-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,602238,00.html
}}}>Begin
Harbingers of death in the Gulf
The consequences of a US attack on Iraq would be devastating
George Galloway
Tuesday November 20, 2001
The Guardian
Last Wednesday, an Iraqi Airways Boeing 727 civilian airliner was
climbing out from Basra, Iraq's southern port, when the ether
crackled at 121.5 megahertz with an unmistakable American voice:
"This is the United Nations [sic] no-fly zone enforcement patrol
calling Iraqi airliner travelling at 21,000 feet proceeding at 400mph
north-west from Basra. I warn you that you are subject to being
fired upon - you continue to fly at your own risk."
Thus in the middle of a war against terrorism, falsely claiming a UN
mandate - the "no-fly zones" are in fact imposed unilaterally by
Britain and the US - an allied pilot was threatening 180 civilian
passengers with airborne death. That would have created quite a
desert storm.
I might not have believed this story if an Iraqi official had told me.
But as chance would have it for the US pilot, I was on that flight,
sitting in the cockpit with Captain Akram, who disdainfully ignored
the warning. A
lso on the aircraft were Lord Naseer Ahmed, Britain's first Muslim peer, and the
solidly Blairite MP Kerry Pollard.
Together with Sunday's incident in the Gulf, when a tanker carrying Iraqi oil sank
after being boarded by US servicemen - with the loss of up to six people, including
two Americans - the signs are that US policy towards I
raq is poised on a bayonet point. Bombing, argue the hawks roosting on the Potomac,
has achieved two regime changes in a row, in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, without the
loss of a single American in action. Time to go for
the hat-trick in Iraq, they say, closing the unfinished business left by Bush the
father in 1991.
Having just returned from the Arab world, I would caution against it. In the first
place, the Yugoslav triumph is not what it seems. Almost 65,000 Nato soldiers continue
to garrison Bosnia and Kosovo. Albanian nationalism
, as the weekend elections in Kosovo showed, is all dressed up with nowhere to go,
except secession in Serbia and destabilisation in Macedonia. The soldiers police a
protectorate liable to turn nasty at any time.
Nor is the Anglo-American "victory" in Afghanistan either remotely final or clear-cut.
If possession of Afghan cities were the issue, Leonid Brezhnev would have been a hero.
A decade of attrition from the mountains and on
the plains cost the USSR much blood and treasure and arguably its very existence. And
in those days the so-called Holy Warriors were united.
Now the ragtag and bobtail army of the Northern Alliance - for whom, like the KLA
before them, we were the airforce - is a powder-keg of ethnic, religious and tribal
loyalties waiting to blow up in our face. The alliance,
a collection of heroin-dealing cut throats who laid waste to Afghanistan the last
time they were in power, have not waited long before reverting to type. British
television viewers have been largely spared their penchant
for castration, mutilation and massacres of prisoners. Viewers of Arab stations have
not.
Meanwhile, the network of Islamist terrorists said by Colin Powell to be ensconced in
50 countries can scarcely be expected to fold up their tents and take up Turkish
tapestry. Contrary to the predictions of wild-eyed opt
imists, there is no reason to believe they will be demobilised or demotivated by
search-and-destroy operations in the caves around Kandahar. If anything, Bin Laden
dead is likely to be a more potent force than Bin Laden a
live. And you don't need a redoubt in the Hindu Kush to learn how to be a killer, as
the hijackers of September 11 showed. Florida or Hamburg will do just as nicely.
The Arab consensus against any widening of the conflict has helped force the first
apparent chink of light between the shoulders of the Anglo-American alliance. Mr Blair
has let it be known that Britain is opposed to an a
ttack on Iraq. If sincere, that could be significant, for with the exception of
Israel, no other country in the world is likely to support such an assault.
But, as Bob Monkhouse observed, "once you can fake the sincerity, the rest is easy".
On Sunday, our most militant foreign minister, Ben Bradshaw, repeated the mantra about
there being no evidence of Iraqi involvement in S
eptember's atrocities. But he added ominously that "of course if
such evidence were to emerge, that would be a quite different
matter". The cooks and spooks may even now be baking it.
Both the incidents at sea and in the air and the imminent security
council decision on Anglo-American "smart sanctions" - with the
demand for the return of weapons inspectors withdrawn before the
1998 Desert Fox fiasco - may be straws in the mistral, harbingers
of a whirlwind to come. Iraq is girding itself for massive attack and
counting on the political earthquake in the region which would
ensue. It would not need to climb high up the Richter scale to
topple some of our oldest and most quiescent friends.
· George Galloway is Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin and a
columnist for the Scottish Mail on Sunday.
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