Veterans for Common Sense

Munich, Germany (Reuters) – Germany and France are working on a new plan to try to avert war in Iraq that would compel Baghdad to admit thousands of U.N. troops to enforce disarmament and tighter sanctions, a magazine said on Saturday.

A German government spokesman confirmed Berlin and Paris were working together to find a peaceful alternative to war with Iraq, but would not provide any details of the efforts.

Germany’s leading news magazine Der Spiegel said the idea had originated in the office of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Berlin and Paris had been working on the details of the initiative in secret talks since the beginning of the year.

Asked about the joint proposals at a major security summit in the southern German city of Munich, German Defense Minister Peter Struck declined to comment, noting only that Schroeder planned to address the German parliament on Iraq on Thursday.

A French Foreign Ministry spokesman declined to comment on the report in Der Spiegel, but French diplomatic sources said: “We are discussing with Security Council members what additional measures could be introduced to bolster U.N. inspections.”

French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told the Munich conference Paris believed inspections had proved more effective than the Gulf War of 1991 in disarming Iraq, but did not rule out military action as a last resort to make Baghdad cooperate.

“That’s why France has proposed reinforcing the means given to inspectors, to reinforce the number of inspectors,” she said.

In an advance copy ahead of publication on Sunday, Der Spiegel said Berlin and Paris wanted to publish their proposal in the next few days before weapons inspectors in Iraq report back to the U.N. Security Council on Friday.

Schroeder, who has angered Washington with his opposition to any war with Iraq, would discuss the idea at the weekend with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Der Spiegel said. France would probably take over driving the initiative forward and use it as a basis for a new Security Council resolution proposal.

Initial reactions from Russia, China and European Union president Greece were positive, the magazine said, while Pope John Paul offered German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer support for the initiative at talks in the Vatican on Friday.

Germany and France had not consulted Washington or its European allies in London, Madrid and Rome, the magazine said.

In what the magazine said was a foretaste of the plan, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed intensifying weapons inspections and offered French reconnaissance planes to support them this week after Secretary of State Colin Powell presented new evidence of Baghdad’s alleged weapons programs.

U.N. PROTECTORATE

Der Spiegel said the initiative, which it said had been dubbed “Project Mirage,” included the following proposals:

— the some 150,000 U.S. troops already deployed to the Gulf should stay in place to force Baghdad to cooperate and be ready to invade if it breaches the new proposed U.N. resolution

— Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be forced to admit thousands of armed U.N. troops to oversee intensified weapons inspections in the whole country as well as full disarmament, creating a de facto “U.N. protectorate”

— the number of weapons inspectors should be tripled from the current 100 operating in Iraq

— the no-fly zone over northern and southern Iraq should be extended to cover the whole country and French, German and U.S. reconnaissance planes should be allowed to patrol the skies

— a permanent U.N. coordinator of arms inspections in Iraq could be appointed

— sanctions should be made more focused to clamp down on oil smuggling by Iraq’s neighbors and tighten export controls

— a special U.N. court should be established to oversee infringements of the new resolution and human rights abuses

The magazine said the initiative could help Schroeder out of the corner he seemed to have backed himself into over Iraq, risking international isolation if he sticks to his anti-war stance but political suicide at home if he changes course.

He could sell the proposal as a last-ditch bid to avert war, allowing him to swing behind any military action if Baghdad failed to go along with the plan, it said.

Germany and France pledged last month to cooperate closely over Iraq in the U.N. Security Council, which is due to hear a new report from arms inspectors on February 14. France is one of the Council’s five veto-holding permanent members.

President Bush has said the United Nations must soon decide whether to back his demand that Iraq abandon its alleged chemical, biological and nuclear programs or be disarmed by force. Iraq denies having any such weapons.

The Call to Peace from Gulf War Heros

No one can tell John Peters and John Nicol anything about the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

They suffered grievously for fighting against the Iraqi despot in the war to free Kuwait.

They were shot down, captured, beaten and tortured. Yet yesterday, as another 100 British planes were ordered to the Gulf, both former airmen spoke out against waging a new war on Iraq.

Like others who have actually taken part in military conflict, they understand it is necessary but must be the last resort.

And we are not yet at that stage in the struggle to control Saddam. He may want to possess weapons of mass destruction, he may want to attack other nations, but there is no evidence he is anywhere near being able to.

That is why so many former military men have come out against war at the moment. Like John Peters and John Nicol, they don’t believe action is necessary – and think it might be dangerous.

We know the British generals are dubious about invading Iraq. Their opposite numbers in the US are likely to feel the same.

As ever, the politicians who order in troops do so from a position of comfort and safety. Neither George W. Bush nor Tony Blair have personal experience of warfare.

They should listen to the men who do.

In the wake of Colin Powell’s bellicose presentation to the UN on Wednesday, the US media’s story line has significantly hardened in insisting war is inevitable. Now it is presented as a matter of days, not even weeks.

From the start of Bush’s march to war last September, the US media has contemptuously dismissed all opposition from “Old Europe” as irrelevant and certain to collapse under intense and “irresistable” diplomatic and economic pressure from George Bush and Colin Powell. UN Resolution 1441, which resulted from weeks of intense negotiations to prevent “automatic” war following renewed inspections, was falsely presented as a complete capitulation by Europe to Bush’s unstoppable will.

Since Powell spoke, the US media has systematically dismissed all of the statements by European leaders. According to the US media, the corrupt French will support Bush after the US makes a side deal to give French oil companies a small stake in Iraq’s oil. Germany, which is hopelessly controlled by socialists and greens, is now no more important than Libya or Cuba.

Naturally, Jacques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder are not pleased at being dismissed, and as the week progressed they became ever more emphatic in their insistence on further inspections. But the US media wants war now, and doesn’t want to hear these tired old objections. So whatever European leaders say is simply shouted down by US leaders, as evidenced by the latest dismissive NY Times headline: “Rumsfeld Rebukes U.N. and NATO on Approach to Baghdad.”

(It goes without saying that public opinion is completely irrelevant. The fact that 20,000 Germans protested outside the hall in which Rumsfeld issued his “rebuke” is barely considered worthy of mention. And the fact that MILLIONS of people around the world are preparing for the LARGEST anti-war protest in HISTORY on February 15 is systematically scrubbed from all reports.)

But suddenly this story line is about to change. Germany and France – dismissed only days ago by Donald Rumsfeld as “Old Europe” – have come up with a comprehensive plan to avoid war by sending thousands of UN troops to take effective control of Iraq.

The plan was revealed by Germany’s leading weekly magazine, Der Spiegel. While the plan is still in draft form, the plan is ambitious and serious. and in order to counter expected US opposition, Germany and France have enlisted Russia, China, the European Union, and even Pope John Paul. Instead of collapsing in disunity, “Old Europe” is on the verge of uniting all of the world’s secondary powers in direct and firm opposition to Bush’s War.

Will Bush welcome this peace plan? Of course not – Bush has made it abundantly clear that he wants war, no matter what. Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice have never had a moment’s hesitation about war, and Colin Powell has discarded whatever small hesitations he once had. (1)

Still, if Bush is going to dismiss the German-French plan, he will have to offer the world a reason. But what possible reason could he offer? After all, Bush himself has repeatedly insisted that the UN had to demonstrate its “relevance” by taking effective action to eliminate any threat posed by Iraq.

It is now time for the US media to change its story line. With this plan, the UN has proved its “relevance.” If a majority of the UN Security Council coalesces around this plan, Bush’s forced march to war will be forced to a screeching halt.

The stakes here are larger than Iraq. The question now before the world is whether George Bush will himself support the “relevance” of the United Nations, or whether Bush has truly transformed the US into a “new Rome” that is determined to rule the world through imperial might. If Bush launches an aggressive war in direct defiance of a majority of the UN Security Council, he will destroy the UN and the entire post-war order.

The world is at a tipping point, swinging on the fulcrum between the rule of international law and the raw assertion of US imperialism. The stakes for the future of the world could not be higher.

Will the US media tell the people? Or will Americans be the last to know?

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(1)The reaction from Karl Rove was immediate – and furious. Moments after the Der Spiegel story broke, Thom Shanker of the NY Times got a call from Rove:

The influential Der Spiegel weekly, in advance copies released today, reported that France and Germany were considering a plan to deploy thousands of United Nations peacekeepers and hundreds more weapons inspectors to prevent military conflict in Iraq.
Livid American officials denounced the fact that they first heard of the possible plan from reporters.

“That’s not the way to have a winning hand with the United States,” said a senior American official. In fact, the official said, Mr. Rumsfeld asked the German defense minister, Peter Struck, about the report, and was told, “We’re not ready to talk yet.” The American official indicated that the United States would not support the plan, citing the failure of United Nations forces to prevent massacres in Bosnia.

Of course, the analogy between Bosnia and Iraq is ridiculous. Bosnia was plunging into a civil war, with rival ethnic groups murdering each other. Iraq’s rival ethnic groups are being kept at peace by Saddam’s brutal rule. The only event that would trigger civil war would be a US invasion and overthrow of Saddam!
Secondly, the U.N. sent a small number of unarmed monitors to Bosnia, not armed soldiers. They were a purely symbolic presence, not a military force. The Franco-German plan calls for a large force of armed soldiers.

As for “preventing massacres” in Iraq, US forces have a dismal record. In Gulf War I, US forces under George Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell pulled out of Iraq after 100 hours, leaving Saddam in power but severely weakened. Bush I believed Iraqi troops would overthrow Saddam in anger; when that didn’t happen, Bush’s CIA encouraged Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to rebel. They did – and they were massacred by Saddam.

Finally, Republicans vehemently opposed Bill Clinton’s decision to send US forces to Bosnia, and tried repeatedly to cut off funding for the operation. So it is more than a little hypocritical for Republicans to argue that US forces should not have been used then, but absolutely must be used now.

Leaked Secret Report in UK Rejects Iraqi al-Qaeda Link

Bin Laden ‘does not agree with Saddam’s regime’

There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network, according to an official British intelligence report seen by BBC News.

The classified document, written by defence intelligence staff three weeks ago, says there has been contact between the two in the past.

His [Bin Laden’s] aims are in ideological conflict with present day Iraq

Leaked intelligence document

But it assessed that any fledgling relationship foundered due to mistrust and incompatible ideologies.

That conclusion flatly contradicts one of the main charges laid against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by the United States and Britain – that he has cultivated contacts with the group blamed for the 11 September attacks.

The report emerges even as Washington was calling Saddam a liar for denying, in a television interview with former Labour MP and minister Tony Benn, that he had any links to al-Qaeda.

Peace prospects

It also comes on the day US Secretary of State Colin Powell goes to the United Nations Security Council to make the case that Iraq has failed to live up to the demands of the world community.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is also ratcheting up the rhetoric in the ongoing crisis over Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, saying the prospect of a peaceful outcome was “diminishing” by the day.

He said he could not believe the Iraqi regime would be “this stupid” not to disarm.

The defence intelligence staff document, seen by BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, is classified Top Secret and was sent to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior members of the government.

It says al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden views Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath party as running contrary to his religion, calling it an “apostate regime”.

“His aims are in ideological conflict with present day Iraq,” it says.

Gilligan says that in recent days intelligence sources have told the BBC there is growing disquiet at the way their work is being politicised to support the case for war on Iraq.

He said: “This almost unprecedented leak may be a shot across the politicians’ bows.”

Iraqi co-operation

Mr Straw insisted that intelligence had shown that the Iraqi regime appeared to be allowing a permissive environment “in which al-Qaeda is able to operate”.

“Certainly we have some evidence of links between al-Qaeda and various people in Iraq,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

But he conceded: “What we don’t know, and the prime minister and I have made it very clear, is the extent of those links.

“What we also know, however, is that the Iraqi regime have been up to their necks in the pursuit of terrorism generally.”

He added: “The use of force to enforce the will of the UN, now, I’m afraid, is more probable, but it is not inevitable and the choice essentially is one for Saddam Hussein and his regime.”

French President Jacques Chirac, as he met Mr Blair on Tuesday, called for UN weapons inspectors to be given more time, saying “there is still much to be done in the way of disarmament by peaceful means”.

But Mr Straw said “endless” calls for more time were “futile” and risked being a “cop-out”.

Both the US and UK are pushing for a second UN Security Council resolution soon, which could authorise force against Iraq.

Colin Powell has said the dossier of evidence against Iraq he is presenting to the Security Council will be “a straightforward, sober and compelling demonstration” that Baghdad is deceiving UN weapons inspectors and failing to disarm.

TV interview

Saddam Hussein himself denied on Tuesday having any weapons of mass destruction.

He told Mr Benn in the interview broadcast by Channel 4 News: “These weapons do not come in small pills that you can hide in your pocket.

“These are weapons of mass destruction and it is easy to work out if Iraq has them or not.”

Denying any connection with al-Qaeda, he said: “If we had a relationship with al-Qaeda and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it.”

UK War Dossier a Sham, Say Experts

Downing Street [the residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom] was last night plunged into acute international embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British government’s latest dossier on Iraq – allegedly based on “intelligence material” – were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old.

Amid charges of “scandalous” plagiarism on the night when Tony Blair attempted to rally support for the US-led campaign against Saddam Hussein, Whitehall’s dismay was compounded by the knowledge that the disputed document was singled out for praise by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN security council on Wednesday.

Citing the British dossier, entitled Iraq – its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation in front of a worldwide television audience Mr Powell said: “I would call my colleagues’ attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed… which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.”

But on Channel 4 News last night it was revealed that four of the report’s 19 pages had been copied – with only minor editing and a few insertions – from the internet version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi which appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September.

Though that was not the only textual embarrassment No 10 seemed determined to tough it out last night.

Dismissing the gathering controversy as the latest example of media obsession with spin, officials insisted it in no way undermines the underlying truth of the dossier, whose contents had been re-checked with British intelligence sources. “The important thing is that it is accurate,” said one source.

What Whitehall may not grasp is the horror with which unacknowledged borrowing of material – the crime of plagiarism – is regarded in American academic and media circles, even though successive US governments have a poor record of misleading their own citizens on foreign policy issues at least since the Vietnam war.

On a special edition of BBC Newsnight, filmed before a critical audience last night, Mr Blair stressed that he was willing to forgo popularity to warn voters of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction: “I may be wrong, but I do believe it.”

With trust a critical element in the battle to woo a sceptical public the first sentence of the No 10 document merely states, somewhat cryptically, that it “draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material”.

But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, told Channel 4: “I found it quite startling when I realised that I’d read most of it before.”

The content of six more pages relies heavily on articles by Sean Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane’s Intelligence Review in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged.

The document, as posted on Downing Street’s website at the end of January, also accidentally named four Whitehall officials who had worked on it: P Hamill, J Pratt, A Blackshaw and M Khan. It was reposted on February 3 with the first three names deleted.

“Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services,” Dr Rangwala said, “it indicates that the UK really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq’s internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data.”

Evidence of an electronic cut-and-paste operation by Whitehall officials can be found in the way the dossier preserves textual quirks from its original sources. One sentence in Dr Marashi’s article includes a misplaced comma in referring to Iraq’s head of military intelligence during the 1991 Gulf war. The same sentence in Downing Street’s report contains the same misplaced comma.

A Downing Street spokesman declined to say why the report’s public sources had not been acknowledged. “We said that it draws on a number of sources, including intelligence. It speaks for itself.”

Dr Marashi, a research associate at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said no one had contacted him before lifting the material.

But on the regular edition of Newsnight he later gave some comfort to No 10. “In my opinion, the UK document overall is accurate even though there are a few minor cosmetic changes. The only inaccuracies in the UK document were that they maybe inflated some of the numbers of these intelligence agencies,” he said.

Explaining the more journalistic changes inserted into his work by Whitehall he added: “Being an academic paper, I tried to soften the language.

“For example, in one of my documents, I said that they support organisations in what Iraq considers hostile regimes, whereas the UK document refers to it as ‘supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes’.

“The primary documents I used for this article are a collection of two sets of documents, one taken from Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq – around 4m documents – as well as 300,000 documents left by Iraqi security services in Kuwait. After that, I have been following events in the Iraqi security services for the last 10 years.”

Iraq’s decision last night to let weapons inspectors interview one of its scientists for the first time without government “minders” signalled that Baghdad may be bending under international pressure.

But diplomats will be trying to determine over the next few days whether it is a token gesture or a real shift away from what they describe as Iraq’s “catch us if you can” approach to inspections. Hours before the announcement, a Foreign Office source in London signalled that this was the kind of change of heart that Iraq would have to make to avoid war.

Washington, February 7, 2003 — The Bush administration planned to increase its terrorist threat level to “orange” — or high risk — on Friday, reflecting concerns among U.S. security officials that terrorists are planning a “major attack” as early as next week, sources told NBC News.

The decision comes a day after the State Department warned Americans abroad of the threat of new terrorist attacks using chemical or biological weapons.

According to a recent CBS news report, the Pentagon plans to strike Bagdhad with 300 cruise missiles in early March, to be followed twenty-four-hours later by 300 more. American land forces will ring Bagdhad, holding it under siege while tank detachments probe into the city to engage Saddam’s praetorian guard—this according to informed military analysts.

We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons against the Iraqis should they attack our forces with chemical weapons, Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, recently warned. The Pentagon says it might use nuclear weapons in any case, to blow up deep Iraqi bunkers.

These leaks and statements may be a form of “psy-ops,” calculated to foment a military coup to topple Saddam Hussein. If they do indicate how we will “win,” however, then Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute may be conservative in estimating that Gulf War II could inflict from several to twenty-five thousand Iraqi civilian casualties and from several hundred to five thousand U.S. casualties.

“The nightmare scenario,” retired General Joseph Hoar, the former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate committee in September, “is that six Iraqi Republican Guard divisions and six heavy divisions with several hundred artillery pieces defend the city of Bagdhad. The result would be high casualties on both sides as well as in the civilian community. U.S. forces would certainly prevail but at what cost … as the rest of the world watches while we bomb and have artillery rounds go off in densely populated Iraqi neighborhoods?” A leaked UN contingency planning report predicted that as many as 500,000 Iraqi civilians could be injured or have their health impaired by city fighting.

This humanitarian disaster will be incalculably worse if Saddam uses chemical weapons against his own people, either purposely or inadvertently while trying to use them against us. He has used them on his people before and, facing death in the Battle of Bagdhad and wanting to raise the political cost of victory for the U.S., some strategists fear he might do so again.

If the Arab “street” believes that the Mossad was behind September 11, they will accept the jihadi propaganda that the U.S., not Saddam, gassed Iraqi civilians. The U.S. would share moral responsibility for this infamy, a foreseen result of our attack.

The rubble of “victory” will still be smoking when the U.S. taxpayer inherits the burdens of occupation. In a comprehensive analysis of the economic costs of war, William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, gives a range of bad news, starting from $100 billion, if all goes well, to as much as $1.9 trillion if nothing goes well and the occupation drags on. U.S. troops never seem to come home—they remain in Germany and Japan fifty-seven years after the end of World War II and ten years after the end of the Cold War; they remain in Korea fifty years after the end of the Korean War; they remain in Saudi Arabia ten years after the end of the Gulf War; they remain in Bosnia five years after the end of the Yugoslav civil war. And they could remain in Iraq for years, targets of terrorist attack and proof of “U.S. imperialism.”

Pentagon idealists bridle at that characterization. They see the occupation making Iraq the center of democratic contagion in the autocratic Middle East. One commentator has termed this “democratic imperialism.” Thomas Friedman of The New York Times imagines the “seeds” of democracy spreading out from Iraq and over time ending the jihadi terrorism against the West produced by the autocratic regimes.

The future, then, would seem to be a race between democracy and imperialism. Which will sprout first, Friedman’s democratic seeds or the seeds of anti-imperialism? People interpret the present in the light of their past. The Arab Middle East has no experience of democracy but it has more than a hundred years’ experience of Western imperialism. Friedman’s seeds must push themselves up against the weight of history and memory. “I doubt you could find one person who would agree that the Americans are coming just for the sake of the region and they want to bring democracy,” Khaled M. Batarfi, a Saudi Arabian newspaper editor, told The New York Times last week. “We think it’s oil. We think it’s Israel. We think it’s control. They want a police station in Baghdad like they have in Kabul.”

While democracy is germinating in Iraq, U.S. forces will be searching for evidence of weapons of mass destruction to retroactively justify our attack. What if they don’t find any, or only a remnant decaying supply of no military utility? What if Saddam destroyed them, and his stonewalling of the UN weapons’ inspectors was a bluff that backfired—by provoking the U.S. attack that the bluff was meant to deter?

What if, as Senator Richard Lugar asked last summer, the successor Iraqi regime wants to preserve Saddam’s weapons and hides them from us? Or what if, as the CIA predicted last fall, Saddam, concluding that a U.S. attack was inevitable, gave quantities of chemical and biological weapons to terrorists to attack the United States? In that case George W. Bush will have killed who knows how many human beings for worse than nothing, making his war not only a crime but a blunder, potentially the most catastrophic in American history.

As an organization representing mainstream Americans, veterans of the 1991 Gulf war, and grassroots activists concerned about the humanitarian and economic consequences of an attack on Iraq, EPIC has several critical concerns that the President must still address before war.

First, there will be great human and economic costs. The humanitarian consequences of a war in Iraq would be so grave as to result in the loss of countless Iraqi lives and the increased threat to Americans at home and abroad. According to an internal planning document prepared by a UN task force (Dec. 2002), 500,000 Iraqi casualties and upwards of 10 million Iraqis in need of immediate humanitarian aid could result from war. Economic costs of a U.S. war on Iraq could exceed $1 trillion (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dec. 2002).

Second, disarmament in Iraq could take years. The disarmament of South Africa, routinely cited by the Bush administration as resoundingly successful, took two full years to accomplish. UN weapons inspectors have only been back inside Iraq for less than three months. If the U.S. is truly invested in the UN disarmament process, why strike militarily and thereby halt inspections when they have only just begun?

Finally, the Iraq/al-Qaeda link is weak. The administration’s claim of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda rests heavily on reports that a Jordanian al-Qaeda member, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, received medical treatment in Baghdad. Yet there is no evidence that al-Zarqawi received anything other than medical treatment in Iraq.

While Secretary Powell has not proven an imminent threat, he has demonstrated the success of aggressive weapons inspections in disarming Iraq. During his speech, Mr. Powell cited several instances of Iraq moving weapons. This only proves the UN has disrupted Iraq’s weapons program, and that continued inspections can be expected to bring about further disarmament and destruction of weapons. If anything, the Secretary’s presentation is an argument for reinforcing the current inspection regime, not for stopping it.

“A preemptive invasion of Iraq would constitute a repudiation of the very system of international law that we are compelling Iraq to abide by. The inspection process guided by the United Nations is the best way to ensure Iraq is disarmed and the world is secure. No proof has been given that Iraq constitutes an imminent threat to the U.S. Military action at this time would not only be illegal, it would destabilize international order,” says Erik Gustafson, the Executive Director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center.

For further information please contact:

Erik Gustafson, Executive Director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, 202-486-8231

Susan Wright, Biological weapons and policy expert, 734-763-1194

Roger Normand, Expert on international humanitarian law, 718-237-9145 x12

Charles Sheehan-Miles, Gulf War combat veteran, co-founder Vets for Common Sense, 703-668-0353

-END-

Mr. Powell’s most convincing evidence was of efforts by Iraq to shield chemical or biological weapons programs from United Nations inspectors. The intercepted conversations of Republican Guard officers that he played, in which they urgently seek to hide equipment or to destroy communications in advance of inspections, offered stark evidence that Mr. Hussein has not only failed to cooperate with the inspectors, as Resolution 1441 requires him to, but has actively sought to thwart them. Mr. Powell also offered new evidence that Al Qaeda terrorists have found safe harbor in Iraq, but the links between Baghdad and the terror network seemed more tenuous than his other charges.

Mr. Powell’s presentation was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime. It may not have produced a “smoking gun,” but it left little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one.

In response to Mr. Powell’s presentation, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, China and Russia called for extending and strengthening the inspection program in Iraq. The French minister, Dominique de Villepin, proposed expanding the number of inspectors and increasing the pressure on Iraq to comply. With the senior inspectors due to make their next report to the Security Council next week, Iraq still has a chance to change course.

President Bush’s decision to dispatch Mr. Powell to present the administration’s case before the Security Council showed a wise concern for international opinion. Since Mr. Bush’s own address to the U.N. last September, he has kept faith with his commitment to work through the Security Council. As the crisis builds, he should make every possible effort to let the council take the lead.

The Security Council, the American people and the rest of the world have an obligation to study Mr. Powell’s presentation very closely and very seriously. Because the consequences of war are so terrible, and the cost of rebuilding Iraq so great, the United States cannot afford to confront Iraq without broad international support.

Australian Senate passes Iraq no confidence motion

Canberra, Australia (ABC) – The Federal Senate has just passed a motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister’s handling of the growing Iraq crisis.

The vote was carried 34 to 31 with the support of Labor, the Democrats, the Greens and Independent senators.

The Federal Government was also formally censured.

It follows an 11-hour debate over Australia’s possible involvement in a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq and the forward deployment of troops.

Debate is continuing in the House of Representatives.