Iraq to USA: Put Up or Shut Up!

Iraq has told Washington to produce evidence that it has weapons of mass destruction or else to cease its constant insinuations that Baghdad is hiding them away from the inspectors as it calls up reservists and prepares for a unilateral military attack on Iraq next January, contrary to international law.

General Amer Al-Saadi declared at a press conference on Saturday that Iraq’s document on its arms programmes is “accurate, comprehensive and truthful”. He added that the size of the document “is irritating certain quarters”, a reference to the declarations by the White House that the declaration, 11,807 pages in length and written in a mixture of English and Arabic, was purposefully so long so as to stall investigations. The document will now be analysed at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and at the UNO headquarters in New York while copies are sent to heads of state around the world for a detailed investigation.

He added that if any source has any information to the contrary, this evidence should be presented officially. Admitting that Iraq had a nuclear programme before the Gulf War, General Al-Saadi stated that “We have the complete documentation from design to all the other things. We haven’t reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it”.

Washington keeps up the pressure not only on Iraq but on the United Nations Organisation which it hosts. Although the leader of the UNMOVIC team, Dr. Hans Blix, is not going to issue a full statement on the contents of the document until the end of January, Washington intends to bully the other members of the Security Council into taking a firm decision before Christmas. The notion is absurd, since any such decision would be hastily made, based on conjecture and not upon fact.

Washington’s slanderous and arrogant conducting of its foreign policy yet again shines through. Instead of accepting a multi-polar new world order, based upon the rule of international legislation and using the UNO as the proper instrument for conducting global policy, which would bring friends from all countries ruled by law and properly elected governments, Washington conducts its foreign policy as if there were a fundamental disrespect for the rest of the world by the administration.

The message that this type of foreign policy conveys is that of an administration that could not care less how many people are antagonised, how many civilians in foreign sovereign states are killed, or how many governments are manhandled, bribed and trampled into compliance with a unipolar global policy dictated by Washington alone, in pursuing its obsessive quest for domination of the world through ownership of its resources.

This is not diplomacy. It is a disgrace not only to the government of the United States of America, but mainly to its people, who are being let down, cheated and mismanaged by a clique of people who appear, at best, to have no idea how to conduct foreign policy, which is unfortunately the administration of the United States of America today. If the White House allowed the State Department to do its job and ceased to interfere with the considerably able work of Colin Powell, the USA would find that it has many more friends than it imagined.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru