By Sean Malloy
If anyone doubts that the New World Order simply means the US and western Europe bullying small countries, they have only to look at the current campaigns against Iraq and Libya.
The Bush administration openly admits that it is stepping up covert operations to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. At the same time, it is planning to use the UN Security Council to impose economic and travel sanctions on Libya.
According to US officials, US$30 million has been allocated from a CIA fund for the program to remove Saddam Hussein.
Since the end of the Gulf War, the US has kept up threats to remove Hussein: during the dispute over UN inspections the US threatened to resume bombing Iraq; in October 1991 the Bush administration "reviewed" programs to hasten his overthrow; in January US officials claimed that Saudi Arabia was pressuring the US to remove Hussein and outlined some possible actions being discussed with the Saudis.
Iraq has still not recovered from the war. UN sanctions are starving and preventing restoration of essential services. The destruction of power stations and water supplies has created health and medical crises. Child mortality has reached disaster levels, with approximately 225,000 more children dying in 1991 than in the same period in 1990.
A UN mission to Iraq concluded in July 1991 that international relief agencies could not fulfil the country's basic needs. The mission's report estimated that $22 billion would be required to restore power, water, sanitation, food, agriculture, health and oil production to prewar levels. Concluding that obtaining these funds was not politically possible, the report outlined a reduced restoration budget of $6.9 billion over 12 months.
The mission proposed to the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee that a controlled sale of Iraqi oil to the value of $2.65 billion over four months be permitted to pay for immediate needs.
A proposal was made to the Iraqi government that a special account be set up by the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation in which funds from the sale of oil would be kept for the purchase of UN-approved supplies. All transactions in the account would be monitored by the UN.
Iraq was prepared to accept this arrangement, but the US orchestrated changes in the Security Council to make the proposal unacceptable to Iraq. These included reducing the value of oil sold to only $930 million over six months and establishing a UN account for oil proceeds, undermining the Iraq's sovereignty over its own resources.
Bush's goal is a new dictator to take the place of the old one. According to the February 10 Sydney Morning Herald, the latest S officials are based on finding an opposition within the Baathist regime.
The uprisings of Kurds and Shiites after the Gulf War, encouraged by Bush's public calls for the "people" to take charge, were brutally suppressed while Bush claimed the US could do nothing because it was an internal matter. But, it seems, a military coup against Hussein is not "internal".
Lockerbie
The pretext for the campaign against Libya is the alleged involvement of Libyan citizens in the Lockerbie air disaster of December 1988 and the crash of a French UTA jet in Niger in 1989.
The US is demanding that six Libyans be extradited: four accused of the bombing of the French airliner and two accused of bombing the Pan Am airliner that crashed in Lockerbie.
But no independent government in the world simply hands over its nationals on demand to foreign courts. The country requesting extradition has to justify its request to the courts of the country of the accused. This the US refuses to do.
To break the impasse, Libyan leader Muammer Qadhafi suggested the charges be submitted to the International Court of Justice (World Court). Again, Bush refused.
(The US doesn't like the independence of the World Court, which, for example, ordered Washington to pay Nicaragua compensation for the CIA terrorist campaign against that country. The US simply thumbed its nose at the ruling. Shouldn't George Bush be extradited to stand trial in Nicaragua?)
The US determination to have the charges heard only in its courts becomes comprehensible when one examines what is publicly known about the "evidence".
In November, Time and Newsweek ran articles outlining the case regarding Lockerbie. Time claimed that a Scottish investigator found a piece of green plastic the size of a fingernail embedded in a shred of material. The fragment was sent to the FBI in Washington for analysis. The FBI matched the piece of plastic to an unexploded bomb that the CIA, by coincidence, had captured from a "terrorist organisation" in Togo which was alleged to be "Libyan-supported". (Evidently, the US grand jury didn't find it amiss that the CIA should be intervening in the politics of Togo.)
The piece of cloth was somehow traced to one particular store in Malta called Mary's House. Employees at Mary's House miraculously identified the cloth as being part of a shirt that a Libyan called Abdel Basset had bought. In another piece of incredible luck, investigators found a diary kept by another Libyan, Lamen Fhimah, which supposedly outlined how Abdel Basset would place a bomb on board an airliner.
Is it any wonder that Bush insists that this evidence be heard either in US courts, or by the British legal system, whose justice has become so well known through cases like the Maguire Seven, the Birmingham Six?
No doubt US or British prosecutors would exclude potential jurors who happened to have read the Washington Post on October 2, 1986, when it reported that the White House had approved a plan of Reagan's national security adviser, John Poindexter, to circulate lies against Libya. A memorandum written by Poindexter stated, "One of the key elements of the strategy is that it combines real and illusionary events".
The US, Britain and France are preparing a sanctions resolution for the Security Council. The sanctions comprise an oil and airline embargo. These would severely damage Libya economically by blocking thousands of foreign workers from the country and preventing the sale of oil, its main source of income.
Open military attacks on Libya are also a danger. The US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi on April 15, 1986, which killed 38 people and wounded hundreds, was justified on the claim that Libya was responsible for the bombing of a nightclub in Germany that killed a US soldier.
Oil and independence
The campaigns against Libya and Iraq obstruct the political and economic development of nations independent of US influence.
The policies of Libyan government since 1969 have challenged US dominance in the Middle East. Libya has improved the standard of living of its citizens, using income from oil. It also became an example for OPEC countries in gaining better prices for oil from foreign companies.
Without oil sales, Libya would not be able to maintain the relatively high standard of living it has achieved for a Third World country, and its ability to take an independent stand would be undermined.
Restricting the sale of oil from Iraq and stopping the sale of oil from Libya would also benefit US clients among the OPEC countries — especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, who could expect to fill most of the gap in the world market.