“Mother-Bomb” to UN's Misfortune

It is astonishing how various the arsenal of political blackmailing employed by George W. Bush for pressing Saddam Hussein is. If Americans fail to have a quorum to attach visible legitimacy to a military intrusion in Iraq, they put the question differently. White House spokesman Ari Fleisher said that if the United Nations Organization was inactive and couldn’t act as an international organization capable of disarming Saddam Hussein, that would be done by some other organization. He also confirmed that the US president had the right to form an alternative organization or an international coalition that could pass a vote on disarmament of Iraq.

As for the UN, Americans never made any secret of their disdain for the organization and called it the cold war product incapable of an adequate response to the challenges of the time. What is more, the USA is furious because it may lose its closest ally in the anti-Iraq coalition, Great Britain to be exact.

British Prime Minister Anthony Blair is driven into a corner: he seems to be already used to anti-war protest actions, but a political demarche of his party colleagues was quite a surprise for him. Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development declared Sunday that she would retire if Great Britain began a military campaign against Iraq without a sanction from the UN. Earlier, Andrew Read from the British Parliament also spoke about his resignation in order to demonstrate protest against the Cabinet policy concerning the Iraqi problem.

Meanwhile, Downing Street is still sure that the UN Security Council will support the draft resolution submitted by Washington and London in accordance with which March 17 is the “deadline” for disarmament of Iraq. However, as The Sunday Telegraph reports, otherwise five aides to British ministers are ready to resign. The newspaper also informs that the number of protesters in the government may go up to 10.

If we take into consideration the fact that recently 120 Laborite deputies voted against governmental plans concerning Iraq, we may see that the British Government is on the verge of a serious crisis.

The last statement of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is just another confirmation of the fact. The US Army is ready to win a victory over Iraq without assistance of Great Britain. When the Pentagon chief spoke in the military department on March 11, he said that most likely Great Britain would participate only in reconstruction works in Iraq after large-scale military operations. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, despite Blair’s declarations on the intentions of Great Britain to support the USA in military operations in Iraq since very beginning of the campaign, the actual role of London in the operation will outline only when a new variant of the resolution on Iraq is voted in the UN Security Council. At the same time, the US Secretary of Defense emphasized that a decision on military operations in Iraq would be taken regardless of Great Britain’s position.

Washington has no triumphs in the diplomatic sphere to boats of, that is why it resorts to its favorite tactics, the play of muscles.

The USA held testing of an air bomb weighing about 8.5 tons (21 thousand pounds) on the Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. As Pentagon spokesperson Cheryl Irwin said, the bomb testing was a success. In the words of Cheryl Irwin, Massive Ordnance Air Burst (MOAB), better known as “the mother of all bombs” is the strongest air bomb that ever existed. The bomb is controlled with signals from satellites. During the tests, the air bomb was dropped from a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and hit the target precisely. Sources in the Pentagon say the air bomb is likely to be used in the US-led war campaign in Iraq.

Dmitry Litvinovich PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Maria Gousseva

Read the original in Russian: https://www.pravda.ru/world/35618-irac/

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