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THE ROVING EYE
Internal look, imminent
war
By Pepe Escobar
There's
growing indication now that a massive US attack against
Iraq is practically set for January, no matter what is
contained in Iraq's weapons declaration and no matter
what United Nations inspectors find out on the ground.
An ambassador to the UN who insisted on remaining
anonymous assured Asia Times Online that "at any moment
we could be facing an official statement from the White
House saying Iraq is in material breach of Resolution
1441. We are all helpless against it at the UN."
The buzz is intense at the UN regarding
the fabulous photocopying capabilities of the US
government compared to those of the multilateral body. The
US received its instant copy of the mammoth Iraqi
weapons declaration before anyone else - then handed
copies to the other four permanent members of the
Security Council (France, Britain, Russia and China),
all of them nuclear powers. The other 10 rotating
members, all of them non-nuclear powers, were excluded -
and will only get their edited copies by the end of the
week. Syria already has protested loudly against the
discrimination, and along with Norway has demanded
access to the full unedited version. Iraq qualifies the
whole process as "unparalleled banditry".
UN
Security Council Resolution 1441 explicitly states that
the Iraqi declaration should be handed to all the
members of the Security Council - and not only to a
select few. The American rationale for getting
preferential treatment - apart from having the fastest
and safest photocopy machines in the market - is that
the report might contain information that would lead to
the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Off the record, furious UN diplomats tell a
completely different story. They say that extreme American
pressure was applied on Colombian ambassador Alfonso
Valdivieso, who holds the rotating presidency of the
Security Council during the month of December. US Secretary
of State Colin Powell, not by accident, was in Colombia
last week. Powell promised a lot of additional funds
to the Colombian government to fight guerrillas. The
funds, diplomats say, will be readily available in
exchange for the speedy first look at the Iraqi
declaration: the CIA has been examining it since Sunday
night. UN diplomats also say that the Iraqi declaration
lists foreign arms and chemicals suppliers to Iraq - and
inevitably some of those are from the same Big Five
nuclear powers who may authorize a strike against Iraq.
As much as an internal look at what's
really happening at the UN reveals the US administration
strong-arming the multilateral body to accelerate its
unilateral quest for a smoking gun, Operation Internal Look
in Qatar reveals the definitive US positioning for
another upcoming high-tech, zero-casualty war won by the
3Cs: command, control and communications.
Internal Look, currently taking place at
the As-Sayliyah army base in Qatar, and supposed to end
on December 17, is a war game testing a new, US$58
million portable command center for the US Central
Command. Internal Look is a sort of video game played in
laptop heaven. General Tommy Franks - who will be
the Schwarzkopf character in the upcoming replay of
1991's Desert Storm - leads the show, with a cast of
1,000 American and British operatives. There are no troops
or mock battles in Internal Look, rather a thorough test
of extremely sophisticated communications with
other command posts and most of all with Central
Command (CENTCOM) headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base
in Tampa, Florida. After the war game, Tommy Franks
will "preserve his flexibility", according to
CENTCOM officials. This means he can come back to Florida
or stay in the Gulf for good while organizing the US
offensive.
The success of Internal
Look will assure that the war can be formally launched
in January. In a slow build-up since March, according to
the CENTCOM's latest figures, 60,000 American
soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen are already
positioned in the Gulf or nearby, plus 200 fighter jets.
Twelve thousand soldiers are in Kuwait - which in effect
has been converted into a US armed camp. Twenty-five
percent of the area of the whole emirate is now occupied
by American military personnel and equipment.
Desert Spring war games started already
in November - involving an array of F-16s, Apache
attack helicopters, M1 Abrams battle tanks and Bradley
armored troop transporters. Every day, most of these
thousands of US soldiers, in chemical warfare gear, practice
assaults on heavily defended "enemy" positions armed with
Soviet-era weaponry, in the very same desert that rolls
out all the way to Baghdad. This is the type of fighting
the US may face in a ground assault against Iraq.
The US Army has 24 Apache attack helicopters and
enough heavy equipment in Kuwait for two armored
brigades. By the end of the year, five aircraft carrier
groups could be positioned to strike Iraq: the USS Harry
S Truman, which sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, last
week; the USS George Washington (which the Truman was
scheduled to replace in the eastern Mediterranean), the
USS Abraham Lincoln operating in the Gulf, the USS
Constellation, and the USS Kitty Hawk, sailing from
Japan.
According to Brookings Institution
experts, it would take from eight to 12 weeks to deploy
a force of 250,000 troops. But Pentagon officials
already have started saying the American - and British -
contingents in place by January would be substantial
enough to begin an offensive, while extra personnel and
equipment could be quickly flown in to sustain a massive
operation capable of involving around 250,000 troops.
The question of airfields remains crucial. Saudi
Arabia has 31 military airfields - and, as has been
widely reported, will offer none to the US. Most
of the smaller Gulf states have at least two airfields
with long runways. The Emirates, for instance, has
eight. According to military experts, the US needs at
least 15, ideally 20, to launch a successful air war.
Kuwait may seem like an obvious
US ally: although it officially mended fences with
Iraq, it definitely does not trust Saddam Hussein's pledges
of no more invasions. But the case of Qatar
is really intriguing: a US ally in the Arab world and the
only prototype so far of the Bush "regime change"
doctrine. Qatar is unique in the region in terms of
being a relatively open society practicing religious
moderation and press freedom.
Qatar is a very small desert kingdom and home to
only 750,000 people, more than two-thirds of them
immigrant workers from South Asia, Southeast Asia and
the Arab world. It is not an oil-dependent emirate. In
the immense North Field - which advances across the
Persian Gulf towards Iran - Qatar holds one of the
largest gas reserves in the world.
Officially, Qatar follows ultra-strict and intolerant Wahhabism
- just like Saudi Arabia. But with a tremendous
difference: There is religious freedom, women are
allowed to vote, there's no police paranoia, and alcohol
is freely available, as well as education, health care
and housing. Per capita income is $17,500 - higher than
many countries in the European Union.
Since 1995
Qatar has been ruled by the very liberal Emir Hamad bin
Khalifa al-Thani. All over the world, Qatar is basically
known as the home of Al Jazeera, the network that
relocated from Saudi Arabia in 1996 with a start-up loan
of $150 million offered by the emir himself.
But not many people know that Qatar
also has allowed the US to build Al-Udeid, an enormous
air base. The US CENTCOM in fact left Tampa,
Florida, and relocated to Al-Udeid when more than 600
CENTCOM top operatives arrived in Qatar last month for what
has now materialized as Internal Look. Historians may
one day note the irony that the nerve center for
"regime change" is located in the same Arab kingdom accused
by US hawks of broadcasting the propaganda of deadly enemy
al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
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