U.S. Public and Military Support for Bombing Iraq Began Fading Immediately After Albright and Cohen Trips

By Lucille Barnes

U.S. public support for bombing Iraq began fading well before Kofi Annan’s visit to Saddam Hussain got President Clinton off the very long limb his Israelist advisers had urged him to mount. The public turnaround began even as U.S. and British aircraft carriers took up positions in the Persian Gulf early in February and while the “world’s only remaining superpower” still seemed hell-bent on becoming the “world’s only remaining superbully.”

Journalists began to catch on just after U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright returned from what she described as a “successful” tour in which she was “not asking for support” but only “explaining to our allies what the U.S. was going to do.”

While U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen was mak ing follow-up visits to the same countries to talk about details, however, the U.S. media began quietly asking exactly which U.S. allies would be providing support. Well, Albright aides explained, there was Britain and there was Portugal, which would allow U.S. aircraft to use its mid-Atlantic island airfields to refuel en route to the Gulf. And, of course, Kuwait.

It was only at the end of Cohen’s trip, during which Australia and Canada added their voices to Britain’s, but no new “allies” turned up in the Middle East, that the truth sank in both to the public and to American leaders: If the U.S. and Britain went ahead and bombed Iraq, essentially they would be all alone.

Therefore, questions about why in 1991 the U.S. had 35 military allies in the Gulf War and in 1998 it stood virtually isolated began creeping into whatever space the American media had left over from its coverage of “Monicagate”—the Washington scandal that preoccupied President Bill Clinton throughout this dangerous period.

In a thoughtful article written from Baghdad, Christian Science Monitor correspondent Scott Peterson reminded readers on Feb. 10 that “even as the current crisis unfolds—with one American-led team prevented from visiting sites the Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussain deems ‘sensitive’—other teams work unhindered.”

Peterson’s Monitor article also cited both the all-American makeup of the banned team, led by former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter, and the shrillness of Australian UNS COM chief Richard Butler’s “media offensive,” which began when—standing before an Israeli flag—he told members of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that Iraq had enough biological weapons materiel and missiles to “blow away Tel Aviv.”

After that, U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan had told Butler to tone down his remarks, since such alarmist claims had not been reflected in his reports to the U.N. Security Council. On the contrary, UNSCOM in the past had reported considerable success, with President Clinton having stated that it had done more to erase chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missile capability from Iraq’s arsenal than the entire Gulf war air campaign.

Increasingly, therefore, thought ful analysts began asking why the U.S. would, in effect, bring all such inspections to an end in order to carry out a bombing program that no one, least of all the U.S. generals in charge, believed would eradicate either Iraqi President Saddam Hussain’s grip on power, or whatever weapons programs or capabilities he still had left.

In fact, although U.N. dependents and “non-essential employees” were evacuated from Iraq, throughout the crisis inspectors at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad continued to monitor video surveillance cameras operating 24 hours a day at some 300 sensitive sites in Iraq. Chemical and radiation units at some of those locations also continued to sample the air, and X-rays also were in use.

“If there is a military strike, the first result will be that the inspectors will be out of Iraq,” a diplomat told Peterson. “As far as disarmament, we will lose our grip on Iraq. UNSCOM is the only instrument to bring Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction.”

Another note of rationality was injected into the media debate on Feb. 10 by Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Democratic African-American congresswoman from Georgia, on the televised “NewsHour” with Jim Lehrer. She quoted Israeli military analyst Meir Stieglitz, who wrote in Israel’s largest daily, Yediot Ahro not, that “there is no such thing as a long-range Iraqi missile with an effective biological warhead. No one has found an Iraqi biological warhead. The chances of Iraq having succeeded in developing operative warheads without tests are zero.”

Representative McKinney also pointed out that: “In 1992 UNSCOM determined Iraq had no engines and no launchers.” In fact, the congresswoman pointed out, “this crisis has come about as a result of two issues really: access of the inspection team and the composition of the inspection team. I think that the international community would also stand behind unfettered access of the inspection team. But on this question of the composition of the inspection team, is that worth going to war over? I don’t think so. Kofi Annan has suggested that the United Nations could be flexible in this area, and I think the United States needs to be flexible as well.”

At first such voices of rationality seemed almost drowned out by the drumbeat for war. Yet the “hawks” were not all singing in the same key. Initial statements of support by Britain’s foreign secretary were conditioned upon passage of another U.N. Security Council resolution—something that seemed extremely unlikely given the opposition of Russia, China and France, all of whom have veto power, to the precipitate use of force. Even in the U.S. Congress, where the Republicans initially seemed to be outbidding the Democrats in their eagerness for military action, things were not as simple as they seemed.

Republicans, then as now, were calling for action aimed at removing Saddam Hussain from power, not for “more pinprick air and missile strikes.” But military officials cautioned that the U.S. is not in a position to undertake such action, given the deep cuts in U.S. military forces overall, the lack of U.S. allies, and the almost complete denial of the bases in the area which had been available to the coalition forces that carried out operation Desert Storm to eject the Iraqi occupation forces from Kuwait. So the Republican support seemed to be political posturing—more illusory than real.

In fact it was retired U.S. military officers such as Gen. Norman Swartzkopf, who opposed the bombing, and other informed callers into radio and television talk shows who injected welcome notes of realism and perspective. They pointed out that it was true that the agreement imposed on Saddam at the end of the Gulf war did not allow him to dictate the composition of the U.N. arms inspection teams. But neither did the agreement say anything about the U.S. alone dictating the composition of those teams.

And, callers pointed out, it is the Iraqis, not Americans, who are suffering so horribly from the embargo until the inspectors can certify that Saddam’s forces no longer have weapons of mass destruction. So why was it the U.S. that was in such a hurry to finish the job?

Now that the crisis has been averted, or postponed, there is much that the U.S. should do. This includes increasing the food and medicines available to Iraqis, diversifying the composition of the inspection teams, and taking steps to enforce all U.N. Security Council resolutions—including the many outstanding resolutions against Israel and not just those against Iraq. All of this will be necessary before the U.S. can expect to find Middle Eastern allies in any future confrontation with Saddam Hussain.

Meanwhile, Americans might consider where the pressure in January and February for immediate air and missile strikes against Iraq came from. Within the government it came from the Israelists making U.S. Middle East policy in the State Department and some of their allies in the White House. In the media it came largely from such tried-and-true U.S. media friends of Israel as columnists A.M. Ros enthal of The New York Times and Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post, and from guest columns in U.S. newspapers by “foreign experts” who, upon examination, turned out to be Israelis.

Their clear objective was to see U.S. bombs and missiles once again crashing down on Iraq and driving a wedge between the United States and all of the Islamic countries of the world. If these friends of Israel had succeeded, they would have conferred upon Israel the title of “world’s only remaining superpower,” since, for a time at least, it almost had the power to turn the United States into the world’s only remaining superchump.