Western Massachusetts

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm an activist. ... I'd like to thank RAIL for inviting me here to speak.

I'm here today to talk about this so-called UNSCOM inspection "process". You're probably aware that since Operation Desert Fox there haven't been any new inspections in Iraq. The U.S. seems to have lost what it said it was trying to preserve as a result of these air strikes.

It's still necessary to talk about these UNSCOM inspections because they're one of the main excuses that has been used to hold Iraq hostage for the last eight years. For example, President Clinton spoke of Iraq's "failure to fulfil its obligations" in his State of the Union address last January. There's a pretty standard line the media and pro-war crowd site in order to justify this bloodbath. It goes like this:

Saddam Hussein is producing weapons of mass destruction. He's going to destroy us all. And he's denying UNSCOM inspectors access to sensitive weapon sites in violation of agreements made after the 1991 Gulf War. And what we got to do is drop our own weapons of mass destruction on him in order to send a powerful message about the iron will of the United States.

8 years of illegal sanctions and over 9000 inspections doesn't sound like noncompliance to me. So what's the crisis?

Well, the real crisis isn't that Iraq is not cooperating. The real crisis is that they have cooperated. It makes it harder to justify these periodic attacks. I'd like to read a small article from the May 1998 issue of The Progressive that illustrates this:

{ Read Article }

That's the end of the article. So the U.S. doesn't care about Iraq's Weapon's of Mass Destruction Ð Our goal is war.

That's one of the keys to understanding these crisis - Our goal is war. Going all the way back to the 1991 Gulf War you'll find that numerous offers have been made by Iraq, Russia, France and other countries to diplomatically settle the various conflicts and the U.S. has systematically rejected them in favor of war.

This includes the dreaded linkage issue. X will discuss this in more depth so I'll just mention it briefly. Before the 1991 Gulf war Iraq said that it was willing to pull out of Kuwait for discussion on the Arab/Israel conflict. The Bush administration found this to be unacceptable. I don't know why; it seems like something we need anyway. How many more people would have opposed the Gulf War if they'd known this? They're might have been a few.

This avoidance of diplomacy, however, could be a whole other topic for discussion regarding the Iraqi crisis. It's worth noting here because one of the answers to the question "What are we supposed to do?" is that other peaceful options were available and they were rejected. One of the reasons why we struck so suddenly last December was so there wouldn't be any time to negotiate a peaceful settlement. Another reason was to avoid any outbreak of "vibrant democracy" like there was at Ohio State last year.

So, UNSCOM wasn't able to find any legitimate weapons of mass destruction. So what did they do? Well, there was all this talk about Iraq's 'capacity" to produce these weapons, hidden nuclear and germ warfare programs and quarreling over documentation.

There was one rather peculiar incident that I'd like to mention. A June 24, 1998 article in the New York Times accused Iraq of loading VX nerve gas onto missile warheads before the 1991 Gulf War.

President Clinton left little doubt that he would use this incident to keep the sanctions against Iraq in place. "Let the inspections go forward and don't lift the sanctions until the resolutions are complied with" he gleefully proclaimed. Chief U.S. delegate Bill Richardson did his part by declaring this alleged discovery to be "a nail in the coffin for Iraq's efforts to lift sanctions and to show substantial progress on disarmament."

I mentioned that I found this to be strange because there were no U.N. resolutions on Iraq before the Gulf War. What did you call this Ð a defacto punishment. There were no weapons resolutions on Iraq before the Gulf War, since then inspections have reduced Iraq's weapons capacity but were going to punish them over this anyway. Oh, and by the way we sold them these weapons.

There was supposed to be a comprehensive review of sanctions and the inspection process in October 1998 but it was called off. This lead to the crisis in November of 1998. At the time media pundits were chanting that Saddam Hussein won't be able to sneak out of this one like he did last February. Diplomatic efforts are viewed as treachery by our media. Our goal is war.

Well there was a diplomatic effort; not from the United States of course. It came about as a result of a letter sent to Kofi Annan from the Iraqi government. It wasn't a pledge of unconditional cooperation as our leaders said. It actually contained a number of terms and conditions. I'll read just a few of them:

Sixth, the second phase of the review only encompasses the obligations determined by clear provisions of the resolutions and no matters be raised contrary to the legal interpretation of the resolutions. (This means that we don't keep raising new questions about Iraq's "capacity" to create weapons and only base our reviews on things like inspectors going into sites.)

Seventh, the members of the Council and specially the permanent members abide by international law and the relevant resolutions of the Council in respect of all matters pertaining to Iraq.

Eighth, the question of Butler and the structure of Unscom and its practices are important matters. The Council is to consider them seriously in order to insure a good relationship in the future. We hope that this will be done as soon as possible.

Or so it seemed, because then came the infamous Desert Fox bombings last December. There wasn't time to negotiate anything. We just started indiscriminately killing people.

What's unique about that crisis is that it wasn't the result of inspectors being kicked out of Iraq. It was the result of a report by Richard Butler saying that he found Iraqi compliance to be unacceptable. So Iraq was complying but now even that is not good enough. Nothing is good enough. Our goal is war.

A few particulars on this report of Butler's:

There have been 427 new inspections since November 17, 1998 and UNSCOM only sited 5 obstructions. So what were they?

1. A 45 minute delay at one site

2. A rebuff to demand that inspectors be allowed to interview undergraduate students in the Baghdad University science department.

3. Restricted access to a small office of the head of the Baathist Party. That's an interesting word restricting. A December 21 article in the Washington Post described it in more detail. It said that on December 9 UNSCOM inspectors showed up at the headquarters of the Baathist Party. The Iraqi escorts cited a 1996 agreement and said that only four inspectors could enter. Also take into account all these assignation threats our leaders have made and you can understand the security concerns here.

4 & 5. The last two cases of obstruction involved delays at entering establishments on the Muslim Sabbath. In accordance with previous agreements the Iraqi's told UNSCOM that since these buildings were not open they could enter, but they would need to be accompanied by Iraqi officials.

These 5 incidents of trivial pursuit are the so-called legal basis for raining thousands of bombs upon the Iraqi people.

This is pretty much par for the course regarding inspections. I'd like to read sections of an article from a publication called Iraq Notebook that demonstrated how easy it is to manufacture these crises.

[ Read Sections of article ]

That's the article. There's a quote in here from Richard Butler [ Read Quote ]

What a bunch of racist arrogance! And this is the person whose word the U.S. uses to justify this slaughter.

Well, Richard Butler can say that Iraq is not compiling but there are others who seem to disagree with him.

A report issued by the International Atomic Energy Commission said that Iraq has "no nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons usable materials or the capacity to produce such items."

Director of inspections Jaakko Ylitalo said that 817 of 819 of Iraq's scud missiles have been accounted for, as have most of the biological and chemical supplies.

Israel military analyst Meir Stiglitz claims that there is no strategic or biological threat to Israel on Iraq's part.

Here's an interesting one. [September 18, 1998] Independent tests done in Switzerland showed that there were no traces of VX nerve gas on the missile fragments mentioned earlier. Tests done in France were said to be inconclusive.

Former inspector Scott Ritter charged that Butler's report [ Read from IAC sheet ]

And Former inspector Michael Bremer suggested thatÉ..[ read Quote ]

No argument there; Sanctions are the real weapon of mass destruction. It's time to also say that sanctions are also the real violation of any kind of post Gulf War agreement. You've seen the damage that they've done. If the U.S. is going to insist on keeping these sanctions in place then Iraq is under no obligation to comply with anything.

Most of this information is from a speech I wrote during the bombing campaign last December. I have an update. In a Jan 7,1998 article in New York Times U.S. officials admitted that they had secretly used the UN weapons inspection system to spy on Iraq. This came about from information released by Kofi Annan and Scott Ritter.

Since the Gulf War our government has said that these inspections are necessary to keep track of Iraq's weapon's of mass destruction. This, however was just a ploy to monitor Iraq's internal communications, to track the movements of its leaders and to keep the sanctions in place.

Clinton hoped that he could use this information to assassinate Iraq's political and military leaders with the air strikes he launched last December. So UNSCOM isn't just some neutral disarmament agency. It is a tool of U.S. imperialism.

But even beyond this recent discovery this excuse for genocide had never made much sense. President Clinton once called Saddam Hussein a threat to the children of the twenty-first century. The sanctions that we are imposing on Iraq, however, are doing real damage to the children of this century. The U.S. is substituting real starvation, real disease, real suffering and sometimes even real war for the hypothetical damage that could be done by Iraq if they have these "weapons of mass destruction", if they have the capability to use them and if they actually did decide to use them. Given the fact that our government often lies to us and it's ability to instigate a crisis whenever it chooses, these are very big "ifs". Thank you for your peace work.