THIS WEEK'S HEADLINES:

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UN resolution, US warplanes pave way to total war with Iraq

‘US invasion’ threat for Zimbabwe

Sovereignty takes major hits in Yemen, Mauritius

UN resolution, US warplanes pave way to total war with Iraq

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Nov. 13 (AGR)— On Friday, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimously voted its approval for a proposed US ultimatum on Iraq -- Resolution 1441. The 15-0 vote ended more than seven weeks of closed-door negotiations, diplomatic arm-twisting, and implicit threats of unilateral military action against the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The adoption of the resolution on Iraq by the UNSC sets in motion a detailed timetable that could take the world to war within months. As the US military continued to bomb several key Iraqi military installations this past week, the inevitability of a US invasion was only emphasized.

Top US officials say a military showdown with Iraq could be triggered as soon as Dec. 8, the deadline for Hussein to account for any weapons of mass destruction.

“We’re not going to wait until February to see whether Iraq is cooperating or not,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said.

On Wednesday, Iraq’s UN Ambassador Mohammed Al-Douri submitted a declaration from Baghdad to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saying Iraq unconditionally accepted the resolution.

“We hereby inform you that we will deal with resolution 1441, despite its bad contents…The important thing in this is trying to spare our people from any harm,” said the letter signed by Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri. “We are prepared to receive the inspectors, so that they can carry out their duties, and make sure that Iraq had not developed weapons of mass destruction during their absence since 1998.”

The letter was delivered just a day after Iraq’s highest legislative body voted unanimously to reject the resolution.

On Monday Iraq’s parliamentary speaker Saadoun Hammadi blasted the resolution as a violation of international law and Iraq’s sovereignty.

“This UN resolution looks for a pretext [for war] and not for a comprehensive solution. It seeks to create crises rather than cooperation and paves the way for aggression rather than for peace,” he said.

Just days before Iraq’s answer arrived, US National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice had declared, “They don’t have the right to accept or reject this resolution.”

US dollars yielded unanimous
UN vote against Iraq

Friday’s unanimous vote by the UNSC was a demonstration of Washington’s ability to wield its vast political and economic power, say observers.

“Only a superpower like the United States could have pulled off a coup like this,’’ an Asian diplomat told Inter Press Service.

The unanimous 15-0 vote, he said, was obtained through considerable political and diplomatic pressure. Besides its five veto-wielding permanent members -- the United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia -- the Security Council also consists of 10 non-permanent, rotating members who hold office for two years.

The 10 non-permanent members -- Cameroon, Guinea, Mauritius, Bulgaria, Colombia, Mexico, Singapore, Norway, Ireland and Syria -- voted under heavy diplomatic and economic pressure from the United States.

Nine votes and no vetoes were the minimum needed to adopt the resolution. Of the five big powers, Britain had co-sponsored the US resolution. In a worst-case scenario, US officials were expecting the other three permanent members -- Russia, China, and France -- to abstain on the vote.

That meant the votes of the 10 non-permanent members took on added significance. Of the 10, the two Western nations, Ireland and Norway, were expected to vote with the United States.

Syria, a “radical’’ Arab nation listed as a “terrorist state’’ by the US State Department, was expected to either vote against or abstain.

So the arm-twisting was confined mostly to the remaining seven countries, who depend on the United States either for economic or military aid -- or both.

All these countries were seemingly aware of the fact that in 1990 the United States almost overnight cut about $70 million in aid to Yemen immediately following its negative vote against a US sponsored Security Council resolution to militarily oust Iraq from Kuwait.

Last week, Mauritius’ UN ambassador, Jagdish Koonjul, was temporarily recalled by his government because he continued to convey the “mistaken” impression that his country had reservations about the US resolution against Iraq.

“The Yemen precedent remains a vivid institutional memory at the United Nations,’’ said Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Bennis said that just after that 1990 vote, the US envoy turned to the Yemeni ambassador and told him that his vote would be “the most expensive ‘no’ vote you would ever cast.” The United States then promptly cut the entire $70 million US aid budget to Yemen.

The latest incarnation of that reality, Bennis said, came from the island nation of Mauritius, which joined the Security Council last year under US sponsorship.

The US aid package to the impoverished country, authorized by the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), demands that the aid recipient “does not engage in activities contrary to US national security or foreign policy interests.’’

Fear of being accused of acting contrary to US foreign policy interests plays a role “not only for Mauritius, but also for any country dependent on US economic assistance,’’ added Bennis.

Colombia, one of the world’s leading producers of cocaine and an important supplier of heroin to the US market, received about $380 million in US grants under the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) program this year. The proposed amount earmarked for 2003 is $439 million .

Under the same program, Mexico received about $10 million last year and $12 million this year. It also received $28.2 million in US Economic Support Funds (ESF).

Guinea, another of the non-permanent members in the Security Council, received three million dollars in outright US military grants last year and is expected to get $20.7 million in development assistance next year.

Cameroon is not only entitled to receive free surplus US weapons but also receives about $2.5 million in annual grants for military education and training.

After Colombia, the largest single beneficiary of US aid is Bulgaria, which received $13.5 million in outright military grants (mostly to buy US weapons systems) last year and an additional $8.5 million this year. The amount earmarked for 2003 is $9.5 million.

Additionally, Bulgaria has received $69 million in aid under a US program called Support for East European Democracy (SEED). Next year’s proposed grant is $28 million. Besides Syria, Singapore is the only country in the Security Council that does not receive economic or military aid from the United States.

But the United States is the biggest single arms supplier to Singapore, selling the Southeast Asian nation weapons worth $656.3 million last year and an estimated $370 million this year.

Could any of these countries easily stand up to the United States or refuse to fall in line with their benefactor or military ally?

US bombings give invasion
head start

Resolution 1441 and Iraqi compliance or not, intensified US military actions in Iraq this past week only seemed to reinforce Iraqi suspicions that US diplomatic wrangling at the UN was mere political cover for an unavoidable invasion.

Airstrikes on Iraqi air defense targets by US and British bombers are beginning to show a pattern that fits neatly into the war plan devised by the United States for toppling Hussein.

US jets launched air raids on Sunday on a key Iraqi base that forms part of a ring of frontline military sites protecting Baghdad. More than 30 bombing raids have taken place in the past three months.

The latest attack by aircraft from the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf was the eighth time in two months that coalition aircraft have targeted the big Iraqi base of Tallil, 175 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Tallil and other key airbases targeted recently, such as al-Kut and al-Amarah, form a network of Iraqi air defense facilities safeguarding approaches to Baghdad. The strategy of General Tommy Franks, commander of US Central Command, will be to attack from three directions — north, south, and west. Every airstrike, particularly in the south and west, is helping to prepare the way for such an invasion.

The clear objective of US Central Command, in the lead-up to total war, is to disrupt Hussein’s integrated air defense network and to undermine the command-and-control set-up between bases in the south and Baghdad.

The targets in recent weeks have included air defense operational facilities, integrated operations centers, command and control sites, and mobile air defense radars.

On board the USS Abraham Lincoln, US bomber pilots admitted that the daily patrols over the no-fly zones had become a dress rehearsal for war and provided an opportunity to damage Iraq’s military capability in the lead-up to a conflict.

The warplanes have attacked Iraqi air defenses in the zones 56 times this year.

As the planes struck on Sunday, the Bush administration once again said it would not wait for the UN Security Council to approve a massive attack on Iraq if it fails to comply with weapons inspections.

“The UN can meet and discuss, but we don’t need their permission,” White House chief of staff, Andrew Card said.

The following day, in a series of Veterans’ Day memorial services, US President George W. Bush said he was ready to take his country to war.

Sources: BBC News, Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Inter Press Service, Iraq Journal, Reuters, Times (UK), USA Today

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‘US invasion’ threat for Zimbabwe

By Charles Cobb Jr.

Washington, DC, Nov. 7— The government-owned Herald newspaper of Zimbabwe and the country’s Defense Forces Commander, General Vitalis Zvinavashe, say the US government is plotting to use the southern African nation’s mounting food crisis as a pretext for interfering and perhaps even invading Zimbabwe.

“They are using food as a ploy to directly control NGOs distributing food and disregard the laws of Zimbabwe,” General Vitalis was quoted as saying by the Herald, Wednesday.

“The United States is planning to invade Zimbabwe within the next six months on the pretext of bringing relief food aid to people who were allegedly being denied food on political grounds,” the newspaper said, in a front page story.

The two responses follow unusually belligerent remarks made by US principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, Mark Bellamy last week, while participating in a panel discussion on “Famine and Political Violence in Matabeleland” sponsored by the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International studies.

“We may have to be prepared to take some very intrusive, interventionist measures to ensure aid delivery to Zimbabwe,” Bellamy said. “The dilemmas in the next six months may bring us face to face with Zimbabwe’s sovereignty.”

“No United States government official has made such a threat,” the US embassy in Harare said, reacting to accusations that an invasion plot is being hatched. And a State Department spokesperson in Washington, who would only agree to speak on background, told allAfrica.com that “the concept of a US invasion [of Zimbabwe] is nonsense.”

Bellamy was said to be “too busy” to speak to allAfrica.com, Thursday.

Although Bellamy’s remarks were unprecedented -- not even the long hostility between the United States and Sudan has been so bluntly articulated -- few would see an actual US invasion of Zimbabwe as likely. But some kind of direct delivery of food to Matabeleland which, some reports suggest, is being deprived of food aid as political punishment for failing to support the Mugabe government, is not inconceivable.

Relations between Washington and Harare have steadily worsened since Zimbabwe’s elections in the spring of this year. “We do not see President Mugabe as the democratically legitimate leader of the country,” Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner said during an Aug. 20 briefing on the southern Africa food crisis. “The election was fraudulent and it was not free and it was not fair.”

When specifically asked if he was calling for “regime change,” the Secretary responded: “The political status quo is unacceptable... The question is: What are the tactics that we can use to work with those inside Zimbabwe as well as their neighbors to encourage a more democratic outcome? And so we’re working with a number of folks in the region and elsewhere.”

Amid accusations that Zimbabwe’s government is using its control of food distribution to force drought-besieged communities to abandon support of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, Washington’s Africa policymakers have reached agreement that additional pressure needs to be placed on the Mugabe government.

In August, Kansteiner said the US was working with Zimbabwe’s neighbors to “isolate” the Mugabe government. But South Africa and the other nations that, along with Zimbabwe, are members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), have been unenthusiastic about this approach.

The opposition MDC, as well as non-governmental organizations engaged in relief efforts in Matabeleland, may be developing networks to channel food aid into the South where much of the opposition to government is strong. How the US might involve itself with this, and whether it is wise, or might put in jeopardy groups involved in aid efforts, remains unclear.

Asked by allAfrica.com to detail additional measures the US might take, a State Department spokesperson was unwilling to specify anything other than a vague reference to “some sort of additional monitoring.”

Currently, about half of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people are affected by drought and in need of food aid. At the end of April, President Mugabe declared a “state of disaster” across the country.

Source: allAfrica.com

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Sovereignty takes major hits in Yemen, Mauritius

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Nov. 8 (IPS)— Almost lost in President George W. Bush’s triumphs in Tuesday’s Congressional elections and at the United Nations (UN) Security Council on Friday were two events that offer a glimpse into the new world imperial order (NWIO) being built by the administration.

An RQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, was used in Yemen recently to blow up a car. The car's six occupants were all killed.

While senior officials have long insisted they want to rejuvenate a global system of strong nation states that exercise full sovereignty over their borders as the preferred alternative to “global government”, the two incidents help illustrate how far Washington will go in interfering with that sovereignty to further its own interests.

Last Sunday, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched a laser-guided Hellfire missile from an unmanned Predator reconnaissance plane at a car traveling in a remote region in northern Yemen, instantly incinerating the vehicle and its six occupants, who reportedly included a senior operative of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida group, Qaed Senyan al-Harthi.

The attack marked the first time that Washington had used an armed Predator drone to attack suspected terrorists outside of Afghanistan and in a country at peace with the United States. While Washington insisted it had permission from the Yemeni government to carry out the attack, Yemeni officials declined to confirm that.

The second incident took place two days before the attack, when Mauritius’ ambassador to the UN, Jagdish Koonjul, was abruptly recalled by his government after Port-Louis received a complaint from Washington that Koonjul was not lining up with sufficient zeal behind Washington’s latest draft resolution on weapons inspections in Iraq at the UN Security Council.

It had apparently been pointed out to the Mauritians, who export most of their textiles to the United States, that, by signing a preferential trade agreement with the United States in 2000, they had agreed not to “engage in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests.”

The not-so-subtle message was that if they failed to support Washington at the Security Council, their trade interests would suffer.

In many ways, neither event was terribly surprising.

The use of economic pressure by one state against another for political ends, for example, is nothing new in the history of interstate relations. On the other hand, making a trade agreement explicitly conditional on a state’s surrendering control over its foreign policy on issues deemed important to a more powerful trading partner, not only narrows the definition of sovereignty; it smacks of 19th century imperialism.

More dramatic, of course, was the attack over the Yemeni desert. The incident, which sparked outrage in Arab countries, immediately drew questions about parallels with Israel’s policy of “targeted killings” of suspected Palestinian terrorists, a policy condemned even by the Bush administration.

While Yemen, like the Philippines, Georgia, and Pakistan, among others, has taken up offers by the administration of US military advisers to provide intelligence and train their own troops to track down alleged terrorists, this was the first time Washington had unilaterally killed a target far from the battlefield in Afghanistan.

Hawks in the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld exulted over the operation, which they called a foretaste of what was to come. “We’ve got new authorities, new tools, and a new willingness to do it wherever it has to be done,” noted one administration source quoted by the New York Times.

“This is an extraordinary change of threshold,” a former intelligence officer told The Washington Post.

Indeed, just 13 years ago, a major controversy erupted when the Justice Department under former president George Bush Sr. asserted a unilateral US right to arrest a criminal suspect in a foreign country without the consent of the host country. That notion, which was overruled by the State Department, seems quaint in light of Sunday’s attack.

But the larger question raised by the incident is how such an attack furthers the administration’s stated goal of building an international order based on strong nation states that exercise sovereignty over their territories.

The Bush government has long made clear that it opposes any system of “global governance” in which multilateral institutions could, in its view, compromise or encroach on US sovereignty.

As an alternative, the administration and its supporters have argued that world order is best secured by rejuvenating the nation-state system created by the 354-year-old Treaty of Westphalia, which ended Europe’s calamitous Thirty Years War.

That treaty, which codified the principles of sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, was explicitly invoked by Bush himself in the same West Point speech last June in which he first announced his intention to maintain unequalled military superiority into the future.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who exercises a not inconsiderable influence on the thinking of several of the president’s top aides, particularly national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, first argued last January that the war on terror’s main aim should be to “revitalize” the nation state’s authority, which had been undermined by globalization.

That aim has been explicitly endorsed numerous times by administration officials to justify policies that rejected multilateral solutions to problems.

In announcing Washington’s renunciation of the Rome Statute to create the International Criminal Court, for example, US Ambassador for War Crimes Issues, Pierre Prosper, argued that much more emphasis should be put on building national judicial systems capable of handling crimes against humanity and genocide.

Similarly, when the UN and the European Union and even the US-installed Afghan government called for expanding the peacekeeping force (ISAF) in Afghanistan beyond Kabul, Washington argued that such a step would only prolong the government’s dependence on the world body. Better, it said, to focus on building the country’s own army, however long that might take.

However appealing the notions of restoring sovereignty and state responsibility may be from a theoretical point of view, they bear little relation to the way in which the United States is pursuing its “war on terrorism.”

On the contrary, sovereignty - the right and power of the nation state to regulate its internal affairs and external relations without foreign dictation - is clearly being subordinated to the will of the United States.

“Complete sovereignty for us; complete intervention for everyone else,” said French foreign-policy expert Pierre Hassner about the administration’s worldview several months ago. “This is typical of empire.”

Editors’ Note: According to CNN and Newsweek, an American citizen, Ahmed Hijozi, was killed in the missile attack in Yemen. CNN quoted a US official as saying “It doesn’t change a thing.”

In a press release, Amnesty International commented, “If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest, in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law.”