By Norm Dixon
As Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly goes to press, the United States is preparing further bombing and missile attacks on Iraq. This has done little, however, to stop the establishment media in Australia parroting US President Bill Clinton's claim that Washington's cruise missile attacks on targets in southern Iraq on September 3-4 were aimed at protecting the Kurdish population in northern Iraq from a military assault by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. "The US attack on Iraq has nothing to do with 'protecting' the Kurds", Democratic Socialist Party national executive member Doug Lorimer told Â鶹´«Ã½.
"The real aim of the latest act of US aggression against Iraq", Lorimer said, "was to defend the profits of US oil companies by forcing the scrapping of the United Nations-brokered agreement to allow Iraq to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months to pay for imports of food and medicine".
The "food for oil" plan, approved by the UN Security Council in May, despite opposition from the US, was to have started this month. "Baghdad's intervention in the faction fighting between the Kurdish bourgeois parties in northern Iraq was simply a convenient pretext for Washington to scuttle the 'food for oil' plan", Lorimer said.
"US Defense Secretary William Perry admitted as much at a press conference on September 3. Perry said that 'the Kurdish people are not the issue', and that Washington's priority was 'protection of the flow of oil' in the Middle East.
"Of course, Baghdad's actions in northern Iraq posed absolutely no threat to the physical flow of oil from any of the neighbouring countries. That's why none of their governments, except the US protectorate of Kuwait, endorsed Washington's missile attack. What the US capitalist rulers are really concerned about is protecting the flow of oil profits and doing so at the expense of their imperialist allies, who are also their competitors."
Lorimer pointed out that Russia and France, which hoped to recoup billions of dollars in pre-Gulf War debts from Iraq, had teamed up almost a year ago to push for the lifting the UN embargo against Iraqi oil sales. In response to the Franco-Russian campaign, in May Washington reluctantly agreed to allow Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil to buy food and medicine. Under the plan, the Banque Nationale de Paris was to handle the account into which Iraqi oil revenues were to be deposited.
In his September 3 speech, announcing the launching of cruise missile attacks on southern Iraq and the extension of the southern "no-fly zone" to the outskirts of Baghdad, Clinton also announced that he had unilaterally frozen the UN "food for oil" plan.
"Washington's unilateral decision to extend the 'no-fly' zone is not only a flagrant violation of Iraq's national sovereignty", said Lorimer. "It is aimed at setting up a pretext for further US military aggression, and thus give the US an excuse to block any moves to allow the lifting of the UN trade embargo."
Commenting on the European Union's refusal to endorse Washington's latest aggression against Iraq, Lorimer said this reflected the growing trade conflict between the major capitalist powers.
"When Baghdad invaded Kuwait in 1990, Washington was able to rally its imperialist competitors to gang up in a massive military assault on Iraq. They were united in opposing Baghdad's takeover of Kuwait because it would have given Iraq control of 20% of the world's oil supply and therefore increased Iraq's ability to negotiate a higher price for its oil exports. That would have threatened the massive profits that the imperialist powers get out of the Third World's oil resources.
"Since then the imperialist thieves have fallen out. Washington's five-year long campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install a compliant, pro-imperialist government in Iraq has not succeeded. A number of its former Gulf War allies, particularly France, but also Russia and Turkey, have become increasingly keen to cut trade deals with the Hussein regime.
"Washington's latest attack on Iraq was aimed at using its military muscle to block such plans and to assert that the United States, as the imperialist godfather or 'world superpower', has the sole 'right' to determine when and under what conditions Baghdad will be allowed to sell its oil."