but the existence of a grave threat to world peace.

Mr. President,
Let me now turn to four current threats to world peace, where true leadership and effective action are badly needed.
First, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of us have recently been struggling to reconcile Israel''s legitimate security concerns with
Palestinian humanitarian needs. But these limited objectives cannot be achieved in isolation from the wider political context. We must return to the search for a just and comprehensive solution, which alone can bring security and prosperity to both peoples, and indeed to the whole region.
The ultimate shape of a Middle East peace settlement is well known. It was defined long ago in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and its Israeli-Palestinian components were spelt out even more clearly in Resolution 1397: land for peace; an end to terror and to occupation; two States, Israel and Palestine, living side by side within secure and recognized borders.
Both parties accept this vision. But we can reach it only if we move rapidly and in parallel on all fronts. The so-called ""sequential"" approach has failed.
As we agreed at the Quartet meeting in Washington last May, an international peace conference is needed without delay, to set out a roadmap of parallel steps: steps to strengthen Israel''s security, steps to strengthen Palestinian economic and political institutions, and steps to settle the details of the final peace agreement. Meanwhile, humanitarian steps to relieve Palestinian suffering must be intensified. The need is urgent.
Second, the leadership of Iraq continues to defy mandatory resolutions adopted by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter. I have engaged Iraq in an in-depth discussion on a range of issues, including the need for arms inspectors to return, in accordance with the relevant Security Council Resolutions.
Efforts to obtain Iraq''s compliance with the Council''s resolutions must continue. I appeal to all who have influence with Iraq''s leaders to impress on them the vital importance of accepting the weapons inspections. This is the indispensable first step towards assuring the world that all Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have indeed been eliminated, and –– let me
stress –– towards the suspension and eventual ending of the sanctions that are causing so many hardships for the Iraqi people.
I urge Iraq to comply with its obligations –– for the sake of its own people, and for the sake of world order. If Iraq''s defiance continues, the Security Council must face its responsibilities.
Third, permit me to press all of you, as leaders of the international community, to maintain your commitment to Afghanistan. I know I speak for all in welcoming President Karzai to this Assembly, and congratulating him on his escape from last week''s vicious assassination attempt –– a graphic reminder of how hard it is to uproot the remnants of terrorism in any country where it has taken root. It was the international community''s shameful neglect of Afghanistan in the 1990s that allowed that country to slide into chaos, providing a fertile breeding ground for Al-Qaeda.
Today, Afghanistan urgently needs help in two areas. The government must be helped to extend its authority throughout the country. Without this, all else may fail. And donors must follow through on their commitments to help with rehabilitation, reconstruction and development. Otherwise the Afghan people will lose hope –– and desperation, we know, breeds violence.
Fourth, and finally, in South Asia the world has recently come closer than for many years past to a direct conflict between two nuclear weapon capable countries. The situation may now have calmed a little, but it remains perilous. The underlying causes must be addressed. If a fresh crisis erupts, the international community might have a role to play; though I gladly acknowledge - indeed, strongly welcome - the efforts made by well-placed Member States to help the two leaders find a solution.
Excellencies, let me conclude by reminding you of your pledge two years ago, at the Millennium Summit, ""to make the United Nations a more effective instrument"" in the service of the world''s peoples.
Today I ask all of you to honour that pledge. Let us all recognise, from now on –– in each of our capitals, in every nation, large and small –– that the global interest is our national interest.
Thank you very much.

Arab League: Iraq Strike Would 'Open Gates of Hell'

Thu Sep 5,11:54 AM ET
By Andrew Hammond

CAIRO (Reuters) - Arab League chief Amr Moussa said Thursday a strike against Iraq would "open the gates of hell" in the Middle East, and urged Baghdad to readmit weapons inspectors in coordination with the United Nations .

The White House said Thursday President Bush believed there was enough evidence to justify ousting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Bush has said he will ask Congress to back possible military action against Iraq and will outline the threat posed by its arms program at the United Nations this month.

Resolutions issued by the foreign ministers from 20 Arab states called for a "complete rejection of threats of aggression against some Arab countries, in particular Iraq."

The brief statement did not specifically refer to weapons inspectors, but Moussa said the ministers had agreed they must be allowed back as part of an overall solution to the crisis.

"We will continue to work to avoid a military confrontation or a military action because we believe that it will open the gates of hell in the Middle East," Moussa told reporters at the end of the two-day meeting.

"When it comes to the issue of Iraq, yes indeed, we again reiterate the importance of the full implementation of Security Council resolutions. We are for the return of the inspectors within an agreement, an understanding, between the government of Iraq and the secretary-general of the United Nations," he said.

The United States says it has not decided whether or not to use force to oust Saddam, whom Washington accuses of developing weapons of mass destruction. Iraq denies the charge.

Many countries insist that Iraq should be given a chance to readmit weapons inspectors before any strike is considered.

DIPLOMACY FIRST

Moussa said Arab states were seeking a diplomatic solution and had already helped bring Iraqi and U.N. officials together.

The ministerial resolutions on Iraq also called for lifting U.N. sanctions, an "interlinked and scheduled implementation of all the requirements of the Security Council resolutions," and a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

Speaking to reporters on his way out, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri accused Israel of possessing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear and other weapons.

Moussa accused the world community of double standards, complaining that while it insisted Iraq obey U.N. resolutions, it failed to measure Israel by the same yardstick concerning its occupation of Palestinian territory.

"When it comes to the implementation of Security Council resolutions, we wonder why should we insist only on Iraq to implement Security Council resolutions. Although this is correct. We should call on Iraq to implement Security Council resolutions, but what about Israel?"

Asked about reports that U.S. troops might use Qatar as a staging post against Iraq, Moussa said: "The Qatari foreign minister completely denied these reports. We have to believe the officials, though if it were true it would be disturbing."

Qatari Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim left the talks after Wednesday's opening session for an appointment in Geneva.

American warplanes attack an air defense target
Thu Sep 5, 8:00 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American warplanes on Thursday attacked an air defense target in a "no-fly" zone of southern Iraq in the latest in a recently escalating series of exchanges, the U.S. military said.

The attack came as President Bush ( news - web sites) continued to press for the removal of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein ( news - web sites) from power and amid speculation that Bush might order a military invasion of that country.

In the 35th strike of the year by American and British jets against no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, the U.S. attack jets launched precision-guided weapons against a command-and-control post at a military airfield 240 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. military's Central Command said.

Iraq does not recognize the zones, set up after the 1991 Gulf War ( news - web sites) to protect minority Kurds and Shiites from attack by Saddam's military. While attempts to shoot down western warplanes and attacks against ground targets have ebbed and flowed over the years, they have increased in recent weeks with 10 air strikes in August, eight of them in the south.

The Central Command said in a news release from its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, that the strike was in response to recent attempts to shoot down the warplanes that monitor the zones.

All aircraft departed the target area safely and damage was being assessed, Central Command said.

Speculation has grown over the summer that the United States will move militarily to oust Saddam, who the Bush administration accuses of developing weapons of mass destruction.

Baghdad denies those accusations, and many U.S. allies have voiced strong opposition to any military attack to oust Saddam. Bush promised on Wednesday to seek backing from the U.S. Congress and allies for any such move against Iraq.

U.S. BUILDUP ESTIMATED AT 100,000 TROOPS, 1,000 MILITARY PLANNERS

[Wednesday, September 4, 2002]: The United States continues its military buildup in and around the Persian Gulf with analysts estimating up to 100,000 troops within striking distance of Iraq.

U.S. military sources and analysts said Washington has sent tens of thousands of soldiers and military personnel to Gulf Arab states, Central and South Asia and the Levant. They said the force includes at least 1,000 military planners who have prepared for a rapid airlift of forces in case Washington decides on a war against Iraq.

The U.S. Defense Department has been bolstering its transport ship fleet as well as preparing its air cargo fleet to defend against Islamic insurgents and Iraqi forces, Middle East Newsline reported. On Aug. 27, the Pentagon said it awarded Northrop Grumman a $23.2 million contract to provide the C-17 transport aircraft with systems to defend against infrared surface-to-air missiles.

The Pentagon has also awarded a $20.5 million contract for the maintenance and overhaul of the U.S. Navy's reserve air fleet. The award for iBASEt, based om Lake Forest, Calif., is meant to support a range of air programs.

Analysts said the total number of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf and surrounding regions now number around 100,000. They said this could enable a U.S. attack on Iraq within weeks of a decision by President George Bush.

The Washington-based Center for Defense Information said the U.S. troop deployment effort has been muted and taken in cooperation with host countries. The center said in a report that the cooperation is meant to keep the airlift out of the public eye.

"Notably, the command posts throughout the southern Gulf states and their implication of offensive operations are as politically sensitive as ever," the center said in a report authored by [Ret.] Rear Adm. Stephen Baker and Colin Robinson. "The U.S. 'footprint' in each country requires actual personnel numbers, amount of prepositioned equipment and support/cooperation agreements made with each country to be kept out of the public's knowledge."

The center said the United States maintains 8,000 troops in Afghanistan with several thousand more aboard naval ships in the Arabian Sea. More than 20,000 additional soldiers are deployed in Gulf Arab countries.

[On Aug. 30, Germany Defense Minister Peter Struck warned that Berlin would withdraw its military personnel from Kuwait if the United States attacks Iraq. Germany maintains 52 soldiers and Fox infantry fighting vehicles and has been training Kuwait in defending against a weapons of mass destruction attack.]

Moreover, more than 1,000 military planners, logistics experts and support specialists have been deployed in command posts throughout the Persian Gulf, the report said.

They are in real-time contact with U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla. by video teleconferencing, satellite imagery and data link and have drafted plans to ship up to 200,000 tons of heavy weapons and other equipment to the region.

The center said the United States could also use military bases in Egypt and Jordan for an attack on Iraq. Currently, the U.S. 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit is exercising with Jordanian forces and the center did not rule out that the maneuvers comprise a cover for prepositioning forces at well-sited forward staging posts.
[WorldTribune]

Iraq Opens Reported Weapons Site to Media
Mon Sep 2, 6:44 PM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq, facing the threat of U.S. attack over its alleged weapons of mass destruction, Monday opened to reporters a facility it says the West suspects of being an arms site.

The tour for the media, part of a campaign by Baghdad to repudiate U.S. allegations that it is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, was the latest in a series conducted over the past weeks.

It came as Iraq stepped up a diplomatic drive to avert threatened U.S. military action, saying it would discuss a conditional return of United Nations weapons inspectors with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg Tuesday.

The White House dismissed the meeting as pointless. "Iraq changes positions on whether it will let the inspectors in more often than (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein changes bunkers," President Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer told reporters.

Reporters were flown by helicopter to a site at al Qaim, in Anbar province, 280 miles west of Baghdad, accompanied by Hussam Mohammed Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, the office used for liaison with U.N. inspectors.

They were shown a uranium extraction plant destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War. The floor was littered with empty and damaged barrels and heaps of twisted iron bars and concrete slabs.

Debris was removed from the plant, built in the 1980s, under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision, Baghdad says.

"This site, as you see, is completely destroyed and allegations that Iraq has rebuilt this site and it is now working to extract uranium for a secret nuclear program are absolutely false," Amin said. "There is no such activity neither here nor anywhere in Iraq.

"It is impossible to rebuild this site because we need to import sophisticated equipment and material from abroad, and the second essential reason is that we have no intention to carry out nuclear activity," he said.

FACILITY DESTROYED

Amin said the site was worked from 1984 to 1991 to extract so-called yellowcake, the raw material of uranium. He said the plant produced a total of 168 tons of the material.

"This quantity was accounted for by the IAEA inspection teams," he said, in accordance with a safeguard agreement between Iraq and the IAEA.

According to the plant's director Riyadh Aziz al-Hadithi, the facility was damaged in the Gulf War and U.N. arms inspectors destroyed what had remained.

IAEA teams visited the site six times to verify its destruction. They also conducted 21 surprise inspections during the period 1994-1998, Baghdad says.

On similar tours last month, Iraqi authorities took Western reporters to a pesticides plant and a warehouse full of baby milk and sugar in a bid to repudiate what they said were U.S. reports that the buildings housed chemical and biological weapons sites.

Bush has labeled Iraq part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and North Korea and is seeking to topple Saddam Hussein over his alleged possession of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons.

Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, speaking at the Earth Summit, said Monday he would meet Annan to discuss the deepening crisis in relations between Iraq and the United States.

Aziz said Baghdad would consider the return of U.N. inspectors, but only under an overall deal to tackle its disputes with Washington.

U.N. arms experts left Iraq in December 1998 ahead of a U.S.-British bombing campaign to punish Baghdad for its alleged failure to cooperate with the inspectors.

MEDIA ALERT: HOW TO LEGITIMISE WAR - IRAQ AND THE BRITISH MEDIA (September 4, 2002)

In our society, choices decrease to the extent that they matter. When it comes to chocolate bars, the options are impressive - supermarket shelves are filled with them. When it comes to political parties, foreign policy and the media, choices merge, narrow and disappear to nothing.

Defenders of the mainstream media tell us there is a wide spectrum of views - we have, for example, a choice between the 'right-wing' Times and the 'left-wing' Observer, they say. George Orwell took a different view:

"I really don't know which is more stinking, the Sunday Times or The Observer. I go from one to the other like an invalid turning from side to side in bed and getting no comfort which ever way he turns." (George Orwell, quoted, Bernard Crick, George Orwell, A Life, p.233, Penguin Books, 1992).

As regular readers of our Media Alerts will know, the bedsores are as irksome now as ever they were in Orwell's day.

In his outstanding work, The Ambiguities of Power - British Foreign Policy Since 1945 - historian Mark Curtis tells us a little about our choices when it comes to deciding who to kill and exploit in foreign countries:

"Since 1945, rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy human rights and economic development in the Third World, British (and US) foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour (or Republicans or Democrats) have been in power. This has had grave consequences for those on the receiving end of Western policies abroad." (Curtis, Zed Books, 1995, p.3)

Selecting freely from options pre-selected to serve the same interests +is+ a choice but it is a meaningless one.

Today, Tony Blair and Tory leader Ian Duncan-Smith are as one in lining up with George Bush in pushing for "action" against Iraq. Blair insists that "Iraq poses a real and unique threat to the security of the region and the rest of the world." (Patrick Wintour, 'Blair: Saddam has to go', The Guardian, September 4, 2002)

This is the same Iraq that had its infrastructure systematically demolished by 88,500 tons of bombs - the equivalent of seven Hiroshima-size atomic bombs - during the Gulf War. The infrastructure has continued to collapse and decay, along with its suffering people, under a decade of murderous sanctions. We are expected to believe that the West's thousands of nuclear warheads were sufficient to deter the Soviet superpower for forty years, but not a smashed Third World nation.

Duncan-Smith informs us that Iraq has ballistic missiles with the capacity to strike Europe, the UK included. This is part of what he describes as the "clear and growing danger" represented by Saddam Hussein.

A permanent feature of media reporting is that the words of Western leaders are reported at face value, while the hidden agendas behind the words of our 'enemies' are remorselessly sought out and exposed. On BBC's News At Ten O'Clock, John Simpson (of Kabul) described a visit to Johannesburg by Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz. Simpson said:

"What they [the Iraqis] want to do is to give the impression that they are being reasonable and sensible... in order to show that they are innocent. Because they know that works, that really does schmooz people here. Tariq Aziz has been schmoozing people ever since he arrived, and doing it very satisfactorily from his point of view." (Simpson, September 3, 2002)

This was delivered by the urbane Simpson in his usual self-assured, well-educated voice - we would not readily associate him or his words with burned and mutilated bodies. But consider this: would Simpson or any other BBC or ITN reporter +ever+ describe Colin Powell or Jack Straw, or Bush or Blair, as trying hard "to give the impression that they are being reasonable and sensible... Because they know that works, that really does schmooz people here"?

The answer is a flat 'no' - Western leaders must always be treated with due deference and respect. It is because of this deep bias (unnoticed because omnipresent) presenting the reasonable good guys, 'us', pitted against the ludicrous bad guys, 'them', that Western nations are able to kill and maim thousands of Third World people with massive military violence, comparatively unhindered by public dissent. Our point is not that the Iraqi's are reasonable; it is that our leaders should not be reflexively portrayed as reasonable.

Also on BBC News, Matt Frei described Tariq Aziz as Saddam's "chief lieutenant", who was tirelessly "trying to woo the world", and that he had just that day "popped up on Good Morning America". (Frei, BBC1 News At Ten O 'Clock, September 3, 2002) Again, the Iraqi's are painted as absurd comedy figures crudely trying to trick the world into taking them seriously - 'But we won't fall for that!' is the message being subliminally delivered to the public. When the bombs start to fall, the public will likely be convinced that the Iraqis had it coming to them.

Again, Frei does not appear to have much to do with violence and death - like most TV reporters, he is a well-dressed, well-spoken, educated, middle class white man (the epitome of 'respectability' in our society). But, again, we should make the association, because words of this kind are crucial in making violence possible.

Consider, by contrast, a recent report by ITN's Washington Correspondent, Robert Moore. Concluding his report, Moore referred to Bush's urgent need to make a decision on whether to attack Iraq, adding ominously:

"As Dick Cheney, his vice president warned, Iraq may soon be armed with a nuclear weapon." (August 27, 2002)

No sense here that Cheney and Bush are "trying to give the impression that they are being reasonable and sensible... Because they know that works, that really does schmooz people here".

It is impossible to imagine that Moore might refer to the response of Scott Ritter, senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq for seven years, to the comments Cheney made that day:

"That's a deeply disturbing comment that the vice president made because it reflects either the fact that he's totally ignorant of the reality of what was transpiring, or if he is truly cognizant of what happened, he lied to the American public. And I'd hate to think the vice president is lying." (National Public Radio (NPR) Show: Talk of the Nation, NPR August 28, 2002 Wednesday. Headline: 'Threat that Iraq poses to the United States')

There was no prospect of Moore seeking a hidden agenda behind Cheney's allegations. We cannot conceive of ITN or the BBC mentioning that Vice President Cheney has intimate ties with Lockheed Martin, the largest US defence contractor, and that his wife Lynne Cheney served on the Lockheed Martin board from 1994 through January 2001, accumulating more than $500,000 in deferred director's fees in the process. Hidden agendas are fine for official 'enemies', but the good guys can be taken at their word, no matter
how absurd and compromised their word might be, no matter how awful their actions.

We have to go to war with Iraq, we are told, because Saddam Hussein is a monster - no right thinking person could stand by while he lives to threaten the world. Hiding in the shadow of the media's 'big question' - should we or shouldn't we attack Iraq? - lies a second, forbidden question consigned to the margins of debate. The question is this: What actually is the moral track record of the Western powers claiming that they intend to use mass violence to make the world a better place? Let's consider some of the
evidence.

We have to attack Iraq, we are told, because Saddam Hussein is a man who gassed his own people at Halabja. William Shawcross writes in The Guardian:

"The last time Iraq was open to the outside world in the 1980s opposition to Saddam was brutally repressed - who can forget Halabja?" ('Let's take him out - The threat to the world posed by Saddam Hussein's rule of terror is too great to ignore any longer. There is only one solution, argues William Shawcross - military action', August 1, 2002)

Who can forget Halabja? The true question is: Who can remember the West's role in Halabja? Dilip Hiro fills in some of the missing details about what actually happened, and about the 'us' of Shawcross' title, "Let's take him out":

"To retake Halabja from Iran and its Kurdish allies, who had captured it in March, Iraq's air force attacked it with poison gas bombs. The objective was to take out the occupying Iranian troops (who had by then left the town); instead, the assault killed 3,200 to 5,000 civilians. The images of men, woman and children, frozen in instant death, relayed by the Iranian media, shocked the world. Yet no condemnation came from Washington... [I}nstead of pressuring him [Saddam] to reverse his stand, or face a ban on the sale of American military equipment and advanced technology to Iraq by the revival of the Senate's bill, US Secretary of State George Shultz chose to say only that interviews with the Kurdish refugees in Turkey and 'other sources' (which remained obscure) pointed towards Iraqi use of chemical agents. These two elements did not constitute 'conclusive' evidence. This was the verdict of Shultz's British counterpart, Sir Geoffrey Howe: 'If conclusive evidence is obtained, then punitive measures against Iraq have not been ruled out.' As neither he nor Shultz is known to have made a further move to get at the truth, Iraq went unpunished." ('When US turned a blind eye to poison gas', The Observer, 1 September, 2002)
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,784125,00.html

On August 18, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, 'Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas'. Quoting anonymous US "senior military officers", the NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided "critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war".

It may have occurred to readers that the use of poison gas is not uniquely awful; not significantly worse than, for example, carpet bombing peasant villages in Vietnam, or spraying depleted uranium around Southern Iraq. Beyond the propaganda, we find that this obvious thought has also occurred to the warriors against terrorism. Retired US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Walter Lang, told the New York Times that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern". Rather, what concerned the DIA, CIA and the Reagan administration was halting the spread of Iran's Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Who can forget Halabja? Almost everyone.

The background to Washington's support of Iraq was the January 1979 popular uprising that overthrew the pro-US Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution threatened the West's control of oil. This brings us to another aspect of our second question regarding the West's moral track record: the issue of "regime change" in Iraq. What kind of regime would our 'moral crusaders' likely install after the fall of Saddam? Journalists take it for granted that it would be a major improvement. Writing in 1999, John Sweeney declared:

"Life will only get better for ordinary Iraqis once the West finally stops dithering and commits to a clear, unambiguous policy of snuffing out Saddam. And when he falls the people of Iraq will say: 'What kept you? Why did it take you so long?' (Sweeney, 'The West created a monster. Now it's time to destroy him. As a good liberal, I personally vote for obliterating Saddam', The Observer, January 10, 1999)

That was not quite what the people of Iran cried out when US-supplied armoured cars took to the streets of Iran, Iraq's neighbour, in 1953, deposing the nationalist Mussadiq and replacing him with the Shah. According to then CIA agent Richard Cottam, "...that mob that came into north Teheran and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. That mob was paid for by American dollars and the amount of money that was used has to have been very large". (Quoted, Curtis, op., cit, p.93)

Under the Shah, Iran had the "highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" which was "beyond belief", in a system in which "the entire population was subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror", according to Amnesty International. (Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International, cited in an Amnesty Publication, Matchbox, Autumn 1976)

After the CIA's coup in Iran, total US and multinational aid and credits to the Iranian monster it had created increased nine-fold: "The more dictatorial his regime became," US Iran specialist Eric Hoogland comments, "the closer the US-Iran relationship became." (Quoted, Curtis, op.,cit, p.95)

This does not bode well for a 'liberated' Iraq.

A rational discussion of the reasons for and against going to war must be based on the likely beneficial and adverse human consequences both for ourselves and others. Quite obviously, this question cannot be discussed seriously unless we are willing to discuss the nature and motives of the dominant political, corporate and military forces wielding Western military power. Marginal hints at the existence of enormous forbidden truths aside (the article by Dilip Hiro, for example), this is a question our media will not allow us to address because the media are part of the establishment status quo that has evolved to support, and benefits from, the silence.

SUGGESTED ACTION
Write to:
Richard Sambrook, director of BBC news:
Email: richard.sambrook@bbc.co.uk
Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian:
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Roger Alton, editor of The Observer:
Email: roger.alton@observer.co.uk
Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent
Email: s.kelner@independent.co.uk
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Copy all your letters to editor@medialens.org
Feel free to respond to Media Lens alerts (editor@medialens.org).
Visit the Media Lens website: www.medialens.org

Iraq denies seeking nuclear weapons, calls for Arab volunteers

BAGHDAD, Sept 2 (AFP) - Iraq vigorously squashed rumours it was pursuing nuclear weapons, but called on Arabs to volunteer to defend the country if it comes under US attack, the prospect of which has raised a chorus of disapproval from key US allies and from inside Washington itself.
   "We are not working on this," Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz told CNN television late Sunday when asked if Iraq was seeking to obtain nuclear weapons.
   "The United States have provided no evidence to support the allegations," Aziz said in reference to statements by US Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
   "The propagation of such claims aims at deceiving the American people ... about (the administration's) aggressive intentions toward Iraq," an Iraqi foreign ministry spokesman said.
   Ath-Thawra newspaper, mouthpiece of the ruling Baath Party in Baghdad, said Monday "these accusations are baseless and without any credibility."
   The army daily Al-Qadissiya advised President George W. Bush's administration to "reconsider its attitude" toward Iraq.
   "Its threats of a military intervention are an unacceptable policy for the international community," the daily said. "It is preferable to opt for dialogue."
   In the absence of talks, the Iraqis "will teach the Americans an unprecedented lesson," warned the influential newspaper Babel, run by President Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday.
   Iraq's Baath Party put out a call late Sunday for Arabs across the region to volunteer to defend the country if it were attacked by the United States.
   Leaders of the secular party urged "the Arab masses and believers around the world to become volunteers to confront the American aggression if it happens."
   Iraqi parliament Speaker Saadun Hammadi confirmed Monday that the Arab Parliamentary Union (APU) would host an extraordinary meeting in Baghdad on Tuesday and Wednesday focused on US threats to strike Iraq.
   "Seventeen Arab parliamentary delegations, including some from Gulf states, will attend this meeting to proclaim their categorical rejection of all threats against our people in Iraq as well as Palestine," APU secretary general Nur Eddin Buchkuj said, quoted by the Iraqi News Agency (INA).
   "The holding of this special session in Baghdad underscores the solidarity of the Arab peoples with Iraq and its cause, and the need to act by all means to preserve the unity and sovereignty of Iraq and face up to US intervention in its affairs," he said.
   Key US allies in Europe have been alarmed by war talk from senior US officials and have sought to cool tempers, urging diplomacy rather than belligerency in dealing with Iraq.
   However, European Union (EU) foreign ministers, meeting in Denmark over the weekend, did press Baghdad to readmit UN weapons inspectors immediately.   "We must understand that the only option for Baghdad is to allow the return of UN inspectors in order to help (big) countries which favor the UN terms" defend Baghdad's case, the semi-official Saudi daily Al-Riyadh said for its part.
   Such a position will help initiate a dialogue between the permanent members of the UN Security Council and "could halt US intentions" to strike Iraq, said the daily which reflects official thinking in Saudi Arabia.
   "But the Iraqi leadership, which ridiculed (similar) ideas and calls after invading Kuwait (in 1990), is repeating the same words from the same dictionaries that it has nothing to hide.
   "If this is really true, then the return of inspectors must be facilitated in order to avoid the division of Iraq," the daily added.
   Despite criticism at home and abroad, a solid majority of Americans supports military action against Iraq to remove Saddam from power, according to a poll of 1,372 by The Los Angeles Times made public Monday.
   Fifty-nine percent believed the United States should take military action to remove Saddam from power, 29 percent were opposed, and 12 percent were unsure, the poll showed.
   However, 61 percent of those who support military action said they believed Washington should attack Baghdad only if the international community backed the move.
   In Britain, a poll published Monday by the Daily Mirror showed that 71 percent of the British people opposed taking part in a war against Iraq without UN approval.

Powell Keeps Low Profile on Iraq (03/09/2002)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell continues to maintain a low profile on attacking Iraq, but close associates
say it is not meant to signal his views. While some other senior advisers to President Bush have been publicly vocal, Powell is concentrating on privately laying out a case to European allies and Arab friends that Iraq's President Saddam Hussein poses a threat to the world, these intimates say. The secretary, in his consultations with foreign leaders, takes the position that even if Saddam reversed his refusal for 3 1/2 years to admit international inspectors to search for weapons of mass destruction it would not end the Bush administration's dispute with Baghdad.
Powell says Iraq must go further and disarm, as it promised the U.N. Security Council at the end of the Persian Gulf war to liberate Kuwait in 1991. Whatever views Powell holds beyond that are reserved for the president, say Powell's associates, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But his consultations, mainly by telephone, are geared to seeking as much unity as possible on Iraq as a threat to stability in the Middle East, as well as elsewhere. His opportunity to lobby will expand this week as he attends an environmental and economic summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Leaders from Africa, Europe and Asia will attend -- and be available for Powell to present the administration's case against Saddam. Powell flies there Monday night.
In a BBC program marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Powell stressed the need to hold unfettered international inspections in Iraq. "The president has been clear that he believes weapons inspectors should return," he said. "Iraq has been in violation of these many U.N. resolutions for most of the last 11 years or so," Powell said. "And so, as a first step, let's see what the inspectors find."
Last week, when Britain appeared ready to propose a deadline for inspections, the State Department spokesman Richard Boucher
suggested even if Iraq complied that would not be enough to satisfy the Bush administration.
He said Iraq had backtracked on commitments nine times since 1991 and that inspections were not an end in themselves.
Powell's low profile is partly due to taking some time for vacation. But it is still in marked contrast to the strong public statements by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, Bush's assistant for national security.
Cheney has been especially outspoken, accusing Iraq of avidly pursuing nuclear weapons. His remarks appeared to support a
pre-emptive strike.
Bush has said little and evidently has not yet made a decision on how to attempt to overthrow Saddam. Powell has given no public indication he disagrees with the administration's goal of ousting the Iraqi leader. His advice on how to go about it is for the president's ears alone, officials say. The former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff brings with that advice long experience in combat. At the same time, he is known to be an advocate of restraint --- against Iraq after Kuwait was freed and against intervention in the Balkans against ethnic conflict in the first Clinton administration. Most of the European allies and Arab governments have sought to dissuade Bush from launching an attack. And members of Congress are asking the administration to outline its position and provide an assessment of whether the U.S. military was ready to take on Iraq.
Sen. Chuck Hagel, a ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an early advocate of caution in Bush's
approach to Iraq, agrees that Saddam regime is a threat. But the Nebraskan says Bush needs to keep an eye on a political map filled
with dangers.
Another senior member of the committee, Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., who joined Hagel weeks ago in counseling a go-slow approach to achieving Bush's oft-stated goal of "regime change" in Iraq, said the president should consult both the United Nations and Congress
before acting. Lugar said a U.N. resolution demanding return of weapons inspectors would give political cover. "There's no question that Saddam Hussein represents a threat to the region, ultimately a threat to the United States and all peace-loving people," Hagel said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "I think the question ... is the urgency of that threat.
"Who would we go to war with on our side? ... When do we do that? Who would then replace Saddam Hussein? Would we further
destabilize the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia? ... And, of course, one of the big questions is, how long would the United
States need to stay in the Middle East? Are we talking about 250,000 troops? Do we want to be in Baghdad running that government, trying to find an alternative?" Hagel said. "These are the questions that we need to think through and ask."
Lugar said the U.N. Security Council's action would be little more than symbolic, because Saddam would refuse to let the inspectors return, and it would be left to the Americans to enforce the resolution making the demand.