International Socialists

The US was gearing up for a new military assault against Iraq as Socialist Review went to press.

 

The US government is already responsible for some one million dead in Iraq - most as a result of the sanctions. United Nations reports admit that Iraqi society was reduced to a "preindustrial" level by the war and that scurvy, rickets, marasmus and kwashiorkor - all previously eradicated - have reappeared on a mass scale.

 

Clinton is prepared to add to the body count to make sure that US power in the oil-rich Gulf region remains undisputed - and, even more cynically, to take attention away from the scandal rocking his presidency. But this should not come as a surprise. It was no coincidence that the last missile strike against Iraq came in September 1996, in the midst of Clinton's reelection campaign.

 

The latest standoff began in mid-January when Iraqi officials barred one of the UN weapons inspection teams that have been investigating Iraqi defence facilities since the end of the war, looking for evidence that the Iraqi government has been constructing prohibited "weapons of mass destruction," including chemical weapons.

 

Iraqi officials objected to a team headed by a former American marine captain. Iraq says that the US is manipulating the inspections to keep sanctions against Iraq in place indefinitely.

 

US concern about Iraqi chemical weapons is sheer hypocrisy. The US refuses to dismantle its own chemical arsenal. Along with other Western governments, it supplied Saddam Hussein with the materials to make "weapons of mass destruction" during the 1980s, including components of chemical weapons.

 

And when Iraq, then a US ally, used chemical weapons in the 1980s - first in its war with Iran and later against the Kurdish minority in Iraq itself - the US didn't lift a finger.

 

If the US does launch an air strike, it may be over the objections of many of the countries which supported the US-led Gulf War seven years ago. But US bosses have always been ready to go it alone in taking the lives of Arabs to protect oil profits.