War on Iraq: What Are the Hawks—and Israel—Getting America Into?

Desperate Search for a Pretext for War

By Patrick Seale

Determined to smash Iraq, U.S. hawks are feverishly hunting for a casus belli—a pretext for war. With strong support from their Israeli allies, they hope to find or fabricate one in the next two or three weeks, in time to justify a massive blitz in early March when the full moon will facilitate night bombing of Iraqi targets. This is the message conveyed by sources in Washington and Tel Aviv, who report the huge anger and frustration of the hawks at the obstruction to their war plans from the U.N. weapons inspectors and the Security Council, but especially from President Jacques Chirac of France, now seen by the hawks as the principal villain.

How can a pretext for war be found? Some sources believe that Washington is already grooming an Iraqi defector whose “revelations” of Iraq’s prohibited arsenal will justify an attack.

Other sources report that strenuous attempts are being made by American and Israeli intelligence agents to penetrate Hans Blix’s expanding team of weapons inspectors, perhaps in the hope of “planting” on Iraq incriminating evidence of prohibited items. Some European counter-espionage sources do not rule out the possibility of a contrived terrorist attack somewhere in the world which could be “linked” to Iraq. On Feb. 19 the British newspaper The Independent reported that Washington and London were contemplating an “orchestrated” raid on three “mystery ships” in the Indian Ocean, suspected of carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, to present them as “evidence” that Saddam Hussain was in “material breach” of U.N. resolutions.

All these rumors and reports point to the utter determination of the neo-imperialists and Zionist extremists who have captured American foreign policy to wage war on Iraq, come what may. For them, the issue of Iraq’s alleged weapons has never been more than a sideshow.

Intoxicated by their hold on American power, they are in the grip of a geopolitical fantasy which sees the destruction of Saddam Hussain’s regime as the first step to the destruction of all their Arab and Islamic enemies and the wholesale “refashioning” of the Mideast to suit the United States and Israel.

These warmongers bitterly regret that President George W. Bush was persuaded late last year by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Colin Powell to seek Security Council authorization for war. The result was Resolution 1441 which returned the U.N. inspectors to Iraq. But the hawks now see this multilateral U.N. route and the ongoing inspections as a trap constraining America’s freedom of action.

Nevertheless, they recognize that Blair, America’s vital European ally, needs a second resolution if he is to head off an anti-war revolt in his own Labor Party and persuade the skeptical British public that war is necessary. Blair’s participation is crucial to the war party: if he were to decide that the political cost was too high, not least to his own position, Bush might have to pause.

America’s Diplomatic Goals

American diplomacy will have its hands full in the coming weeks. Apart from the search for a pretext for war, the following are seen as its most urgent tasks:

• Securing a majority in the Security Council for the new resolution drafted by the U.S. and Britain. This will be no easy task. At present, the U.S., Britain, Spain and Bulgaria are ranged against a powerful bloc comprising France, Germany, Russia, China and Syria. The other six members of the 15-member Council are undecided. Great U.S. pressures are now being applied to bring these “waverers”—Mexico, Pakistan, Chile, Angola, Guinea, and Cameroon—over to the American side. Such political pressures, financial inducements and other forms of “arm-twisting” might well cause Pakistan, Angola and Chile to bend, but that is still two votes short of the number the U.S. needs for a majority.

• A further priority is to head off the possibility, even the probability, of a French veto of the proposed second resolution. While it is recognized that President Chirac will not easily give up his conviction that war must only be a last resort, American tactics will be aimed at weakening the French position by persuading Russia to switch camps. President Vladimir Putin’s recent decision to back France and Germany greatly strengthened the anti-war camp. A defection by him would leave France and Germany vulnerable and would be a major victory for the hawks. It is widely rumored that, in private negotiations, the U.S. is offering Russia a “share of the spoils” from the Iraqi campaign in the form of access to Iraqi oilfields and a guarantee that Iraq’s $8 billion debt to Russia will be repaid.

• A third American tactic will be to urge Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, to proceed immediately with a number of key tasks: the destruction of Iraq’s complete stock of Al-Samoud rocket engines (which are alleged to have exceeded the permitted 150 kilometer range); conducting many more interviews of Iraqi scientists, without minders or tape recordings; accounting for the missing stocks of anthrax, VX nerve gas and other chemical agents; proceeding with extensive monitoring of Iraqi territory by American U-2 aircraft and French Mirage IVs.

Any Iraqi hesitation to comply with any of these demands would immediately trigger war. On the other hand—and this is Saddam Hussain’s unenviable dilemma—if Iraq were to lay itself open to such all-intrusive surveillance, it would greatly compromise its ability to defend itself if the U.S. decided to attack after all, as seems more than probable.

Rebellion Against U.S. Designs

Even before a single shot is fired, the costs of the war to America’s regional alliances, and to the American treasury, are rising steeply. In a highly significant interview with the BBC, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, declared that a U.S. attack on Iraq without U.N. authorization would be an act of aggression.

In other words, he was signaling that the U.S. could not use Saudi air bases for such an attack. The rift between Washington and Riyadh is widening, threatening to damage a close relationship of well over half a century. Another U.S. ally, Turkey, is setting stiff terms for its participation in the war. Tayyib Erdogan, leader of Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party, has said that Turkey would not open its bases to thousands of American troops unless the U.S. paid massive compensation—put by some sources at over $40 billion. Turkey’s hard bargaining is threatening America’s two-front strategy for an assault on Saddam Hussain.

Alone in the region, Israel is pressing hard for a U.S. attack: war is indeed the corner-stone of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s strategy for destroying the Palestinians and confirming Israel’s regional hegemony. Its powerful friends in Washington are the impatient advocates for war. And Israel is asking for an additional $12 billion in U.S. aid to help it out of its current economic difficulties.

Beyond the current diplomatic jousting for and against war lie a number of wider issues. In the Mideast, the overriding question is whether the Arab states can achieve something like real independence or whether they must submit, in neo-colonial fashion, to American and Israeli hegemony.

For the Palestinians, now facing national extinction at the hands of Sharon, the problem is both agonizing and immediate.

In Europe, the issue is also one of power. Who will dominate the future of the European Union? Will it be the core states of France and Germany, or will America and its British ally call the shots?

No doubt, in seeking to check the rush to war, one of President Chirac’s objectives is to contain American power, which he sees as irresponsible and dangerous. In this he is reflecting the view of many Europeans who fear that the United States, under the influence of Israel and a handful of right-wing extremists, is charging blindly down a path which will destabilize the already volatile Mideast, provoke still more terror, and bring about the much-heralded “clash of civilizations.” America itself could be heading for another Vietnam.

As the world holds its breath, here are some immediate questions: How long can the arms inspections continue before some form of closure will be demanded? Can Putin’s Russia be “bought off” by the United States? Can American and Israeli agents spring a “surprise” and produce a pretext for war?

Above all, will Saddam Hussain give up everything he has and will even this be enough to save his country? The greater the hawks’ frustration, the more dangerous and desperate they become.

Patrick Seale is the author of Asad of Syria and Abu-Nidal: A Gun for Hire (both available from the AET Book Club). This article first appeared in the Saudi Gazette, Feb. 22, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

The Wages of Empire

By Patrick J. Buchanan

To the acolytes of American empire, the invasion of Iraq is but Act I in the exhilarating unfolding drama of the 21st century. All the “Islamo-fascist” regimes of the Middle East and northern Africa—Iran, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya—are to follow Saddam Hussain’s onto the landfill of history. As democracy was imposed on Japan by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, so shall it be imposed upon them all.

That is the vision of the neoconservatives to whom George W. Bush incarnates their Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Winston Churchill. Yet, their disillusionment is certain, for they misread the man and the times.

It is the height of hubris to believe America can indefinitely defy the whole world.

True, the relative power of the United States exceeds Britain’s at the height of its empire. But this war to “liberate” Iraq and reshape it in our own image has already called into existence countervailing forces that stand athwart our path to empire.

The first is the force of world opinion. To protest a U.S. war on Iraq without U.N. Security Council sanction, there were million-person marches in the streets of the capitals of our staunchest allies, Spain, Italy, Britain. Polls show that huge majorities of Europeans oppose a U.S. war without U.N. sanction. Among Arabs and Turks, the opposition is visceral and well-nigh universal. We are as isolated as the Brits at the time of the Boer War. It is the height of hubris to believe America can indefinitely defy the whole world.

Even if Iraqis initially welcome U.S. soldiers as liberators, within months there will be Islamic bombers willing to die to drive us out, as they drove the French out of Algeria, the Israelis out of Lebanon, the Marines out of Beirut. While the Arab and Islamic worlds did not succeed in many endeavors in the 20th century, they did excel in terrorizing and expelling all the old imperial powers. Our turn is next.

Neoconservatives came to their editors’ cubicles a century too late. Peoples everywhere have internalized Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and Wilson’s gospel about all peoples being entitled to self-determination. This idea has taken root in the hearts of men: better to fight than be ruled by foreigners.

We may see American hegemony as benevolent. Is it not clear that the world does not?

Already, Cold War friends and allies are revisiting the issue of whether the protection afforded by the presence of U.S. troops on their national soil is worth the price paid in alienation from their own peoples.

According to The New York Times, Crown Prince Abdullah will ask for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia at the end of the Iraq war.

The new president of South Korea was elected on a pledge to review the U.S. troop presence there. The Pakistanis want us out, and, after 60 years of occupation, even the Okinawans wish to be rid of us.

Nor should we resist the eviction orders, for the terrorists are only over here because we are over there.

Worldwide, the anti-American card has become a trump. Herr Gerhard Schroeder played it deftly to rescue himself from certain defeat in the German elections. And while Americans may be boycotting French wines, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin is a more celebrated figure in Old Europe than Colin L. Powell, let alone Bush.

And the staggering bill for empire has just begun to come in. Not only are Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia unwilling to pay the cost of this war, as they did for Desert Storm, they are not in any condition to do so. Nor does the United States, staring at deficits of $300 billion to $400 billion, have the means to subsidize an empire.

The cost of invading and rebuilding Iraq has been put at $100 billion to $200 billion by Bush’s former economic adviser. That was last year.

More recent estimates have soared. Will Americans pay this immense sum to reconstruct and “democratize” Iraq?

With California mulling higher taxes and firing workers to cover a $35 billion deficit, how long will taxpayers tolerate shakedowns like Ankara’s demand for as much as $30 billion for U.S. troops to transit Turkey and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s demand for $15 billion in foreign aid and loan guarantees to hold our coat?

Neoconservatives assure us that once Arab peoples see our destructive power rain down on Iraq, they will line up with the winner and accept our hegemony. But if such power has not brought respect for Israel in Lebanon or on the West Bank, what guarantee is there it will make American occupiers revered or loved?

History teaches otherwise. Five years after the United States had reduced to smoldering ashes the greatest empire Asia had seen in centuries, little North Korea, which did not even exist in 1945, launched an invasion to throw the Americans off the peninsula and out of Asia. World champions never lack for challengers.

Our own history teaches us this. A dozen years after the British army had defeated our enemies in the French and Indian War, American patriots were shooting British soldiers on the Concord Road.

George Washington wept with joy at America’s alliance with France in 1777, but a year after Yorktown, American agents were back-channeling Brits in Paris to conclude a separate peace.

As for the Bush Doctrine—“We will not allow the world’s worst dictators to get the world’s worst weapons”—it is already going the way of William McKinley’s “open door.” With Russian assistance, Iran is building nuclear plants it does not need and mining uranium. North Korea, with a secret uranium- enrichment program running and a plutonium reactor being refired, is openly taunting and defying the president. The American response to date: repeated assurances that neither sanctions nor military strikes are being considered.

Given the immense time, energy, resources and costs—financial and political—of Bush’s drive to disarm a weak, isolated Iraq, will the president, when Baghdad is occupied, press on against other regimes, which are not under U.N. sanction?

Where will he get his authority to go after Iran, Syria or Libya, as Sharon and his Amen Corner demand? In Iraq, the president has the cover of U.N. resolutions. Will the Brits be with us when we go after Iran?

Will British Prime Minister Tony Blair be up for a second adventure? Who will be with us if we attack North Korea to disarm it? Can the United States tread alone the path to empire in a world where the United States is believed by much of mankind to be itself the great threat to world peace?

Imperialism is an idea whose time has come and gone, and, in any event, we Americans were lousy imperialists. We lacked the tradition, the will to rule other peoples, the perseverance required. We had not occupied the Philippines a few years before Theodore Roosevelt, champion of annexation, wished to be rid of it.

No, empire is not our future, or our fate. The braying Beltway interventionists are only advancing the day when this generation too will rid itself of empire and America returns to the foreign policy written in its history and heart: the friend to freedom everywhere but the vindicator only of our own.

That way lies long life for the republic. To hell with empire.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of A Republic, Not an Empire and editor of the American Conservative. This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 2003. ©2003, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.