BY ROHAN PEARCE
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad", an unnamed Pentagon official told the US news network CBS on January 24."You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of you at division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In two, three, four, five days, they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted", Harlan Ullman told CBS reporter David Martin.
Ullman is one of the authors of Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, published by the Pentagon's National Defense University in 1996 and a managing director of Defense Group Inc (DGI).
(DGI describes itself banally as a "high technology services and hardware company providing research, development, analysis, integration, management, and marketing support to a variety of ... governments, as well as commercial clients.)
Shock and Awe has been adopted by the Bush administration as the blueprint for its attack on Iraq. The plan is a prescription for an Iraqi holocaust.
The CBS report claimed that Pentagon plans for an invasion of Iraq call for 300-400 cruise missiles to slam into Iraq on the first day of the war, and a further 300-400 on the second day — almost one missile every four minutes for two days.
Ullman's report cites the US use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki when World War II was all but over. "The intent here", reads Shock and Awe, "is to impose a regime of Shock and Awe through delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly military or strategic objectives".
Nuclear and chemical weapons
Ironically, while Bush's purported reason for invading Iraq is to destroy Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, the US government is considering the use of illegal chemical weapons in Iraq. The February 16 British Independent reported: "The US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, revealed earlier this month [at February 5 hearings of the House Committee on Armed Services] that American forces are planning to use 'non-lethal' biochemical weapons such as anti-riot gases and crowd control agents if they invade Iraq."
Professor Alistair Hay and Professor Julian Perry-Robinson, two of Britain's leading authorities on chemical weapons, told the Independent that "such weapons are illegal under the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention and the 1928 Geneva Protocol, which ban the use of chemical agents against people in wartime".
The "nuclear option" is also being considered by the anti-Iraq US/Britain/Australia coalition. Washington's January 2002 Nuclear Posture Review added Iraq to the list of countries considered potential targets for nuclear weapons and suggested the use of "bunker-buster" mini-nukes be a component of warfare.
On February 2, British defence minister Geoff Hoon brazenly stated on BBC TV: "Saddam can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use nuclear weapons."
Paul Rogers in a February 2 Open Democracy article () noted "a highly significant article in the Los Angeles Times (January 26) by a well-informed defence analyst, William J Arkin". According to Arkin, planning for the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq is underway at the US Strategic Command. Citing "multiple sources close to the process", Arkin specified two potential roles for nuclear weapons: attacking Iraqi facilities located so deep underground that they might be impervious to conventional explosives and thwarting Iraq's use of "weapons of mass destruction".
Roger reported: "Furthermore, Arkin cites sources within US Central Command ... saying that a Theatre Nuclear Planning Document has already been prepared for Iraq. Arkin's article led to inquiries by other journalists seeking clarification from administration sources, but no denials were forthcoming."
In a January 27 commentary for Common Dreams (), Ira Chernus, an academic at the University of Colorado, asked: "Is the Hiroshima model [in Ullman's Shock and Awe report] just a metaphor?"
According to Chernus, "Ullman recently wrote that one way to 'shock and awe' Saddam is to remind him that the US has 'certain weapons' that can destroy deeply buried facilities. That's a not-even-thinly veiled reference to the newest kind of nuclear weapons, the B-61 'bunker-busters'... Suppose we drop the nuke in the wrong place? Even Harlan Ullman admits it could easily happen: 'Of course there will always be intelligence gaps, and no solution is perfect.'"
Humanitarian disaster
Potentially more devastating than the immediate impact of the US-British military assault will be the subsequent humanitarian crisis that will result from the displacement of civilians and destruction of infrastructure.
A February 6 article in the Inside the Pentagon newsletter reported: "The Bush administration is woefully unprepared for a humanitarian catastrophe ... that almost certainly will befall the Iraqi population during and after an anticipated war, according to a former military officer who has informally advised the executive branch over the past month."
Retired air force colonel Sam Gardiner told ITP that "after about three days of reporting on the retreating Iraqi soldiers, the embedded press will begin to report on the children begging for water. And that's the second battle... You have to be prepared for this one or you lose the war."
According to Gardiner, the US military has only deployed one hospital ship, which has a 1000-bed capacity. "Iraqi hospitals have 27,000 beds and most of those are filled", according to ITP.
Aid agencies in a post-war Iraq will face a humanitarian disaster of staggering proportions. A February 5 Refugees International policy paper prepared by Joel Charny states: "In the 'medium impact scenario' — to use the UN's term for a two to three month conflict involving ground troops — 1.45 million refugees and asylum seekers will try to reach neighbouring countries, 900,000 people will be newly displaced within Iraq and 4.9 million people will require emergency food assistance."
The capacity of the UN to cope with this situation is likely to be limited because, as Gardiner told ITP, "[the US government hasn't] used the UN agencies right, we have kept them out of the planning process".
A confidential draft UN report, jointly released by the Cambridge-based Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (at ) and the New York-based Center for Economic and Social Rights, predicts: "The "population in immediate need of humanitarian intervention and that are expected to be accessible, those in the south, would ... total 5.4 million, to which must be added a further 2 million internally displaced persons and refugees."
If the US invasion goes ahead, the humanitarian crisis in Iraq will dwarf the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan. Kenneth Bacon, a former US assistant secretary of defence and the president of Refugees International, noted in the January/February edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "Relief agencies have been working for years in Afghanistan, but there is little infrastructure to deal with a humanitarian disaster in Iraq."
Bacon wrote that "most of Iraq's 24 million people depend on food rations provided under the UN Oil for Food Program. Any break in the food pipeline would create a nutritional crisis, forcing hungry Iraqis to besiege invading troops for food." Another confidential working draft of a UN report obtained by CASI (dated January 7) confirms the disastrous impact the disruption of government-supplied rations will have, noting that "80 per cent of the average household income is constituted by the food ration, while 60 per cent of the population (around 16 million people) rely solely on the monthly food basket to meet all household needs and would be directly and seriously affected by a disruption of the food distribution system".
The report, Integrated Humanitarian Contingency Plan for Iraq and Neighbouring Countries, predicts: "In the event of a crisis, 30 per cent of children under five would be at risk of death from malnutrition."
According to CASI, this represents approximately 1.26 million children under five who could die. The report concludes that "the collapse of essential services in Iraq ... could lead to a humanitarian emergency of proportions well beyond the capacity of UN agencies and other aid organisations", particularly because "the effects of over 12 years of sanctions, preceded by war, have considerably increased the vulnerability of the population."
Shifting the blame
The Bush gang has launched a propaganda campaign to try to shift the blame for the civilian deaths that will result from Washington's attack on Iraq.
On February 10, at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Tennessee, Bush declared: "In violation of the Geneva Conventions, Saddam Hussein is positioning his military forces within civilian populations in order to shield his military and blame coalition forces for civilian casualties that he has caused. Saddam Hussein regards the Iraqi people as human shields, entirely expendable when their suffering serves his purposes."
This echoes Apparatus of Lies, a report issued by the White House earlier this year. This sickening piece of "pre-emptive propaganda" tries to dismiss US atrocities in the 1990-91 Gulf War and place the blame for civilian deaths solely on the Iraqi regime. It contains examples of Hussein's "crimes" such as placing air defence missile systems in "civilian areas", meaning cities. The document plays up this notion of "co-location" of "military assets" and civilians.
Moreover, a February 2 British Independent article revealed that Britain's defence ministry has "admitted the electricity system that powers water and sanitation for the Iraqi people could be a military target".
A spokesperson for the ministry said that "every care would be taken in all circumstances, at every planning level, that all targets were military targets and there was very little chance of injury to civilians or non-military targets". The spokesperson then admitted: "I can obviously see the difficulty in this because a target seen as a military target can also have, sadly, implications for civilian populations as well."
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, February 26, 2003.
Visit the