Veterans for Common Sense

Sorry, I can’t applaud the French foreign minister, because I don’t believe that France, which sold Saddam his first nuclear reactor, the one Israel blew up, comes to this story with the lofty principles it claims.

The French foreign minister, after basking in the applause at the U.N., might ask himself who was clapping for his speech back in Baghdad and who was crying. Saddam was clapping, and all his political prisoners — i.e., most Iraqis — were crying.

But I don’t have much applause in me for China, Russia — or the Bush team either. I feel lately as if there are no adults in this room (except Tony Blair).

No, this is not a plague-on-all-your-houses column. I side with those who believe we need to confront Saddam — but we have to do it right, with allies and staying power, and the Bush team has bungled that.

The Bush folks are big on attitude, weak on strategy and terrible at diplomacy. I covered the first gulf war, in 1990-91. What I remember most are the seven trips I took with Secretary of State James A. Baker III around the world to watch him build — face-to-face — the coalition and public support for that war, before a shot was fired. Going to someone else’s country is a sign you respect his opinion. This Bush team has done no such hands-on spade work. Its members think diplomacy is a phone call.

They don’t like to travel. Seeing senior Bush officials abroad for any length of time has become like rare-bird sightings. It’s probably because they spend so much time infighting in Washington over policy, they’re each afraid that if they leave town their opponents will change the locks on their office doors.

Also, you would think that if Iraq were the focus of your whole foreign policy, maybe you would have handled North Korea with a little less attitude, so as not to trigger two wars at once. Maybe you would have come up with that alternative — which President Bush promised — to the Kyoto treaty, a treaty he trashed to the great anger of Europe.

You’re not going to get much support in Europe telling people, “You are either with us or against us in a war on terrorism, but in the war you care about — for a greener planet — America will do whatever it wants.”

I am also very troubled by the way Bush officials have tried to justify this war on the grounds that Saddam is allied with Osama bin Laden or will be soon. There is simply no proof of that, and every time I hear them repeat it I think of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. You don’t take the country to war on the wings of a lie.

Tell people the truth. Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice — but it’s a legitimate choice. It’s because he is undermining the U.N., it’s because if left alone he will seek weapons that will threaten all his neighbors, it’s because you believe the people of Iraq deserve to be liberated from his tyranny, and it’s because you intend to help Iraqis create a progressive state that could stimulate reform in the Arab/Muslim world, so that this region won’t keep churning out angry young people who are attracted to radical Islam and are the real weapons of mass destruction.

That’s the case for war — and it will require years of occupying Iraq and a simultaneous effort to defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to create a regional context for success. If done right, such a war could shrink Al Qaeda’s influence — but Al Qaeda is a separate enemy that will have to be fought separately, and will remain a threat even if Saddam is ousted.

It is legitimate for Europeans to oppose such a war, but not simply by sticking a thumb in our eye and their heads in the sand. It’s also legitimate for the Bush folks to focus the world on Saddam, but two years of their gratuitous bullying has made many people deaf to America’s arguments. Too many people today no longer accept America’s strength as a good thing. That is a bad thing.

Some of this we can’t control. But some we can, which is why it’s time for the Bush team to shape up — dial down the attitude, start selling this war on the truth, give us a budget that prepares the nation for a war abroad, not a party at home, and start doing everything possible to create a global context where we can confront Saddam without the world applauding for him.

U.S. plans to use Turkey as a springboard for a northern front against Iraq ran into an obstacle when Ankara demanded more than double the multibillion- dollar economic aid package the Bush administration originally offered to cushion Turkey from losses it may incur during a possible war.

Turkish lawmakers had been expected to vote Tuesday on allowing an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 American combat troops to use the country’s military bases in a potential Iraq campaign. But the government postponed the vote, saying it would not consider letting the troops deploy unless the United States agrees to its new demands: $30 billion in grants and long-term loans.

‘STRATEGIC PARTNER’

“The United States is Turkey’s strategic partner, but if we are going to act together, if our existence and support is meaningful and important for the United States, then the United States has to take into account our sensitivities and treat our demands with goodwill,” said Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the governing Justice and Development Party, in remarks carried by Turkey’s Anatolia news agency.

“The other side must meet our demands, and if they do, we shall see,” Erdogan said.

From the U.S. perspective, time is of the essence. Four American ships carrying tanks and other heavy equipment for the Army’s 4th Infantry Division are off the Turkish coast and awaiting landing permission. Between 20 and 30 ships able to supply the full complement of troops Washington wants to send to Turkey are expected to arrive shortly.

Pentagon officials said a decision must be made within the next 48 hours before the equipment is sent elsewhere and the war plans redrawn.

Analysts and politicians in Ankara warn that as Turkish leaders haggle with the White House, they must be careful not to overestimate Turkey’s strategic importance for military planners in Washington.

If Ankara wants to have any say in the war’s aftermath, it had better make up its mind soon — or risk damaging its relations with the United States, its key ally, and not getting the loans it desperately needs to recover from the country’s worst economic crisis since World War II.

“It is not in the interests of Turkey not to allow U.S. troops,” said Mustafa Ziya, the official representative of the country’s ethnic Iraqi Turkomans in Ankara. “Turkey is interested in Washington’s benevolence. I think it will all be solved in the next few days.”

U.S. combat troops streaming in from the north could draw Iraqi divisions away from defending Baghdad, thereby shortening the war, according to U.S. military planners. But Washington has hinted it will go ahead without Turkey’s help if Ankara continues to drag its feet.

“It will be settled one way or another rather soon,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. “We continue to work with Turkey as a friend. But it is decision time. We will find out what the ultimate outcome is.”

What the Bush administration terms its “final” offer of aid to Turkey is a package consisting of about $6 billion in forgiven loans and up to $20 billion in loan guarantees. That is substantially more than Washington’s initial offer of $14 billion.

GULF WAR COSTLY

Turkey estimates it lost $30 billion in the first Gulf War, and politicians in Ankara say they are not keen to get shorted again.

Lawmaker Inal Batu of the opposition Republican party called the latest U.S.

offer “chicken feed,” adding, “we have already lost $6 billion since the beginning of this crisis in tourism and trade.”

Batu, who opposes the deployment of U.S. troops in Turkey, said a larger economic package might help tone down the Turkish public’s aversion to a war with Iraq. A recent poll by the Strateji/GFK polling agency in Istanbul showed that more than 90 percent of Turks are against any Turkish involvement in a military campaign against Iraq.

Husnu Ondul, head of the Human Rights Association, based in Ankara, attributed Turkey’s delay to an attempt to show its people that the country is “not an American puppet.

“The government is trying to show that it is resisting America — but it is just for show,” said Ondul, who expects Turkey to vote by the end of the week to allow U.S. troops into the country.

Other analysts say Turkey needs American support in the event Kurds in northern Iraq move to create an independent state in what is now an autonomous,

no-fly zone protected by U.S. and British warplanes. Such a move is one of Ankara’s biggest fears, especially as it could trigger nationalist aspirations among Turkey’s 12 million Kurds. Turkey is still staggering from a 15-year conflict with Kurdish separatists that left an estimated 37,000 dead.

Turkey also fears that the Iraqi Kurds might take over Iraq’s oil-rich region around Kirkuk — just beyond the border of the no-fly zone — with its estimated reserves of more than 10 billion barrels of oil.

Although the United States has promised Turkey — much to the Iraqi Kurds’ chagrin — that it would not allow an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, Turkey wants to send tens of thousands of its own troops into the region just to make sure.

“We are going to war alongside the United States in part because we are afraid the United States otherwise will create a Kurdish state,” said Hasan Koni, a political analyst in Ankara.

Turkey also needs to be on America’s good side so Washington will continue to lobby for Ankara to be accepted into the European Union. U.S. support is also key in securing international loans Turkey needs to recover from its deep economic crisis, which has seen nearly 2 million people lose their jobs.

E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.

Washington (Reuters) – The Defense Department has ordered a further 28,000 troops to the Gulf region as the United States builds a military force of more than 200,000 for a possible war with Iraq, military officials said on Tuesday.

The 5,200 soldiers of the highly mobile U.S. Army 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, based at Fort Carson in Colorado, are included in the deployment order signed in recent days, the officials said.

The United States now has 182,000 troops in and near the Gulf in case President Bush orders an invasion of Iraq, said a defense official speaking on condition of anonymity. Tens of thousands of more troops are heading toward the region in the coming weeks.

Bush has said the United States will lead a coalition of nations to disarm Iraq by force if the Iraqis fail to comply with U.N. demands that they give up any banned weapons of mass destruction. Iraq denies possessing such weapons.

The 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, nicknamed “Brave Rifles,” played an important role in the 1991 Gulf War. The regiment drove more than 185 miles into southern Iraq in 100 hours in the crushing “left hook” movement during the brief ground phase of the Gulf War.

“The regiment moved over 300 kilometers and literally destroyed three Iraqi Republican Guards divisions,” said Capt. Bren Workman, a spokesman at Fort Carson.

The regiment has more than 300 armored vehicles, including M1A1 Abrams tanks and M3A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and more than 80 aircraft, including AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, officials said.

The regiment is a highly mobile force that can conduct offensive and defensive operations, reconnaissance and security functions, officials said. It also can be quickly deployed in emergency situations, they said.

Fort Carson officials said the regiment would be deployed in the coming weeks, but declined to be more specific.

U.S. officials said nearly 200,000 American troops could be in place by early March. In addition to ground troops, the United States has massed air power and warships in the region, deploying five aircraft carrier battle groups. The carriers are accompanied by dozens of other warships carrying long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Thousands of U.S. troops last week began flying to the Gulf region on commercial airliners mobilized by the Pentagon to meet growing airlift needs for a possible war.

Britain also is committing more than 40,000 troops, as well as warships and warplanes.

San Francisco – When the Bush Administration talks about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), it means nuclear, chemical and biological devices.

But the U.S. is preparing to use a WMD of its own that will accomplish at the speed of light what 10 years of bombing was unable to do in Southeast Asia: turn a country back to the stone age.

The device, sometimes referred to as a “microwave bomb,” sometimes as an “E-Bomb,” will literally bring a nation to its knees by destroying all electrical devices–permanently. Every battery, every semiconductor, every electrical line and every power source will simply cease to function.

Asked about using the weapon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently said that “you never know,” then added that the U.S. “might use it.”

While the Administration was being coy about employing the device, military analysts were rubbing their hands in anticipation. “Kabammy! A huge electronic wave comes along and sends out a few thousand volts. Wham! Your cell phone or your computer dies,” says Roger McCarthy, chair of Exponent Failure Analysis Associates.

But not only cell phones and computers will die. The E-Bomb will fry all communications cables, radio towers, phone systems, and wires. Traveling through the air or conducted by everything from railroad tracks to plumbing pipes, an enormous electromagnetic pulse (EMP) will flash into homes, businesses and hospitals, and essentially terminate the 20th century.

It will also violate the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and in particular, Protocol 1, Part IV, Article 48, which clearly states that warring parties “shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”

Article 51 specifically prohibits attacks employing a “method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective.”

Firing one of these devices over Baghdad would indeed immobilize the tanks of the Republican Guard, as well as its anti-aircraft missiles, but it would also shut down every hospital and ambulance. It would also destroy every generator and water pump in a city of 4.5 million people.

Given that some 5,000 Iraqi children die each month, according to the World Health Organization, many of them as a result of water borne diseases caused by a decade of sanctions, civilians are likely to seriously suffer the brunt of such a device.

Again, Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions explicitly forbids rendering “useless” any “drinking water installations.”

Iraq is one of the most urban societies in the Middle East. Some 76 percent of its population reside in cities, compared with 61 percent in Iran and 45 percent in Egypt. It is also a very young population. Over 50 percent of its population is 15 years or younger, and children are far more susceptible to water borne diseases, like cholera, than are adults.

The effects of EMPs have been know since a 1958 high altitude nuclear test in the Pacific inadvertently disrupted telephones, street lights and radio transmission in Hawaii and Australia. The initial effect of a nuclear explosion is an EMP wave, and its results have been closely studied since those tests.

The Livermore and Los Alamos national labs have recently produced a rather simple device with a devastating effect. Mounted on a cruise missile, or even attached to a helicopter, the “bomb” forces an explosion through a copper coil, producing what is called the “Compton effect,” or electrons traveling at 186,000 miles per second.

The effects are virtually instantaneous and the damage permanent. Every electrical device that it touches will have to be replaced, from microchips and semiconductors to wiring. If the cost for such reconstruction in Iraq has been calculated, the figures are classified.

Supporters of the device see it as a “humane” weapon because it is not supposed to kill people. “The electromagnetic pulse generator is emerging as one of the strongest contendersŠto find effective weapons to defeat an enemy without causing loss of Life,” writes David Fulghum, an EMP expert.

But as the Geneva Conventions make clear, this kind of attack is a violation of international law because it targets services that civilians will need to survive a war.

Imagine a hospital without electricity or backup generators, serviced by immobile ambulances, their ignition systems fused by a massive EMP. “Code Blue,” hospital shorthand for emergency, will become “Code Black.”

The temptation to try a new whiz bang in wartime conditions is likely to be overwhelming.

“The only time you get realistic feedback on new capabilities is during wartime,” says Bob Martinage from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The military will take advantage of that time to test new systems.”

But that “feedback” will violate international law, derail a modern society, and put 23 million Iraqi civilians in harm’s way.

“I think that the Chinese have to understand that unless they become very engaged with North Korea and bring about a very quick resolution to this crisis that the Japanese will have no choice but to nuclear arm themselves,” McCain said on a Fox News television talks show.

“It is a crisis,” said the Republican from Arizona. “So I think that the Chinese ought to understand that it is not in their interest in any way to have a nuclear-armed North Korea.”

Appearing on the same show after McCain, White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice denied the possibility of Japan arming itself with nuclear weapons.

“I don’t see any evidence that the Japanese think that this is in their interest,” Rice said.

“The key here is to get the regional powers to recognize that we need a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, that we’ve got to work for it in a united fashion,” she said, referring particularly to Japan, China and Russia.

Against this backdrop, Rice welcomed the International Atomic Energy Agency’s decision Wednesday to refer the North Korean nuclear issue to the U.N. Security Council, calling it a “very good step.”

“I know that the North Koreans would like nothing better than for this to become a bilateral problem between the United States and North Korea,” Rice said.

“But of course, the Chinese have an enormous stake in this. The Russians have an enormous stake. The Japanese have an enormous stake,” she said.

Rice reiterated that Washington will not allow Pyongyang to “get back into a kind of discussions with the United States that produces an agreement that the North Koreans have no intention of carrying through.” (Kyodo News)

Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Each with a deadweight of 35,000 to 40,000 tonnes, the ships have been sailing around the world’s oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law, say authoritative shipping industry sources.

The vessels left port in late November, just a few days after UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix began their search for the alleged Iraqi arsenal on their return to the country.

Uncovering such a deadly cargo on board would give George Bush and Tony Blair the much sought-after “smoking gun” needed to justify an attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime, in the face of massive public opposition to war.

The ships were chartered by a shipping agent based in Egypt and are flying under the flags of three different countries. The continued radio silence since they left port, in addition to the captains’ failure to provide information on their cargoes or their destinations, is a clear breach of international maritime laws.

The vessels are thought to have spent much of their time in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean, berthing at sea when they need to collect supplies of fuel and food. They have berthed in a handful of Arab countries, including Yemen.

American and British military forces are believed to be reluctant to stop and search the vessels for fear that any intervention might result in them being scuttled. If they were carrying chemical and biological weapons, or fissile nuclear material, and they were to be sunk at sea, the environmental damage could be catastrophic.

Washington and London might also want to orchestrate any raids so that they can present the ships as “evidence” that President Saddam is engaged in “material breach” of UN resolutions. This could provide the trigger for military strikes. While security sources in London last night were unable to provide information on any surveillance operation, the movement of the three ships is the source of growing concern among maritime and intelligence experts.

A shipping industry source told The Independent: “If Iraq does have weapons of mass destruction, then a very large part of its capability could be afloat on the high seas right now. These ships have maintained radio silence for long periods and, for a considerable time, they have been steaming around in ever-decreasing circles.”

The ships are thought to have set sail from a country other than Iraq to avoid running the gauntlet of Western naval vessels patrolling the Gulf. Defence experts believe that, if they are carrying weapons of mass destruction, these could have been smuggled out through Syria or Jordan.

Despite hundreds of searches by UN inspectors, no evidence has yet been found of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes. A succession of “dossiers” presented by Downing Street has been criticised for providing inaccurate information, with the most recent one subject to ridicule because a student’s 11-year-old doctoral thesis was being passed off as current intelligence.

There was a further setback for Washington and London when the accuracy of satellite photographs shown to the United Nations by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, purporting to show Iraqi officials moving incriminating evidence from a suspected site, was questioned by Hans Blix.

Mr Blix said: “The reported movement of munitions at the site could just as easily have been a routine activity as a movement of proscribed munitions in anticipation of an imminent inspection.”

Attempts to link the Iraqi regime to al-Qa’ida and other Islamist groups have also been met with scepticism. The UN says, though, that Iraq has failed to account for 1,000 tonnes of chemical agents from the war against Iran; to reveal the whereabouts of 6,500 missing chemical rockets; to produce evidence it has destroyed 8,500 litres of anthrax; and to account for 380 rocket engines smuggled into Iraq with chemicals used for missile propellants and control systems.

Intelligence reports, and some Iraqi defectors, have maintained that incriminating material and documents relating to weapons of mass destruction have been buried in remote parts of the country and have also been hidden in a variety of locations including homes of officials and scientists, as well as mosques. There have also been claims that chemical and biological products have been smuggled into Syria.

White House Press Briefing with Ari Fleischer

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 – 12:15pm

by Russell Mokhiber

Mokhiber: You said last week that, “Every step will be taken to protect civilian and innocent life in Iraq.” But Pentagon officials have said that under a battle plan called ‘shock and awe,’ “there will not be a safe place in Baghdad when we attack.” Baghdad is a city the size of Paris, with five million residents. If there will not be a safe place in Baghdad when we attack, then how do you plan to protect every civilian life?

Ari Fleischer: First of all, I think that any construing of any statements that are made by anybody at the Pentagon to suggest that the Pentagon does not and will not take every step to protect innocent lives is an unfair representation of what the Pentagon would say. It’s well-known how the United States conducts itself in military affairs. We are very proud of the fact that any time force is reluctantly used, the force is applied to military targets and innocents are protected.

Mokhiber: Second question. You have admitted that Saddam may attack our invading troops with chemical and biological weapons. On Sunday, 60 Minutes reported that many military leaders believe that our troops have neither the proper equipment, nor the proper training to survive a chemical and biological attack. The report quoted an Army audit that found that 62 percent of the gas masks examined “had critical defects that could cause leakage.”

Now, since 100,000 U.S. veterans in the Gulf War may still be suffering from Gulf War [illnesses] — many of them believe that this is from inhaling toxic fumes. Tens of thousands of them were exposed to sarin gas when we bombed a Iraqi munitions dump. How can the President send troops into harm’s way knowing that they are not adequately protected from a chemical and biological attack?

Ari Fleischer: The President has full faith and confidence in the Department of Defense and in their planning for the worst. And I think premised in your question is the fact that perhaps you now are coming around to the realization that Iraq does indeed have weapons of mass destruction and a willingness to use them. It’s not anybody in the United States government who has admitted — in your word — that Iraq might use these weapons — it’s that Iraq has such weapons, they’ve used them in the past. And hence the danger not only to the troops who are in the region, but to people abroad, people in the United States, and friends and allies and civilians in the region who remain vulnerable to Saddam using such weapons on innocents.

Mokhiber: What about the 60 Minutes report that we’re not prepared —

Ari Fleischer: As I indicated to you, the President has full faith and confidence in DOD’s measures to protect our troops in all circumstances.

…VCS COMMENT FOR THE RECORD: the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency knew about the Khamisiyah, Iraq chemical munitions dump before the Gulf War started. However, during the mop-up operations after the ground war, no one told the front line combat troops about the ammo dump. The U.S. military demolished it, releasing an unknown amount of sarin and cyclosarin into the air to poison as many as 140,000 U.S. troops with low-level exposures. The Iraqi army didn’t “use” chemical weapons. The U.S. and other nations sold the agents to Iraq and the U.S. blew them up in an enormous “friendly fire” incident.

London, United Kindgom (AP) – Prime Minister Tony Blair’s popularity has slumped amid concern over the Iraq crisis, according to an opinion poll published Monday.

The British prime minister was rated as satisfactory by only 35 percent of respondents to an ICM Survey for The Guardian newspaper. The figure was down from 49 percent a month earlier.

Fifty-five percent said they were dissatisfied, up 12 points from January. The other 10 percent expressed no opinion.

Blair is staking his political future on backing the United States against Iraq, despite considerable opposition from Britons to war without United Nations backing.

An estimated 750,000 peace demonstrators marched in London on Saturday as part of a global anti-war protest. Politicians, trade unionists and some British newspapers said Sunday that Blair will risk his political future if he ignores the protests.

According to the poll, 52 percent of respondents oppose a war with Iraq, up five percentage points from last month. The poll did not indicate if that opposition depended on U.N. backing for military action. Twenty-nine percent said they would support military action, down one point.

Support for Blair’s governing Labor Party fell from 43 percent to 39 percent, according to the survey. Support for the main opposition Conservative Party, however, rose only one percentage point to 31 percent, as it did for the Liberal Democrats, which stood at 22 percent.

ICM interviewed a random sample of 1,003 adults by telephone on Feb. 14-16. The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.

Downing Street [the residence of the Prime Minister] is at panic stations as the full implications of Hans Blix’s inspections report sink in.

The two main US-British arguments in favour of launching a war on Iraq next month – that Saddam currently possesses deployable weapons of mass destruction and poses an immediate or near-term threat to the region and to us – already had few takers before Friday’s UN meeting.

In his peculiarly dispassionate, persuasive way, Blix further undermined and, for many, destroyed the credibility of the Anglo-American case for an early, pre-emptive attack.

A third core argument, favoured by George Bush and blithely reiterated by him in Florida last week – that Saddam is in cahoots with al-Qaida and is somehow linked or even to blame for 9/11 – is not seen as convincing even by those who have espoused it. Downing Street now knows this argument, too, is a definitive non-runner.

Assailed on all sides by unprecedented popular protest, at odds with Europe, outnumbered in the security council, with the Pentagon’s clock inexorably ticking, and rightly worried that an impatient Bush may reject the “UN route”, dish his British ally and press on regardless, Tony Blair has now reached his bottom line: morality.

With his back against the wall, belatedly aware of the depth of his difficulty, and surrounded by the empty shell casings of a defeated polemic, Blair played his last card in Glasgow at the weekend.

Action was a moral imperative, he declared. If Saddam remains in power, he warned emotively, there will be “consequences paid in blood”. The moral case for intervention was overwhelming. Those who opposed it, he implied, were themselves acting immorally.

In many respects, this is an outrageous statement. It reeks of condescension.

In his wisdom, it seems, the prime minister is suggesting that millions of weekend marchers and all those in the European, Arab and Muslim spheres who disagree have failed to think through the ethical ramifications of their stand.

But since Blair can be sure to repeat his moral message in the two or three weeks that remain before Bush is expected to press the button, it must be answered.

How moral is it, to take one aspect, to wreck an inspections process unanimously agreed by the UN?

Blair and Jack Straw endlessly stress the exact terms of resolution 1441. But this document sets no time limit on inspections. It makes no mention of the regime change that Blair now advocates. Nor does 1441’s text authorise the conquest, indefinite occupation and forcible remaking of Iraq under US military auspices.

Exactly how moral is it, as is now the US-British plan in the next fortnight, to gerrymander UN backing for war by buying votes with US financial largesse?

Blair’s new concept of the “unreasonable veto” and the quaint idea of claiming a “moral mandate” from a simple majority UN vote has no base in international law. Nor, for that matter, does the concept of an offensive war, as opposed to collective, defensive action. The US and Britain have no moral right to try to reinterpret and thus subvert the UN charter in this way.

The onus is surely on Blair, not his opponents, to explain the morality of rejecting Blix’s provisional conclusion that his inspections are beginning to work.

It is not “moral” to turn to the “last resort” of violence when Iraq has conceded many of the UN’s demands and when South Africa, for example, is offering its good offices and experience in assuring nuclear disarmament.

The onus is surely also on Blair to show the Vatican and, say, Britain’s Anglican and Muslim leaders, why and on what grounds his moral authority exceeds theirs.

Having made his bid for the high ground, the prime minister has many other dilemmas to clarify. The Iraq crisis has entrenched the Israel-Palestine stalemate.

War will bring further delays to the peace process. But Palestinian children are suffering malnutrition right now. For many, international intervention to secure the occupied territories is a more pressing priority.

Or consider the Kurds. In the event of war, their hard-won autonomy will be under direct threat from a US-sanctioned, Turkish military incursion. Kurds were among the biggest victims of (deeply immoral) US-British military assistance to Saddam in the 1980s.

They were victims again in 1991, with hundreds of thousands displaced. Now it seems they must suffer once more – but this time, for a Blair-defined moral good.

Such questions must all be weighed in the overall balance of good and bad. Likewise, too, the central prop of the Blair case: that intervention is morally justified on humanitarian grounds. There is no doubt, after all, of Saddam’s tyranny, no argument that the Iraqi people are oppressed. It is pointless to dispute the sincerity of Iraqi exiles who insist his overthrow is more important than anything else.

The moral dimension of the Iraq crisis is plain to all. Unfortunately, for a man now mawkishly keen to demonstrate poll-defying “conviction” leadership, there are no absolutely right answers.

Against those who have suffered under Saddam in the past must be set the humanitarian catastrophe that the UN says may leave up to 10 million hungry. The World Health Organisation estimates that 100,000 Iraqis could be casualties and another 400,000 affected by disease and displacement.

Expert Non-Government Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty utter similar warnings – concerns candidly shared by Clare Short. From within Iraq itself, meanwhile, come first-hand accounts of the terror and anger that the prospect of attack elicits.

Yet from the US, at least, comes little but vague promises of minimised civilian casualties and “post-liberation” nation-building. To gauge the value of such pledges, one need only look at Afghanistan

Again, if humanitarian con cern is now the prime motivating factor in international intervention, there are many more urgent candidates, such as Congo, or North Korea, or southern Africa where millions are starving (and misgoverned) right now. On the other hand, it is clear that Iraq is not a Kosovo, where ethnic cleansing was an immediate, urgent horror or a fledgling East Timor, crying out for external assistance.

In truth, perhaps the principal measure of Iraq’s jeopardy is not to be found in present-day humanitarian abuses, but in the depth of Bush’s personal enmity towards Saddam. A prime Blair interest, meanwhile, is maintaining the transatlantic alliance. That is strategically important. But it is hardly a moral necessity.

With so many possible or likely negative consequences, and with US motives and follow-through in doubt, it cannot be reasonably or objectively concluded that war against Iraq is morally preferable to the alternatives.

Nobody advocates doing “nothing” about Iraq, as No 10’s panic-station chief, John Reid, fatuously suggested yesterday. An intensified, permanent UN-led disarmament process, containment and sustained diplomatic pressure to remove Saddam is hardly nothing.

Rather, it is the consensual, common sense and proper way forward. For sure, Bush may scorn such arguments. But others have a moral duty not to aid and abet his irresponsibility.

Like his other arguments, Blair’s “moral” case for war does not convince. It is but another excuse for the inexcusable.

s.tisdall@guardian.co.uk