South Australian HUMANIST POST EXTRACT 3

(As printed in the April 1998 issue of the S.A. Humanist Post) OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR ! The Invasion of Kuwait by Iraq quite rightly aroused the rest of the world, or a lot of it, to agree to a United Nations force to oust the Iraqi army and re-instate the deposed regime, no matter how undemocratic and despotic it had been. The military build-up was immense, and the assault that followed not only destroyed the Iraqi war capabilities and expelled them from the territory they had occupied, but brought death and destruction to Bagdad and other cities. Allied casualties were minimal: the thousands killed by bombing were labelled "collateral damage". The United Nations forces made no attempt to penetrate Enemy territory or depose its government. The treaty that followed the conflict was a strange concoction of no-fly zones; an embargo on oil exports, Iraq's only source of income, an embargo on most imports, and an agreement that United Nations Inspectors would search for and destroy "weapons of mass destruction". Six and more years on the military dictatorship of Iraq is still there; UN inspectors are still searching for the weapons they believe still exist somewhere, and the crippling sanctions remain. It is estimated that up to 1.2 million children have died from malnutrition and lack of medicines since sanctions were imposed. Small wonder that the Iraqis have wanted to bring to an end the economic starvation. The United States reply was a massive, by any standards, build-up of a military force in the Persian Gulf for an aerial assault on a small dessert country. This time the United States found that friends and supporters were few and hard to find: Britain's Tony Blair and our own John Howard and our small neighbour across the Tasman. In their efforts, very successful, to convince the American people of the rightness of another assaulton Iraq a defence spokesman appeared on television with a bag of sugar telling viewers that Iraq had that much and more of a deadly biological weapon that could destroy goodness knows how many million Americans. Since then politicians, American and Australian, media commentators and columnists have prattled on about biological and germ warfare, anthrax and all the rest. No one seemed to ask or suggest how these weapons could be delivered and activated. At the time of the Gulf war a French military writer commenting on the huge military build-up, suggested that a couple of army brigades with air and armour support could have driven up the road and taken Bagdad in a few days. Even then, by European standards, Iraq was a very poor country, oil its only export, with a GNP rather less than that of Portugal, Western Europe's poorest country. Years of sanctions have reduced that country to absolute poverty with a military capability that would be minimal by any standards. That the Australian Government, and opposition and so many people here should be willing to go along with the US in this conflict is more than deplorable. Need we ever again wonder how in the past countries went to war for the silliest of reasons. President Clinton constantly used the word crisis, echoed by our own John Howard. The crisis was home-made but in the meantime there is a real crisis just north of us. One of the world's largest countries is in economic meltdown, and its burning forests are covering much of South East Asia in a pall of smoke. The money wasted in the military build-up in the Gulf could have been put to much better use. Tom Goodwin.