[A-List] UK sub-imperialism: crisis management

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Straw struggles to convince MPs of need for attack

Michael White, political editor
Wednesday March 13, 2002
The Guardian

Jack Straw told MPs last night that action to curb Saddam Hussein's
"accelerating" weapons programmes must be taken to uphold the authority
of the United Nations - not to undermine it.

Under cross-party pressure not to follow America's lead, he revealed
that new British and US intelligence evidence shows that President
Saddam is working to increase his ballistic missile and nuclear
potential as well as resuming biological and chemical experiments.

Both sides accept that US-UK sabre-rattling is partly designed to
frighten Saddam into accepting back UN weapons inspectors - though
ministers are adamant that action will have to follow if the tactic
fails.

Critics fear it will further destabilise the Middle East and voiced
their fears in the Commons and later at a "good-natured" private meeting
with 50 backbench Labour MPs.

What was clear from both sessions is that British and US ministers
refuse to accept the link critics make between a new squeeze of Baghdad
and progress to stop the carnage in Israel and the occupied territories.

Mr Straw also used President Saddam's domestic abuses of human rights
and his defiance of UN security council resolutions on arms inspections
to argue that any steps eventually agreed if diplomatic and political
pressure fails will reinforce UN authority, not corrode it.

But the foreign secretary's warning that the evidence against Baghdad is
"overwhelming and compelling" failed to persuade sceptical MPs on all
sides of the Commons.

Though the shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, offered
Conservative support for whatever action is deemed necessary to resolve
the threat, other senior Tories joined Labour and Liberal Democrats in
urging caution.

The former Tory cabinet minister Douglas Hogg challenged the wisdom of
military strikes during Foreign Office question time. "Many of us do not
believe there is established sufficient requirement for that."

David Winnick, the veteran leftwinger, said MPs would need to be
persuaded that the military option - rather than the smart sanctions
policy now under active consideration - is "absolutely essential".

Loyalists believe that formula will isolate the 30 or so hardcore
opponents of most recent military interventions. Critics argue that
constituency activists also regard an unprovoked attack on Iraq as a
line Labour must not cross.

Mr Straw repeated concerns that 31,000 chemical weapons munitions, and
4,000 tonnes of "precursor" chemicals were left unaccounted for by the
UN inspectors forced out of Iraq in 1998. He cautiously deployed
post-1998 intelligence data to claim that since Operation Desert Fox the
Iraqi ballistic missile programme has been repaired, nuclear procurement
resumed and biological/chemical programmes maintained.

Mr Straw insisted that UN inspectors be allowed renewed access "to all
relevant sites, to be allowed to inspect freely wherever they want to".

Ewen MacAskill adds : As Vice-President Dick Cheney arrived in Jordan
yesterday to begin rallying Arab leaders to the US cause, a defiant
Saddam Hussein described his mission as "futile". But Arab diplomats say
most of the region's leaders would be glad, their public positions
notwithstanding, to see President Saddam go.

Full article at:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,666465,00.ht
ml

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx