Two articles on bombing in Iraq

Britain and America's pilots are blowing the cover on our so-called "humanitarian" no-fly zone
by John Pilger, New Statesman, 19th March

Royal Air Force pilots have protested for the first time about their role in the bombing of Iraq. Pilots patrolling the so-called no-fly zone in the north of the country have spoken angrily about how they have been ordered to return to their base in Turkey in order to allow the Turkish air force to bomb the Kurds in Iraq - the very people the British are meant to be "protecting".

The pilots say that, whenever the Turkish air force wants to launch attacks on the Kurds, the Turks are recalled to base and their radar is switched so that the targets will not be visible. One British pilot reported seeing the devastation caused by the attacks when he resumed his patrol.

The pilots agreed to speak, on a non-attributable basis, to Dr Eric Herring, the Iraq sanctions specialist at Bristol University. "They were all very unhappy about what they had been ordered to do, and what they had seen," he said, "especially as there had been no official explanation."

While British government ministers have repeatedly described the no-fly-zones as "humanitarian cover" for the Kurds, the pilots' unease has become an open secret in the United States. Last October, the Washington Post reported: "On more than one occasion [US pilots who fly in tandem with the British] have received a radio message that `there is a TSM inbound' - that is, a `Turkish Special Mission' heading into Iraq. Following standard orders, the Americans turned their planes around and flew back to Turkey. `You'd see Turkish F-14s and F-16s inbound, loaded to the gills with munitions,' [pilot Mike Horn] said. `Then they'd come out half an hour later with their munitions expended.' When the Americans flew back into Iraqi air space, he recalled, they would see `burning villages, lots of smoke and fire'."

Last December, more than 10,000 Turkish troops invaded northern Iraq, killing untold numbers of civilians and fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK. British and American aircraft "protecting" the Kurds did nothing to prevent the invasion; indeed, most patrols were suspended to allow the Turks to get on with the killing. Inside Turkey, the Ankara regime has destroyed 3,000 Kurdish villages, displaced more than three million people and killed tens of thousands. Racist laws prevent Turkish Kurds from speaking their language; parliamentarians and journalists who speak out end up in prison, or assassinated.

The Blair government has said nothing about this, because Turkey is a member of Nato. Almost all Kurds applying for asylum in Britain - from Turkey and Iraq - have been refused. Jack Straw's new Terrorism Act bans the PKK, which has no history of violence in this country. This means that Kurdish activists resident in Britain are now at risk of being sent back to Turkey: to prison, or worse. In the past few weeks more than 1,000 political prisoners on hunger strike in Turkish jails have been attacked by the authorities, leaving 33 people dead. Again, Whitehall's response has been silence.

RAF pilots are gradually becoming aware of the dishonest power game of which they are a part, and that the no-fly zones have no basis in international law and provide no "humanitarian cover" for the Kurds in the north and the Shi'a in the south. Concern for these people was always a sham. In 1991, when President Bush Sr called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, he was really inviting Saddam's generals to stage a military coup and install a more malleable dictator. The last thing he wanted was the ensuing popular uprising by the Shi'a in March of that year - which Saddam crushed with helicopter gunships that the US allowed him to fly, and while American commanders denied weapons and equipment to the rebels. An estimated 30,000 people were slaughtered. "We clearly would have preferred a coup. There's no question about that," said Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft in 1997. The British commander in the Gulf war, General Sir Peter de la Billiere, said, apparently with a straight face: "The Iraqis were responsible for establishing law and order."

Eric Herring wrote to me: "Perhaps the most repulsive thing about the whole policy is that US and British decision-makers have exploited popular humanitarian sentiment for the most cynical Realpolitik reasons. They have no desire for the Shi'ite majority to take control or for the Kurds to gain independence. Their policy is to keep them strong enough to cause trouble for Saddam Hussein while ensuring that Saddam Hussein is strong enough to keep repressing them. This is a direct descendant of British imperial policy from the First World War onwards [and is about the control] of Iraqi oil . . . Divide and rule was and is the policy."

Recently, Richard Norton-Taylor disclosed in the Guardian that Britain's military establishment was concerned about the proposed new international criminal court. The generals complained that rules made in Brussels might "prevent British peacekeepers from carrying out their tasks effectively". Their real concern, and that of western politicians, was put by Michael Caplan, the former lawyer to General Pinochet, who questioned how Tony Blair would be able to defend himself were he charged with bombing targets in Kosovo knowing that civilians would be killed.

When he was the Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq, Peter Hain wrote to the New Statesman, describing as preposterous the very suggestion that he, and other British ministers directly complicit in the atrocious embargo against Iraq, might be summoned to appear before the new court.

We shall see.

U.S. used cluster bombs in assault against Iraq
Weapons used in February attack `will kill for years to come'

(lead article from March 12, 2001 issue of the Militant, a socialist newsweekly published in New York, from www.themilitant.com
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS

U.S. warplanes fired 28 cluster bombs-each equipped with 145 anti-armor and anti-personnel incendiary bomblets-as part of Washington's February 16 assault against Iraq. Dropped on the outskirts of Baghdad, the country's capital city, most of the bombs missed their target, despite the Pentagon's earlier claims of pinpoint hits by the satellite-guided weapons.

These facts have only come to light in the on-line edition of the Washington Post , in a February 26 article by William Arkin, a former Army intelligence analyst and consultant. The print edition of the paper did not carry the article, and the use of cluster bombs has been covered up in the big-business media.

The Bush administration also dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Mideast, with the purpose of explaining to regimes in the region U.S. government decisions to adjust the sanctions against Iraq-modifications made with the goal of more effectively sealing the borders and controlling the flow of goods and people in and out of the country.

Arkin explains the cluster bombs are antipersonnel weapons and have "no real aimpoint." As with cluster bombs used by Washington in its assault against the Iraqi people a decade ago, those dropped February 16 will "kill and wound innocent civilians for years to come," he writes.

Washington's choice of cluster bombs highlights the character of the 10-year aggression as a brutal assault on the people of Iraq. From the sanctions imposed in 1990, to the six-week bombardment and invasion, to the massacre of workers and farmers retreating from Kuwait on the road to Basra, to the burial in trenches of surrendering Iraqi troops, U.S. imperialism has sought to break the Iraqi people and strip them of their national sovereignty.

Arkin explains that the weapon used in the bombing, "still unnoticed by the American media, is likely to prove controversial." The bomb is called the Joint Stand-off Weapon (JSOW) and "was first used in combat in Iraq on January 25, 1999, when Marine Corps F-18 Hornets fired three weapons at an air defense site," he reports. The 1,000-pound, 14-foot-long weapon-each costing at least $250,000--disperses the bomblets over an area that is approximately 100 feet long and 200 feet wide. Twenty-eight of these JSOWs were fired by U.S. warplanes in the February 16 attack, along with guided missiles and laser-guided bombs. The Pentagon now admits that 26 of the 28 JSOWs missed their "aimpoint."

These bombs, which Pentagon spokes-people describe as "precision-guided weapons," can be launched from a range of 40 nautical miles and at altitudes of 20,000 feet. They then spray the bomblets from 400 feet above the ground. Six bombs fall in every 1,000 square feet.

The Post article further states, "The JSOW uses a gasbag to propel the sub-munitions outward from the sides. Once ejected, the bomblets, each the size of a soda can, simply fall freely at the mercy of local winds. A few almost always land outside of the center point of the football field size main concentration. On average 5 percent do not detonate. These unexploded bomblets then become highly volatile on the ground."

Kills for years to come
Washington used a similar type of cluster bomb during its assault on Iraq during the 1990-91 Gulf War. Iraqi civilians continue to be killed and seriously injured by these unexploded bomblets that detonate upon contact. A February 20 Agence France Press (AFP) report described the wounding of a shepherd near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq by one of these bomblets. Five days earlier, Reuters reported that two boys in western Iraq, also tending sheep, were injured when another cluster bomblet exploded. AFP also reported February 9 that a child was killed and six others were wounded by similar submunitions near Basra.

"Recently, U.S. Air Force engineers in Kuwait found an entire unexploded CBU-87 [cluster bomb] at an airbase that had been attacked during the Gulf War," Arkin writes. "The weapon had apparently malfunctioned and ripped open upon impact, burying bomblets up to six feet deep in the vicinity. To destroy them in place, a series of 10-foot high barriers had to be built inside a 700-foot wide safety cordon."

After initially presenting a glowing assessment of its February 16 bombardment of Iraq, Pentagon officials admitted several days later that most of the bombs dropped by the U.S. warplanes missed their target by an average of more than 100 yards. The Pentagon claimed they were aiming at 25 components of Iraqi radar stations, but confirm damage to only eight of these targets.

"Although the mission was to `degrade' rather than destroy Iraqi air defense, all it degraded was our air force technology's reputation for accuracy," complained New York Times columnist William Safire in a February 26 op-ed piece.
U.S. warplanes continue to bomb sites in Iraq. Six days after the bombing near Baghdad, U.S. missiles were launched against targets in the northern "no-fly" zone.

Reinforcing sanctions
U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell insisted in a February 12 CNN interview that Washington's decade-long policy of economic sanctions and ongoing military attacks by U.S. warplanes patrolling "no-fly" zones over Iraqi air space is really a humanitarian one. "What we have to do is make sure we continue to tell the world that we are not after the Iraqi people," he cynically stated.
Powell conducted a six-nation tour of the Mideast February 24-27, with stops in Egypt, Israel, the occupied territories, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. He discussed with leaders of the Arab regimes proposals for revamping and reinvigorating Washington's sanctions policy against Iraq. A headline in the Financial Times read, "U.S. toughens line on Iraq oil sanctions violations."

A February 25 article in the New York Times pointed to recent fraying of the sanctions, noting that at least "a dozen countries have broken the air embargo by flying planes belonging to their national carriers into Baghdad, and three, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, have begun scheduled flights." Several days before Powell's visit to Egypt, Cairo and Baghdad authorities also signed an accord to boost transportation links.

Washington is seeking to undercut criticism of the devastating impact of the sanctions on the Iraqi people, at the same time as it moves to tighten its grip on oil and the country's other major imports and exports. The Washington Post reported Powell's view that new U.S. proposals "strengthen the core sanctions by raising the idea that countries that violate them will face real penalties."

"Right now the consequences have less currency because things are in, I must say, a state of disarray," said the secretary of state.
In exchange for agreement on these more effective sanctions, Washington says it would be willing to discuss revamping the list of products that the United Nations prohibits or restricts for sale to Iraq. Currently about 1,600 contracts worth an estimated $3 billion are on hold because of objections, many from the U.S. government.

Powell won support from several governments for the plan. Syrian president Bashir Assad agreed to place Iraqi funds generated from the sale of oil being sent through a recently reopened oil pipeline in Syria under UN control, denying Baghdad any benefit from the oil exports.

In Kuwait City Powell was joined by former president George Bush and Norman Schwartzkopf, the U.S. commander in the Gulf War, and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, for official ceremonies marking the end of that brutal offensive 10 years ago.
In Cairo, Powell also spoke with Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov. Moscow is concerned about recent statements by top Bush officials that represent a step-up in threats against Russia. In mid-February, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that Russia was "part of the problem." Recently, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, said Russia was "a threat for the west in general and our European allies in particular."

Meanwhile, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service issued a report at the end of February claiming that the Iraqi regime may have the capacity to launch nuclear weapons in the Mideast region within three years. The secret police agency also charged that Baghdad may be able to hit Europe with missiles within five years.

The Wall Street Journal reported February 26 that "Israeli weapons experts responded with some skepticism" to this report. "It has very much to do with American internal politics," stated Yiftah Shapir, a weapons expert at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. He instead argues that Iraq would need another decade to produce nuclear weapons.

U.S. war against Iraqi people
(editorial from March 12, 2001 issue of the Militant, a socialist newsweekly published in New York)

Washington's recent cluster bombing of Iraq on the outskirts of Baghdad is a continuation of the brutal character of the U.S. rulers' 10-year assault against the Iraqi people. This policy has included the killing of as many as 150,000 human beings in the Gulf War in 1991 through a six-week bombardment and one-hundred-hour invasion of the country; sanctions imposed by Washington under the auspices of the United Nations since 1990; and the imposition of "no-fly" zones over northern and southern Iraq patrolled by U.S. warplanes that regularly bomb the country. In fact, over the past two years these bombing attacks have killed an average of one Iraqi civilian about every other day. Washington has made it clear that there will be no letup in these attacks.

The 28 cluster bombs, each weighing 1,000 pounds put the lie to Secretary of State Colin Powell's claim that Washington is "not after the Iraqi people." Cluster bombs are designed to kill and maim people. Despite Washington's claims about the pinpoint accuracy of their "precision-guided" weapons, these cluster bombs have no aimpoint, except to disperse thousands of highly explosive bomblets over a wide area. And those that don't explode become imbedded in the ground, ready to go off as Iraqi workers, farmers, or children travel through the area.

Washington has been dropping the Joint Stand-off Weapon-the Pentagon's latest brand of cluster bombs-on Iraq since January 1999, under the Democratic Clinton administration and now by Republican George Bush.

The ongoing bombing drive against Iraq and the Pentagon's use of such weapons against the Iraqi people show the true face of imperialism. Yet the capitalist media has been virtually silent about the use of the weapons. A story that finally did appear in the Washington Post's web site never did made it into its print edition.

In his recent visit to the Mideast region, Powell succeeded in winning some support from Arab leaders for the Bush administration's plan to ease some aspects of the overall sanctions, while tightening up those deemed most damaging to the country. Washington's aim is to reinvigorate a policy that in recent months has been cracking at the edges. Its goal is to more effectively seal the borders around Iraq, and tighten its grip on oil and the country's other major imports and exports.

Another indication of the Bush administration's intentions to further step up its assault upon Iraq is reflected in his nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be deputy defense secretary. Wolfowitz is an advocate of Washington arming the Iraqi opposition groups. In the spring of 1999 he wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that "the United States should be prepared to commit ground forces to protect a sanctuary in southern Iraq where the opposition could safely mobilize." The big-business media did take notice of Wolfowitz's views when Bush announced his nomination for the high-level Pentagon post.

Working people can respond to these stepped-up threats by defending Iraq's sovereignty and demanding: Hands off Iraq! Halt the bombing! End the sanctions and the "no-fly" zones.