I barely got my last dispatch about defecting insiders off before John Brown, a veteran State Department official and at the moment diplomat-in-residence at Georgetown University in Washington, wrote a letter of resignation to Colin Powell, which, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, said in part:
“I am joining my colleague John Brady Kiesling in submitting my resignation from the Foreign Service – effective immediately – because I cannot in good conscience support President Bush’s war plans against IraqThroughout the globe the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of forceThe president’s disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American centuryI joined the Foreign Service because I love our country. Respectfully, Mr. Secretary, I am now bringing this calling to a close, with a heavy heart but for the same reason that I embraced it.”
In the meantime, the stock market took an almost two hundred point dive, oil prices hit a two-year high and the Wall Street Journal reported that Chevron Texaco announced it had stopped loading crude oil from Iraqi ports for fear of war. “No refiner is going to keep buying Iraqi crude and hope the missiles don’t fly,” said a company spokesman. “This is strictly a business-driven economic decision.” Amid all this, and a threatened Russian veto to go with the French one at the UN as well as ratcheting pressure on Tony Blair in England, there was more desperate foot-shuffling about UN resolution dates and deadlines at the UN.
This war now seems like a beat-the-clock race against the utter collapse of the “coalition of the willing.” We are now being ruled by some of the greatest gamblers in history. They are ready to stake their all, including the economy and their political fate, on an Iraqi war in which everything must happen as if in a fantasy scenario for anything to work out right.
In the meantime, the drumbeat about “disarming” Saddam continues. Below you’ll find three pieces on weapons of mass, or massive, destruction. Military analyst William Arkin, a careful, dot-the-i’s reporter on military affairs, asked a most interesting question in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times opinion page — if we’re going to war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, where are those weapons? For all the trees that have been sacrificed to press coverage of Saddam’s WMD capability (and he certainly had one), there has been remarkably little good reporting on the subject. I’ve seen almost nothing on the real capabilities of these weapons. Could a scud filled with sarin or anthrax and sent to Tel Aviv actually deliver such horror weapons in a meaningful way? Who knows? Not I, not from reading our newspapers. Certainly, bio-weapons have proved difficult to deliver effectively. And what if it turned out that Saddam no longer had significant stocks of chemical or bio-weapons?
By the way, just to beat an increasingly dead horse, the only bio-weaponry attack of significance is no longer even mentioned in the media in this country. What happened to the anthrax killer(s) investigation? A handful of people actually died from those attacks and the weaponized anthrax almost certainly came out of the U.S. weapons labs. Is there no paper in America ready to assign a team of reporters to do an update?
Finally, whether Saddam does or doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the United States has evidently based its war strategy — “shock and awe” — on weapons of massive destruction to be used in urban areas. As Paul Rogers, another sober analyst from www.openDemocracy.net reports, MOAB, a staggeringly powerful, nearly-subnuclear bomb is now in the American arsenal. It is about to be very publicly tested here in order, as CBS radio news said last night, to “rattle” the Iraqi leadership. The idea that in the year 2003 we are even considering delivering massive explosive blows to urban areas and that we call such arms “precision” weaponry seems like a mockery to me.
And, of course, the Bush administration is hot on the trail of mini-nuclear weapons that could be added to our arsenal and used in our future “rogue” wars. James Sterngold in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle Insight section reminds us, based on a just-released secret Vietnam era study of the uses of such weapons, that this is truly the path of folly — and, as we’ve already learned, via North Korea and possibly Iran, the path of proliferation. Tom
This war now seems like a beat-the-clock race against the utter collapse of the “coalition of the willing.” We are now being ruled by some of the greatest gamblers in history. They are ready to stake their all, including the economy and their political fate, on an Iraqi war in which everything must happen as if in a fantasy scenario for anything to work out right.
In the meantime, the drumbeat about “disarming” Saddam continues. Below you’ll find three pieces on weapons of mass, or massive, destruction. Military analyst William Arkin, a careful, dot-the-i’s reporter on military affairs, asked a most interesting question in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times opinion page — if we’re going to war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, where are those weapons? For all the trees that have been sacrificed to press coverage of Saddam’s WMD capability (and he certainly had one), there has been remarkably little good reporting on the subject. I’ve seen almost nothing on the real capabilities of these weapons. Could a scud filled with sarin or anthrax and sent to Tel Aviv actually deliver such horror weapons in a meaningful way? Who knows? Not I, not from reading our newspapers. Certainly, bio-weapons have proved difficult to deliver effectively. And what if it turned out that Saddam no longer had significant stocks of chemical or bio-weapons?
By the way, just to beat an increasingly dead horse, the only bio-weaponry attack of significance is no longer even mentioned in the media in this country. What happened to the anthrax killer(s) investigation? A handful of people actually died from those attacks and the weaponized anthrax almost certainly came out of the U.S. weapons labs. Is there no paper in America ready to assign a team of reporters to do an update?
Finally, whether Saddam does or doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the United States has evidently based its war strategy — “shock and awe” — on weapons of massive destruction to be used in urban areas. As Paul Rogers, another sober analyst from www.openDemocracy.net reports, MOAB, a staggeringly powerful, nearly-subnuclear bomb is now in the American arsenal. It is about to be very publicly tested here in order, as CBS radio news said last night, to “rattle” the Iraqi leadership. The idea that in the year 2003 we are even considering delivering massive explosive blows to urban areas and that we call such arms “precision” weaponry seems like a mockery to me.
And, of course, the Bush administration is hot on the trail of mini-nuclear weapons that could be added to our arsenal and used in our future “rogue” wars. James Sterngold in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle Insight section reminds us, based on a just-released secret Vietnam era study of the uses of such weapons, that this is truly the path of folly — and, as we’ve already learned, via North Korea and possibly Iran, the path of proliferation. Tom
A Hazy Target
Before going to war over weapons of mass destruction, shouldn’t we be sure Iraq has them?
By William M. Arkin
The Los Angeles Times
March 9, 2003SOUTH POMFRET, Vt — For all their differences, proponents and opponents of war with Iraq agree on one thing: The paramount threat posed by Saddam Hussein is his possession of chemical and biological weapons.
“The one respect that we think most about and worry most about is an enemy with weapons of mass destruction,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz said last month. Opponents of war with Iraq have much the same view.
Administration leaders argue that only war can smoke out Hussein’s hidden biochemical capabilities. Doves argue that we must rely on inspections because attacking Hussein could provoke him to use chemical or biological weapons; if Israel were hit, they warn, the result could be nuclear war. By different routes, the two sides arrive at an almost obsessive focus on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons.
The Mother of all Bombs – how the US plans to pulverise Iraq
By Paul Rogers
openDemocracy
March 7, 2003A devastating new weapon will be part of the US’s massive assault on Iraq. Paul Rogers, openDemocracy’s international security correspondent, explains what it is, how it developed, and why its use is likely to destroy civilian lives in their thousands.
As the United States Air Force (USAF) builds up its deployments of aircraft in the Middle East, it has emerged that a huge new bomb has recently been developed that will be used in the war against Iraq. It is the most powerful conventional bomb to be deployed anywhere in the world and is described as having an effect as devastating as that of a small nuclear artillery shell.
The bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Air Burst (MOAB) weapon, contains 9.5 tons of a very powerful explosive
To read more Rogers click here
Battlefield nukes
Secret Vietnam-era report, just declassified, highlighted dangers
James Sterngold
The San Francisco Chronicle
March 9, 2003It was the height of the Vietnam War, and though the American military was pounding the North relentlessly with one of the heaviest bombing campaigns in history, it was having no apparent impact. So a group of highly regarded scholars prepared a secret study for the Pentagon on whether using a sledgehammer — battlefield nuclear weapons — might finally turn the tide.
The group, part of the influential but little-known Jason Division, met for six weeks at UC Santa Barbara in the summer of 1966, then sent their carefully researched 55-page analysis, warning in powerful language that unleashing the nuclear genie would undoubtedly backfire and have devastating consequences for the United States.