Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Lockerbie mystery added or unveiled

by pv vivekanand

CONTENTIONS that Sabri Al Banna, or Abu Nidal, was behind the 1998 mid-air bombing of an American airliner that killed 270 people and for which a Libyan is serving a life sentence in Scotland have thrown a new element to the never-say-die speculation about who was actually responsible for the blast.
The special trial of two Libyans held in the Netherlands under Scottish laws as a compromise to end the crisis between Libya, which was accused of masterminding the attack, and the UN and the conviction of an alleged Libyan intelligence agent have never really convinced many since many questions were never answered during the trial.
Similarly, the claim by Atef Abu Bakr, a one-time Abu Nidal associate, that the leader of the Fateh Revolutionary Group had told his followers that his group was behind the blast has not been substantiated by any physical evidence. If anything, it raises more questions, and, if true, pulls the rug from under the feet of the very elaborate process of the trial, conviction, appeal and reaffirmation of the verdict in the case.
At this stage, Abu Bakr's revelation is simple hearsay and, if we accept it as true, it could even be construed as Abu Nidal's way of impressing upon his people he could pull such meticulous operation as organising the bombing of an aircraft of a high-security-minded American airline and getting away with it.
However, it does not preclude the possibility that the Abu Nidal group had indeed planted the explosives that ripped PanAm flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in the night of Dec.22, 1988. The blast killed 259 people aboard the flight and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie.
What we have now is only Abu Bakr's "revelation" that his former boss, who was reportedly either shot dead or committed suicide in Baghdad two weeks ago, had claimed that he was behind the attack.
"Abu Nidal told a ... meeting of the Revolutionary Council leadership: I have very important and serious things to say. The reports that attribute Lockerbie (bombing) to others are lies. We are behind it," Abu Bakr was quoted as saying in an interview with the London-based Al Hayat daily.
He said Abu Nidal threatened those present against speaking of the group's responsibility for the bombing.
"If any one of you lets this (word) out, I will kill him even if he was in his wife's arms," Abu Bakr quoted Abu Nidal as saying.
The apparent contradiction in Abu Bakr's account is clear: Abu Nidal was never known to have dealt directly with any of his henchmen and always used his close lieutenants to direct operations and convey his "instructions." As such, it seems doubtful that the four people that Abu Bakr says were present when Abu Nidal made the claim were being told of such a major operation for the first time and that too after it took place -- unless of course Abu Bakr was speaking part truth with a view to disassociating himself and the others, whoever they are, from the blast.
In any case, it clearly indicates that there is much more to the episode than Abu Bakr's version carried by Al Hayat.
Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed Al Megrahi is serving a life sentence in Glasgow's Barlinnie prison after being convicted of having planted the explosives aboard Flight 103.
Megrahi was convicted by a special court in the Netherlands in 2000. The court acquitted another Libyan. In March this year, a Scottish appeals court upheld the conviction of Megrahi.
Why the revelation of the alleged Abu Nidal link with the bombing at this juncture in time?
An argument that it was made following Abu Nidal's death that removed the risk of his threat appeared to have been quashed when Ghassan Sharbal, Al Hayat's assistant editor who conducted the interview, said he spoke to Abu Bakr before Abu Nidal's death was "reported."
There were two other instances when Abu Nidal's group was linked to the Pan Am blast, but both times the assertions never sparked a serious independent inquiry.
Shortly after the Dec.21/22 bombing, the US State Department said that the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland, had received a call 16 days before the blast from a man who claimed to be an Abu Nidal agent and warned that there would be a bombing attempt within two weeks against a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the United States.
The finding of the inevitable US investigation that would have followed was never revealed, and the claimed Abu Nidal connection appeared to have died a natural death as far as public State Department comments on the issue were concerned.
In 1996, a self-confessed Abu Nidal agent standing trial for the 1994 murder of senior Jordanian diplomat Naeb Imran Maaytah in Beirut told the court that the Abu Nidal group was behind the blast and he was part of the operation.
That claim was rejected as a ruse to get Libya off the hook, with the media speculating that the man stood to lose nothing by making the claim. If anything, went the speculation, he was already headed for prison after confessing to the Jordanian diplomat's killing and he had made the claim in return for a large amount paid to his family by Libya.
What is no clear at this point is what motive Abu Nidal had to blow up the plane except the conventional argument that the avowed anti-West hard-liner simply wanted to make another attack against Westerners and that it was his way of registering his opposition to US efforts to involve the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in indirect peace negotiations with Israel.
The revelation of the Abu Nidal connection to the blast comes amid reports that Libya is considering making an announcement that it accepts "general responsibility" for the bombing of Flight 103, and is now ready "in principle" to take steps to compensate the relatives of the 270 victims.
These two steps would pave the way for the formal lifting of United Nations sanctions against Libya.
Tripoli has made no comment on Abu Bakr's assertions.
Libya reportedly hosted Abu Nidal around the time of the bombing after he was expelled from Iraq in 1993 and from Syria in 1987.
Libya, which was under intense international pressure over Lockerbie, asked him to leave the country in 1999 after he reportedly went on a spree of "eliminating" dozens of followers whom he did not trust.
At one point, Atef Abu Bakr himself was quoted as saying that Abu Nidal buried the bodies under and around the villa where he was staying in Libya. It was also alleged that he had employed some of his people to "spy" on Libya and this had infuriated Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi into expelling him.
If media accounts were true, he was in Egypt for some time after leaving Libya and then slipped out of the country to Iran and entered Iraq across the border.
If indeed Abu Nidal was behind the PanAm bombing, it is then highly unlikely that Libya was not aware of it. And if Libya was aware it, why did Tripoli use that information at least to lay a red herring in the trial that was held in the Netherlands in 2000, after Abu Nidal had left Libya?
Lawyers for the two Libyans who were tried at the specially set up Scottish court in Camp Zeist in the Netherlands suggested that the Syria-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) could have been behind the bombing. What stopped them from pointing the finger at Abu Nidal if they could have done so at the PFLP-GC?
In London, senior Labour Member of parliament Dalyell, who had consistently insisted that Abu Nidal was responsible for the blast, has renewed his demand for a investigation into the affair. Dalyell has long argued that the Libyans were not behind the attack and now he says the Foreign Office must now investigate Abu Bakr's claims "as a matter of the utmost urgency."
"If these allegations are true they blow everything relating to Lockerbie out of the water, including the trial in Holland," he said last week.
The Scottish prosecutors' office has dismissed Abu Bakr's claim. But then that was only expected since acknowledging that anyone other than the convicted Libyan -- and by extension Libya -- could be responsible for the blast would demolish their credibility.
"We deal, and have dealt with, evidence not rumour or speculation, especially about allegedly dead terrorists," an unidentified Scottish Crown Office spokeswoman was quoted as saying in response to Abu Bakr's comments.
Not many have accepted as true the prosecution version of the case, and Western and Arab legal experts have asserted that the court overlooked several strong indicators that someone other than the convicted Libyan was behind the blast.
What could establish or at least throw some light into the mystery of the blast could be an independent investigation authorised and backed by the British government in co-ordination with other European and Arab governments and agencies.
But London has consistently rejected MPs' calls for such an investigation, and there is little sign that the Blair government would change it mind after Abu Bakr made the claim.,
Even Members of the UK Families Flight 103 say many important questions remain unanswered. They are demanding to know the motive behind the bombing, why it was not prevented and why it had taken 13 years to investigate the case and to conclude legal proceedings.
The demand was warded off by the government until Megrahi's appeal, with the argument that a wide-ranging inquiry had not been possible because it could have jeopardised a criminal trial, and families of the blast victims say that now that the trial and appeal have been concluded, the reasons for postponing any further inquiries have been removed.
Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the Lockerbie explosion, has said the trial in the Netherlands only considered the guilt or innocence of the defendants, and the court's conclusion that Megrahi was involved did not mean Abu Nidal might not also have participated.
"In my view, in those days most of the groups knew what the other groups were doing," said Swire, a spokesman for the UK Families Flight 103 Group. "Abu Nidal in those days was in Tripoli. ... I think it's likely he would have known what was going on but I have no way of knowing" whether he was behind the bombing.
And it is unlikely that anyone would know either unless Abu Bakr or someone else speaks up and tears down the veil of mystery over the blast.

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Ansar Al Islam - Part II

PV Vivekanand

This the second and final part of a report on the militant Ansar Al Islam group, which the US says was linked with Al Qaeda and is present in northern Iraq in what appears to an effort to establish a connection between the Baghdad government and Al Qaeda.


What is known about Ansar Al Islam?
The existence of the group and its alleged links with Al Qaeda were highlighted in a Christian Science Monitor report in March.
It is a tight-knit group of less than 800 followers -- Iraqis, Jordanians, Moroccans, Palestinians and Afghans -- based in Halabja, a Kurdish village on the Iraqi-Iranian border and enforces a Taliban-style Islamic code in a cluster of villages in the area.
Halabja is the site of what the US has described as a massive Iraqi chemical attack towards the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war to quell Iranian Kurdish presence there -- all the more reason for the group to maintain hostility towards the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad.
Ansar Al Islam's leader Mulla Kreekar has refugee status in Norway after landing there from Iran under a UN refugee programme in 1993. He has been out of Norway for the last two years.
The Norwegian government has launched an investigation into his activities in the wake of the US allegation that the group had ties with Al Qaeda.
The group, an offshoot of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan which was reportedly backed by Tehran.
Iran upports everal Iranian Kurdish groups in the area with a view to countering the influence of Iraqi Kurdish factions that are dominant in northern Iraq, regional experts say.
Mullah Kreekar was a former member of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan who joined Ansar Al Islam after its formation in September 2001. He supposedly replaced Abu Abdullah Shafae - an Iraqi Kurd who allegedly trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan for 10 years - and changed his name from Warya Holery. Shafae is now believed to be Ansar Al Islam's deputy leader.
Traditionally, Tehran has supported the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of Jalal Talabani, and its support for other groups is seen as aimed at using them if, as and when Kurdish activities threaten Iranian interests.
Tehran is eager to ensure that the Kurds living in its north, Iraqi Kurds and Turkish Kurds do not gang up to set up an independent Kurdistan in the border area.
Baghad might have tried to use Ansar Al Islam if only to create confusion among the dozens of Kurdish groups that challenge its control of northern Iraq, analysts say. However, they doubt whether Saddam had much success with the group, which is said to be staunchly fundamentalist bordering on an obsession with their fight against "the blasphemous secularist, political, social, and cultural" society in northern Iraqi villages.
According to reports, Ansar Al Islam activists have ransacked and razed beauty salons, burned schools for girls, and murdered women in the streets for refusing to wear the veil in the areas under their control.
"Ansar Al Islam is a kind of Taliban," according to PUK leader Jalal Talabani. "They are terrorists who have declared war against all Kurdish political parties. We gave them a chance to change their ways ... and end their terrorist acts. But if we can't do it through dialogue, we are obliged to use force."
The PUK, which is engaged in a running battle with Ansar Al Islam for domination of the villages on the border, does not believe the group is backed by Iran.
"The Iranians are emphatic that this group is a threat to their own security," according to Barham Salih, a senior PUK official.
The other dominant Kurdish group, the Kurdish Democratic Party led by Masoud Barzani, has not commented on the allegations, but it is united with the PUK against Ansar Al Islam.
Another PUK official, Mustapha Saed Qada, claimed in comments carried by the Christian Science Monitor in March that his group had overrun two Ansar camps after Sept. 11 and found "the walls covered with poems and graffiti praising Bin Laden and the Sept. 11 attacks on the US."
Predictably, Qada claimed that Ansar Al Islam might even have ties with Iraqi government agents operating in northern Iraq. "We have picked up conversations on our radios between Iraqis and Ansar Al Islam. I believe that Iraq is also funding Ansar Al Islam. There are no hard facts as yet, but I believe that under the table they are supporting them because it will cause further instability for the Kurds."
Given that the PUK is bitterly opposed to the Iraqi regime, Qada's comments need a lot more than simple assertions, observers point out.
US officials have voiced similar doubts since the PUK has a vested interested in implicating Baghdad with Al Qaeda.
Reports in the US said the White House had rejected a proposal to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Al Ansar positions in northern Iraq.
Saddam's eldest son Udai has accused Iran of backing the group but rejected its purported links with Al Qaeda.
The ambiguity in Udai's comment was that he referred to a group called "Jund Al Islam," which US officials varying describe as either a mother group from which Ansar Al Islam broke away or an offshoot of Ansar Al Islam itself.
"They (Jund Al Islam) do not have any link whatsoever with Al Qaeda, and this is purely an Iranian game aimed at gaining influence in the area," said Udai Hussein.
Tehran rejected the accusation and said it disapproved of the group's activities.
Since mid-August, more than 1,000 Peshamargas of the PUK are figthing Ansar Al Islam around the Ansar stronghold of Halabja after pushing the group back from from villages further into north Iraq.
It was reported in early August that 19-year-old youth belonging to Ansar Al Islam surrendered to PUK authorities after he had a last-minute change of heart on his way to blow himself among PUK officials.
The youth had strapped himself with explosives and was indoctrinated by his Ansar mentors that he would be serving his people by killing PUK officials in a suicide attack.
However, the youth opted not to carry out the attack and surrendered to the same officials whom he was supposed to have killed, the reports said. He is detained at a PUK jail in Sulaimaniya in north Iraq.
Had the attack taken place, it would have been the first known suicide bombing by an Iraqi Kurd against opponents, and would have introduced a new element in the ongoing battle between Ansar Al Islam and the PUK.
Mullah Kreekar, the Ansar Al Islam leader, has given an interview to Norwegian television that is expected to be broadcast on Tuesday. Possibly, he might throw more light into the group's activities and its connections.
Regardless of all other factors, is abundantly clear that the group espouses militancy and is present in northern Iraq. However, is it not enough to prove that Baghdad is linked with the group, and, inter alia, Al Qaeda, particularly given that the group is active in an area generally under American protection?

Sunday, August 25, 2002

Ansar Al Islam Part I

by pv vivekanand

ANSAR AL ISLAM, the group whose name rose to prominence last week with the CNN screening of alleged testing of chemical weapons in Afghanistan by Al Qaeda members, has been active in northern Iraq since late 2001 but the connection that the US is trying to make between Baghdad and the faction -- and Al Qaeda by extension -- is weak at best, according to regional experts,
Washington has failed to establish that Baghdad had links with Al Qaeda although several attempts were made: first with a report that an Iraqi diplomat had met with Mohammed Atta, the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks, in Europe in early 2001. It could not be confirmed that such a meeting took place, let alone that the two discussed Al Qaeda plans to stage anti-US attacks.
The second attempt was a matter of convenience and it came with the rash of anthrax scares in the US. The finger was immediately pointed at Iraq, since UN inspectors had found anthrax strains in Baghdad's weapons programme. However, the accusation fell apart when it was found that the particular strain in anthrax that caused the massive scare in the US was different from what the UN inspectors had discovered in Iraq.
The third attempt to link Iraq with Al Qaeda came in May with reports that a defecting Iraqi intelligence agent had seen Osama Bin Laden in Baghdad in early 2000. The US media played up the report, but then it became apparent that the defecting agent could not have been telling the truth since he had left Iraq in early 1999 and never went back.
The third attempt seeks to establish that Al Qaeda fighters are present in northern Iraq, but it appears to be a self-defeating exercise since the area where they are said to be present is outside the control of the Baghdad government. If anything, the US is offering protection to the area's residents against attacks by the Iraqi army.
Against that backdrop, the alleged Al Qaeda presence in northern Iraq could not be a strong argument for the US to target Saddam in its war against terrorism.
Regional experts are emphatic that Saddam and Bin Laden, while sharing common enmity towards the US, are ideologically too far apart to strike an alliance and work together.
Bin Laden holds Saddam responsible for having set the ground for US military presence in the region by invading Kuwait in 1990 and has often been bitterly critical of the Iraqi president.
According to Arabs who knew Bin Laden well while they were in Afghanistan and maintained contacts with his supporters after leaving the country in the mid-90s, the Al Qaeda leader had turned down Iraqi offers of asylum after he came under American focus following the 1998 bomb attacks in Kenya and Tanzania.
US intelligence reports say Ansar Al Islam fighters trained with Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan in 1999 and 2000 and the group is harbouring Al Qaeda activists in northern Iraq. They are presumed to have fled overland from Afghanistan in the wake of the American military strikes against that country launched in October 2001. The implication is that they reached northern Iraq through Iranian territory.
Immediately after the CNN screening of the purported tapes of Qaeda testing of chemical weapons last week, US "experts" said it resembled a method followed by Ansar Al Islam.
The New York Times reported that US intelligence had monitored an Ansar Al Islam site in northern Iraq where chemical or biological weapons experiments were conducted with farm animals. It was initially feared this might constitute a significant chemical-biological threat, but US officials decided it was not serious enough to justify a military strike, said the paper.
Even if it is established that Ansar Al Islam, which is led by a Kurd, Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad, who goes by the name of Mullah Kreekar, had links with Al Qaeda, it is far from establishing that Baghdad had connections with Ansar Al Islam.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said there are Al Qaeda members in Iraq, but he has not said where they are.
"I have said for some time that there are Al Qaeda in Iraq, and there are," he said last week. "They have left Afghanistan," he said. "They have left other locations. And they've landed in a variety of countries, one of which is Iraq."
US officials initially said Arab members of Ansar Al Islam were involved in the experimentation, but later they said it was unclear whether they were Arabs or Kurds.
Ansar Al Islam is based in northern Iraq near the border with Iran -- territory not controlled by the government of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
As such, says Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, the US, which offers "protection" to Kurds in north Iraq by enforcing a "no-fly" zone, should ask itself how it allowed the group to base itself there.
Aziz, in recent US television interviews, pointed out the irony in the US contention that the Iraqi government was harbouring a group in a territory beyond its control and "protected" by the US.
Aziz questioned why American officials have not publicly raised the Al Qaeda matter with the Kurdish groups Washington supports in northern Iraq.
What is known about Ansar Al Islam?
The existence of the group and its alleged links with Al Qaeda were highlighted in a Christian Science Monitor report in March.
It is a tight-knit group of less than 800 followers -- Iraqis, Jordanians, Moroccans, Palestinians and Afghans -- based in Halabja, a Kurdish village on the Iraqi-Iranian border and enforces a Taliban-style Islamic code in a cluster of villages in the area.
Halabja is the site of what the US has described as a massive Iraqi chemical attack towards the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and to quell Iranian Kurdish presence there -- all the more reason for the group to maintain hostility towards the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad.
Ansar Al Islam's leader Mulla Kreekar has refugee status in Norway after landing there from Iran under a UN refugee programme in 1993. He has been out of Norway for the last two years.
The Norwegian government has launched an investigation into his activities in the wake of the US allegation that the group had ties with Al Qaeda.
The group, an offshoot of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, is reportedly backed by Tehran, which supports for several Iranian Kurdish groups in the area with a view to countering the influence of Iraqi Kurdish factions that are dominant in northern Iraq.
Mullah Kreekar was a former member of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan who joined Ansar Al Islam after its formation in September 2001. He supposedly replaced Abu Abdullah Shafae - an Iraqi Kurd who allegedly trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan for 10 years - and changed his name from Warya Holery. Shafae is now believed to be Ansar Al Islam's deputy leader.
Traditionally, Tehran has supported the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of Jalal Talabani, and its support for other groups is seen as aimed at using them if, as and when Kurdish activities threaten Iranian interests.
Tehran is eager to ensure that the Kurds living in its north, Iraqi Kurds and Turkish Kurds do not gang up to set up an independent Kurdistan in the border area.
Saddam might have tried to use Ansar Al Islam if only to create confusion among the dozens of Kurdish groups that challenge his control of northern Iraq, analysts say. However, they doubt whether Saddam had much success with the group, which is said to be staunchly fundamentalist bordering on fanatic obsession with their fight against "the blasphemous secularist, political, social, and cultural" society in northern Iraqi villages.
According to reports, Ansar Al Islam activists have ransacked and razed beauty salons, burned schools for girls, and murdered women in the streets for refusing to wear the veil in the areas under their control.
"Ansar Al Islam is a kind of Taliban," PUK leader Jalal Talabani has said. "They are terrorists who have declared war against all Kurdish political parties. We gave them a chance to change their ways ... and end their terrorist acts. But if we can't do it through dialogue, we are obliged to use force."
The PUK, which is engaged in a running battle with Ansar Al Islam for domination of the villages on the border, does not believe the group is backed by Iran.
"The Iranians are emphatic that this group is a threat to their own security," according to Barham Salih, a senior PUK official.
The other dominant Kurdish group, the Kurdish Democratic Party led by Masoud Barzani, has not commented on the allegations, but it is united with the PUK against Ansar Al Islam.
Another PUK official, Mustapha Saed Qada, claimed in comments carried by the Christian Science Monitor in March that his group had overrun two Ansar camps after Sept. 11 and found "the walls covered with poems and graffiti praising Bin Laden and the Sept. 11 attacks on the US."
"In one, there is a picture of the twin towers with a drawing of Bin Laden standing on the top holding a Kalashnikov rifle in one hand and a knife in the other." he said.
He added that the group has received $600,000 from Al Qaeda and a delivery of weapons and Toyota landcruisers.
According to Qada, Ansar Al Islam might even have ties with Iraqi government agents operating in northern Iraq. "We have picked up conversations on our radios between Iraqis and Ansar Al Islam. I believe that Iraq is also funding Ansar Al Islam. There are no hard facts as yet, but I believe that under the table they are supporting them because it will cause further instability for the Kurds."
Given that the PUK is bitterly opposed to the Iraqi regime, Qada's comments need a lot more than simple assertions, observers point out.
Saddam's eldest son Udai has accused Iran of backing the group but rejected its purported links with Al Qaeda. The ambiguity in Udai's comment was that he referred to a group called "Jund Al Islam," which US officials varying describe as either a mother group from which Ansar Al Islam broke away or an offshoot of Ansar Al Islam itself.
"They (Jund Al Islam) do not have any link whatsoever with Al Qaeda, and this is purely an Iranian game aimed at gaining influence in the area," said Udai Hussein.
As of Sunday, Tehran has not commented on Udai's s statement.

Friday, August 16, 2002

Syria and Iran after Iraq

BY PV VIVEKANAND

SYRIA and Iran should have enough reasons to be worried. It is emerging that the planned US action against Iraq for "regime change" in Baghdad could be part of a grand plan to remove all those who challenge US strategic interests in the Middle East, and Syria could be the next US target after Iraq to be followed by Iran.
There are indeed signs of a wider American campaign to consolidate the US' standing as the unchallenged sole superpower of the world, and the Middle East is a very important test case for Washington.
Reports from Washington indicate that the driving force behind the campaign is a small group of "neoconservatives" with powerful political allies and which seeks to serve Israeli interests more than those of the US.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that the three US targets in the Middle East, Iraq, Syria and Iran, are also among the most vocal against Israel. It is not simply a matter of convenience for the US that fundamental changes are made in these countries to remove the challenge to Israel if not to better suit the interests of Washington's sole "strategic ally" in the Middle East; it is indeed a policy objective just as the ouster of Saddam Hussein is.
Washington flirted with Syria in the early 90s because it suited US interests to do so but now Damascus has become more of a liability than an asset only because it insists on its rights and represents the toughest of all Arab parties on whom Israel wants to impose its version of peace.
Similarly, the US hoped it could do business with Iran when "moderate" Mohammed Khatami was elected president in 1997. However, those hopes failed to materialise in view of the "hardline" religious establishment's grip on power on a parallel track with that of the government but with overriding authority.
Now that Khatami would soon step down after serving two terms, the US has little hopes that another "moderate" might take his place, and hence the recent posture that Washington had "given up" on Khatami.
On the Syrian front, George Bush Senior broke new ground in Washington's ties with Damascus by holding a meeting with the late president Hafez Al Assad in late 1990 and secured his endorsement for the US-led military action that evicted Iraq from Kuwait in early 1991.
In the bargain, Bush promised Assad at least two things: The US would ensure that an Arab-Israeli peace process is launched soon after the war over Kuwait and Washington would not question Syria's role in Lebanon.
The peace process, Assad was assured, would aim at implementing United Nations resolutions based on international legitimacy. In the end, apart from a solution to the Palestinian problem, Syria would have its Golan Heights back from Israeli occupation.
But when Arab-Israeli negotiations got under way in earnest after launched in Madrid in late 1991, it became clear that Israel had no intention of returning the Golan Heights, and the Arab camp became weak, as the late Assad saw it, because of the Palestinian-Israeli Oslo accords of 1993 and the peace treaty that Jordan signed with Israel in 1994 -- both under American auspices.
Assad, a political realist, was ready to accept peace with Israel and normal relations with the Jewish state in exchange for the return of the Golan in its entirety.
From the Israeli perspective, there is no way it could return the Golan to Syria since the Heights represents its main source of water. Giving it up would mean surrendering Israel's control over its source of water and that is not a chance it would take no matter what cost. As such Assad's insistence on a return to the lines of June 4, 1967 offered a perfect cover for Israel to stall the process.
Despite flirting with Syria, it would seem that the US never actually "trusted" it. It did not remove Syria from the list of "countries sponsoring terrorism" and demanded a series of reforms before it would think of doing so. Assad tried to comply with some of the demands by expelling some of the groups named as "terrorist" by the US, but it was not enough for Washington.
The US also found it was difficult to keep its pledge to stay away from intervening in Lebanon as calls mounted from Lebanese right-wing groups backed by France for an end to the Syrian domination of Lebanese affairs. Furthermore, Damascus failed to heed American demands to rein in Lebanese resistance against Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, and it soon became apparent that Washington could not do business with Syria.
Indeed, the US hoped that Bashar Al Assad, who succeeded his father in 2000, would be more amenable to its demands. But the hope was short-lived since Bashar remained firm on his father's lines in the peace process.
The US is now convinced that it would be wasting time to persuade Damascus to accept anything less than its demands in the peace process and to dilute the Syrian role in Lebanon. And so, a "regime change" in Damascus is the only way out, as far as the US sees it under the givens today.
On the Iranian front, "liberal" Khatami has been unable to weaken the hardline theologians' grip on power. In the American view, the religious establishment's constitutional authority is too deep-rooted to be pried away through conventional political means adopted by political forces within the country. Again, in the US eyes, a "regime change" aiming at destroying the religious leaders' power is the order of the day in Iran.
The hostility of the theologians towards the US stemmed from the American backing for the ousted Shah dynasty. The hostility was further strengthened and turned into a way of life for the religious establishment of Iran when the US implicitly backed Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Iran's support for Lebanon's Hizbollah and Palestinian groups is a constant source of concern for Israel, and, by extension, the US. Further compounding the concern are the advances that Iran has reportedly made in developing long-range missiles which could hit Israel, its acquisition of two Russian submarines and the ongoing construction of a nuclear power plant on the Gulf coast.
Now it is almost foregone conclusion short of divine intervention or a miracle that US President George W. Bush would not be dissuaded from his plans to launch military strikes against Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. It is also clear that the US action would lead to a reshaping of Iraq, including a disintegration of that country as we know it today.
It is not a new discovery. It was always known that toppling Saddam could not been seen as a surgical operation conducted in isolation from all other realities in Iraq, and Arab leaders have repeatedly warned the US against such action that would definitely have wide-ranging regional implications.
It was also clear these fears plus the immense difficulty in toppling Saddam had forced the then administration of George Bush Senior to stop short of ordering American forces into Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf war.
As such, and given that the ground realities today make it much more predictable that military action against Iraq would destabilise the region, it appears that Washington has accepted the inevitability of such a course of events and, if anything, it suits the post-Sept. 11 American thinking.
That would definitely mean that the "regime change" in Iraq that Bush is seeking is the first step in the grand American plan to change the shape of the region and would be followed by similar action in Syria and Iran.
However, there could be more than meets the eye in the equation.
There is a growing school of thought that believes that purely Zionist -- read Israeli or vice versa -- interests aimed controlling the world's destiny are the guiding force behind the US administration's actions that ultimately would serve Israel rather than the US itself.
A recent report indicated that the main force driving Bush into undertaking such actions is the group of "neoconservatives" in Washington.
Some might even argue that it sounds more like a Zionist-led circle which had planned in the first half of the last century that the best means to serve the goal of Zionist domination of the world was to control the superpower which dominates the world.
The report, carried by Reuters, said that the group known was "neocons" first emerged in the 1960s when a group of thinkers, many of them Jewish and all passionately anti-Communist, became disillusioned with what they saw as a dangerous radical drift within the Democratic Party to which they then belonged.
Some researchers argue that the group was actually formed in the 30s, with Prescott Bush, grandfather of the present president, taking a leading role as an American Christian supporter of Israel but manipulated by Zionist leaders.
That group is now aligned with the Republicans, and might find Bush Junior a willing tool in its hands to serve Israeli interests if only because of his relative inexperience in international affairs, critics say.
It was under this group's influence that the then president Ronald Reagan took the unprecedented step of bombing a foreign country in peace time arguing that it was involved in attacks against Americans.
Under Reagan's orders, American warplanes bombed the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1985 after intelligence reports said that Libya was behind a grenade attack at a Berlin disco frequented by American soldiers. One woman was killed in the grenade attack while the American bombing killed five people, including Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi's adopted daughter.
In concept, it fitted in with the Israeli policy of military retaliation for attacks targeting Israeli interests, and Reagan appeared to have been prompted to taking an Israeli leaf by the Zionist group.
(It is even argued by some critics that the all-too powerful "neocons" were behind "framing" Libya in the 1988 Lockerbie affair despite evidence that pointed the finger at Syria and Lebanon as well as "rogue" agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. The argument goes on to say that the group thought Libya posed an immediate challenge to US interests and Washington was not ready yet to take on Syria or Iran).
Today, according to Stephen Walt, a dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the group, which he described as "small but well-placed" and including "neoconservative officials and commentators, is primarily interested in eliminating what they regard as a threat to Israel."
"Absent their activities, the United States would be focusing on containing Iraq, which we have done successfully since the Gulf War, but we would not be trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We would also be pursuing a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East in general," Walt told Reuters.
Among the "allies" of the group are Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.
Another ally of the group is said to be Richard Perle, another former Reagan Defence Department hawk who serves as chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, "a formerly sleepy committee of foreign policy old timers that Perle has refashioned into an important advisory group."
Incidentally, it was Perle who organised a briefing by RAND Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec, who has no firsthand experience whatsoever with the Middle East.
In his briefing -- which was very conveniently "leaked" to the Washington Post -- Murawiec portrayed Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the US, an assertion that prompted the Pentagon to issue a denial that it is not official policy.
The "neocon" circle is backed by conservative magazines like Commentary, and the Weekly Standard, and think-tanks such as the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century, says Reuters.
James Zogby, chairman of the Arab American institute, appeared to have put, perhaps unwittingly, his finger on the Zionist pulse of the group when he commented that the circle's "attitude towards an Iraq invasion is, if you have the ability and the desire to do it, that's justification enough."
That is precisely a part the Zionist ideology, and this seen at work today in the brutal military approach adopted and practised by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon against the Palestinians and his attitude towards the Arabs at large.

Thursday, August 01, 2002

Like a broken music record

by pv vivekanand

AFTER failing to establish a link between Saddam
Hussein and Osama Bin Laden -- and by extension to
prove an Iraqi role in the Sept. 11 attacks in the US
-- President George W. Bush is citing charges that
Baghdad is continuing to develop weapons of mass
destruction as his reason to launch military action
aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein.
But how authentic is the charge?
On the face of it, the international community is
being told to accept that Iraq has eluded the most
advanced satellite surveillance -- with equipment that
could arguably trace the contours of a grain of wheat
on the ground -- and the strictest-ever
air-sea-land-blockade backed by intense interceptions
and inspection of anything and everything crossing its
border -- and managed to resume its clandestine
weapons programme.
The assertion is based on an argument that the
departure of UN inspectors who were withdrawn by
Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- often wrongly
described by the US as their expulsion by Iraq -- in
late 1998 allowed Baghdad to pick where it had left
off following the destruction of most of its weapons
of mass destruction under the UN verification and
destruction programme.
A review of the UN programme would raise serious
questions about the US charge against Baghdad.
It was known that Baghdad and the UN mission never got
on well and there were always skirmishes, both
diplomatic and otherwise.
Iraq and the UN inspection teams have had many
standoffs, some of them resulting from the personal
postures adopted by inspectors and others because the
Iraqis tried to prevent vital papers on their
country's weapons programme as well as intelligence
documents unrelated to arms inspections being removed
by the UN officials.
"We hated each other's guts," as a former member of
the UN team put it.
It had become clear that Iraq had a much larger weapon
programme than was known to the international
community when the UN inspectors launched their
mission in 1991 as the United Nations Special
Commission (UNSCOM).
It took several years before UNSCOM managed to unravel
the programme, with the Iraqis revealing information
in bits and pieces and only when they were cornered
with solid evidence, and it became a cat-and-mouse
game.
It was not until late 1995 that the UN managed to get
a clear picture of Iraq's military programmes and that
came from Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel,
who "defected" to Jordan in August of that year.
Kamel, who served as Iraq's defence minister and head
of the country's military industry commission, was
believed to have been debriefed not only by the then
UNSCOM chairman, Sweden's Rolf Ekeus, but also by
American and European intelligence agencies.
At that time Kamel's "defection" and revelations about
his country's weapons programmes were seen as
Baghdad's opportunity to come clean with its secrets
to UNSCOM. In fact, Baghdad blamed Kamel for having
kept the secrets for himself and handed over several
cupboards full of files that it said were stashed away
by the defector at his farmhouse outside Baghdad.
The information gained from those files represented a
key pillar of UNSCOM strategy, and it was believed
that the UN mission had managed to unearth more than
90 per cent of Iraq's weapon programmes.
Shortly before the inspections came to a premature end
prompted by Iraq's insistence that a clear blueprint
be given for what was expected of it before the
sweeping UN sanctions imposed on it in 1990 are lifted
and Washington's refusal to meet the demand, UNSCOM
officials had asserted that the bulk of their work was
over although they were seeking answers to some vital
questions, and those questions are now being dusted
off and presented as the reasons for the charges
against Iraq.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which
followed an independent verification programme, said
that it had located Iraq's nuclear programme and had
eliminated the country's nuclear material and
equipment as well as the ability to renew them. But
when the IAEA tried to close the "nuclear file," the
US intervened it and aborted the move.
On the "missiles" file, Richard Butler, who succeeded
Ekeus as UNSCOM chairman, said in July/August 1997
that the UN team had accounted for all but less than
12 long-range Scud missiles that Iraq was known to
have bought from the then Soviet Union and modified.
He also said that the bulk of Iraq's chemical and
biological weapons were destroyed but that the UN team
had not received all answers.
"UNSCOM did a fantastic job," he said. "You have to
understand that when the Gulf war was ended there was
revealed an awesome array of weapons of mass
destruction: almost a nuclear bomb, long-range
missiles, chemical, biological, all of the weapons of
mass destruction. And we, with Iraq, got hold of most
of it, got an account of it or got rid of it."
Such comments had also come from several other key
members of the UN mission as well as American and
international military experts who had access to
classified information collected by UNSCOM.
Seen against the backdrop of such assertions, a look
at the claims and assertions that Iraq continues to
build weapons of mass destruction -- the reason that
Bush cites for his plans to launch military action
aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein -- unveils a
contradiction.
The key question is: With all entry points into Iraq
under close surveillance and a ban on all commercial
and military planes in and out of the country, how is
it possible that Baghdad continued to develop weapons
of mass destruction in the absence of the UN
inspectors since late 1998?
In an appearance before the US Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Butler asserted that Iraq had
extensive chemical and biological weapons programmes
and that there is evidence it has stepped up it
alleged nuclear programmes in recent years.
Is the world then to believe that Iraq managed to get
equipment and material past the American armada
patrolling the seas and checking anything and
everything heading for Iraq, and indeed "suspect"
material headed for Iraq's neighbours that could be
sent to Iraq, and renewed its weapons programme?
It has been 12 years since the sweeping trade embargo
was imposed on Iraq.
Isn't it not fair to anyone to expect that the
enforcers of the sanctions would have perfected their
art?
Almost every vessel, small or big, is inspected before
it docks in Iraq or anywhere with access to Iraq.
American intelligence agents are present in all
neighbours of Iraq -- although to a lesser extent in
Iran -- to ensure that no "contraband" material enters
the country; nothing beyond food and medicine and
related items approved under the UN's oil-for-food
programme is allowed into the country. Any item which
could have slightest "military use" is blocked from
entering Iraq.
An example is caustic soda, a key element in cleaning
and washing of dairy equipment. It could also be used
in production of chemical weapons, according to
experts.
Since the day the sanction and verification regime was
put into place, no consignment of caustic soda has
been allowed into Iraq, and efforts by Jordan-based
exporters to send the material to Iraq across the
border -- presumably for legitimate purposes -- have
been repeatedly thwarted.
That is only an indication of the effectiveness of the
blockade, and it is difficult to see how the Iraqis
managed to lay their hands of components of chemical
weapons.
However, that is not to say that Iraq could not have
done it. Then again, reports from Washington and
London indicate that military generals on both sides
of the Atlantic are not really convinced that Iraq had
developed weapons as alleged or that poses a real
threat to the region. Such scepticism has been voiced
by officers who should be in a position to have access
to classified and top secret information on Iraq's
military capabilities as a key pillar of any strategy
to launch a war on that country.
Some of the allegations are also based on accounts by
Iraqi defectors, both identified and unidentified.
However, the credibility and authenticity of such
accounts are brought under question when considering
that almost all the "defectors" are produced and
paraded by Iraqi dissident groups which have a vested
interest in convincing the world that Baghdad is evil.

In some cases, it has also been found that the
defectors had left Iraq around the same time the UN
inspections were halted and they were making claims
linked to the period after their departure from the
country.
However, regardless of all reasonings and logic based
on available facts that expose the hollowness of the
American argument for striking at Iraq, the Bush
administration is dead bent upon carrying out their
designs in the region and Saddam Hussein has no room
in their strategy.

'Spying' charges

AS was expected sooner or later, the Swedish diplomat
who headed the UN arms inspection programme in Iraq
until 1997 has turned around and extended implicit
endorsement of Baghdad's assertion that the
inspections were mostly a smokescreen for American
intelligence activities in the country.
Sweden's Rolf Ekeus, who chaired UNSCOM since its
creation in 1991 until he quit in 1997, affirmed in
public comments this week that some of his team
members were obviously engaged in work unrelated to
weapon inspections.
In comments carried by Swedish radio, Ekeus said the
US and other powers had exploited UN teams in Iraq
for their own political ends, including monitoring
President Saddam Hussein's movements and that, at
times, crises were created that could possibly form
the basis for military action.
"There is no doubt that the Americans wanted to
influence the inspections to further certain
fundamental US interests," Ekeus said in his first
affirmation that he was aware of what was going on.
That partly vindicates Baghdad's accusations,
particularly that Ekeus was one of the harshest
critics of Iraq while he headed UNSCOM and thereafter
until this week's comments.
Indeed, one of the key arguments Iraq is putting up
against the US demand for renewed inspections of
Baghdad's alleged programmes of producing weapons of
mass destruction is the record that previous
inspectors had spied on the country.
It is not a new position and some of those who served
in the UN mission for verification of arms in Iraq
until it was stopped in late 1998 had admitted in
public that some of their colleagues were intelligence
agents rather than arms experts.
In a statement that went largely unnoticed or played
down deliberately or otherwise, Iraqi Deputy Prime
Minister Tareq Aziz said in mid-1998 -that many of the
UN inspectors appeared unaware of what they were
supposed do in the realm of arms inspections and Iraqi
officers assigned to working with them found a marked
ignorance among them of technical issues related to
weapons of mass destruction.
Ironically, it had also been reported that some of the
inspectors were reporting directly to Israel with or
without US knowledge.
In fact, it was Aziz's statement that enraged
Australian diplomat Butler, who assumed charge of the
UN inspections as successor to Ekeus in mid-1997, and
led to a course of events that culminated in the UN
decision to withdraw the inspectors ahead of
US-British military strikes against Iraq in December
1998.
Obviously Butler was counting on American military
strikes against Iraq everytime he reported to the UN
Security Council that Baghdad was not extending the
level of co-operation he demanded. He was frustrated
that his mission was not making any real headway and
knew within a few months' time and several visits to
Iraq that he would not get anywhere in his mission.
The real reason for the failure was his high-handed
approach and effort to dictate terms from his
self-assumed position of strength stemming from
American military powers to "punish" Iraq if it did
not fall in line with his commands.
It was clear that Aziz's pointed comments angered
Butler if only because he had hand-picked some of
members of the inspection team and the Iraqi
minister's accusation was seen as questioning his
abilities.
He was visibly upset when he appeared before the press
in Bahrain after his last visit to Baghdad during
which Aziz had made the statement to the press.
When asked about a report that a British minister had
said that Iraq was loading missiles with chemical
warheads at the rate of one a day Butler said he was
not aware of the report. In a report he presented to
the UN Security Council two days after the Bahrain
appearance he made no reference to any such Iraqi
activity.
However, a few hours after he presented the report, he
appeared before a pro-Israeli gathering in New York
and accused Iraq of arming missiles with chemical
weapons aimed at "destroying" Israel. He repeated that
allegation in a New York Times interview shortly
thereafter, leaving one wondering why he failed to
include it in his official report to the Security
Council, the very body which had assigned him the
mission and to which he was supposed to report.
The impression one got was that Butler took his
failure in Iraq too personal and waged a pointed
campaign during which he spared no effort to build the
case against Baghdad. And that culminated in the
December 1998 military "punishment" for Iraq.
Scott Ritter, an American who served under Ekeus as
well as Butler, has affirmed in public comments that
some of his team members were obviously engaged in
work unrelated to weapon inspections.
Against such a backdrop, it is only natural that
Baghdad continues to see any renewed inspection as
aimed at gathering more intelligence on the country in
preparation for eventual action to eliminate the
Saddam regime.
The Iraqi reaction to Ekeus's comments was also
predictable.
An official spokesman called the Swedish diplomat's
comments as "another important confirmation of many
statements by Iraq, international parties and foreign
personalities on the exploitation by the United
States of UN arms inspectors to perform tasks that
contradict their mandate as defined by Security
Council resolutions on Iraq."
"The remarks come at a time when extremists in the US
administration are trying to distract attention from
Iraq's legitimate rights according to Security
Council resolutions, in the forefront of them lifting
of the unjust sanctions and respecting Iraq's
sovereignty," he said.
"The new comments by Ekeus confirm Iraq's legitimate
concerns expressed in the questions submitted to the
UN secretary-general in talks on May 7," the
spokesman added. Those questions sought answers
whether US threats against Saddam were a breach of
international law to whether US "spies" would serve on
inspection teams.
Iraq is now demanding that the Security Council answer
Iraq's queries as "a first move to stop the United
States' exploitation of the apparatus of the United
Nations for ends contradicting those stipulated in
the council's resolutions and the UN Charter," said
the spokesman.