Posted on 24-12-2002

Hawks Prey For Christmas
by Alan Marston

The image of Christ and therefore Christmas was a metaphor for peace and
love, that's history now. Since Coca Cola re-advertised St Nicholas as a
tubby red santa in the early 1900s the nature of giving has been changed,
gifts from the heart have been replaced by giving money and influence over
to corporate dominated business and government. December 2002 is Christmas
as usual, and as usual prayers for the dove of peace have been plucked from
the ether by the modern birds of prey, hawks of war. God help us.

In the latest of a long line of deceipt US war-mongers currently inhabiting
the Whitehouse edited out more than 8000 crucial pages of Iraq's
11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitised version to
the 10 non-permanent members of the United Nations security council. The
full extent of the hawks complete control over who sees what in the crucial
Iraqi dossier makes a shame of the allegations made by US Secretary of
State Colin Powell that 'omissions' in the document constituted a 'material
breach' of the latest UN resolution on Iraq.

Last week, Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan accepted that it was
'unfortunate' that his organisation had allowed the US to take the only
complete dossier and edit it. He admitted 'the approach and style were
wrong' and Norway, a member of the security council, says it is being
treated like a 'second-class country'.

Although Powell called the Iraqi dossier a 'catalogue of recycled
information and flagrant omissions', the non-permanent members of the
security council will have no way of testing the US claims for themselves.
This will be crucial if the US and the UK go back to the security council
seeking explicit authorisation for war on Iraq if breaches of resolution
1441 are confirmed when the weapons inspectors -- this weekend
investigating 10 sites in Iraq, including an oil refinery south of Baghdad
-- deliver their report to the UN next month. A UN source in New York said:
'The questions being asked are valid. What did the US take out? And if
weapons inspectors are supposed to be checking against the dossier's
content, how can any future claim be verified. In effect the US is saying
trust us, and there are many who just will not.'

Current and former UN diplomats are said to be livid at what some have
called the 'theft' of the Iraqi document by the US. Hans von Sponeck, the
former assistant general secretary of the UN and the UN's humanitarian co-
ordinator in Iraq until 2000, said: 'This is an outrageous attempt by the
US to mislead. Although the five permanent members of the security council
-- the US, the UK, France, China and Russia -- have had access to the
complete version, there was agreement that the US be allowed to edit the
dossier on the ground that its contents were 'risky' in terms of security
on weapons proliferation.

Yesterday, US President George W Bush announced that a planned trip to
several African countries, scheduled for January, had been cancelled. As he
gave the go-ahead to double the current 50,000 US troops deployed in the
Gulf by early January, he used his weekly radio address to say that 'the
men and women in the [US] military, many of whom will spend Christmas at
posts and bases far from home' were the only thing that stood between
'Americans and grave danger'.

An equally pessimistic view of the immediate future came from the Vatican.
Pope John Paul II promised the Catholic church would not cease to have its
voice heard and would offer prayers 'in the face of this horizon bathed in
blood'. Prayers have for a long time been far out-weighed by preyers in the
Catholic Church and most other large institutions. History is ourselves. So
despite the prayers, yesterday, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US
joint chiefs of staff, was asked if US forces were ready if called upon
immediately. General Myers simply said: 'You bet.'

The language coming from Baghdad is equally gung ho. The spirit of Christ
doesn't hold much sway there either not withstanding the much vaunted
respect for Christ and deep religious convictions of Islam. The Iraqi
newspaper Babel, owned by Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday, likened US and
UK political leaders to ruthless Mongol conquerors of the past.

All this while international aid agencies state the obvious, warning of a
humanitarian catastrophe in the event of a war in Iraq, which could leave
millions without food or shelter. Unicef, the children's charity, has
already begun to move supplies to neighbouring countries while the World
Food Programme is moving food it intends to provide for nearly a million
people for one month. Aid officials say the United Nations' 'Oil for Food'
programme - under which tens of millions of Iraqis live on meagre rations -
would be suspended during any military action, leaving them facing
starvation or reliant on emergency food aid.

The UN, which drew up a request at a meeting in Geneva last week for $37.3
million from donor countries to tackle the issue, is increasingly worried
about the scale of any potential disaster. In Britain, Clare Short's
Department for International Development admitted last night that it was
now holding 'regular discussions on general contingency preparedness' for a
range of possible outcomes in the Middle East. 'In the case of Iraq, the UN
is preparing for all such eventualities,' said a spokeswoman. UN officials
complain that the US administration is refusing to listen to warnings about
the scale of the possible humanitarian disaster. 'There is a studied lack
of interest in a warning call we are trying to deliver to the people
planning for war, about what its consequences might be,' a UN official told
The Observer yesterday.

The extent of the US Pentagon's concern is over the location of
humanitarian sites and depots so as to try and avoid bombing them. 'In the
light of the huge humanitarian consequences that could result, we will need
full access to people in need,' said Mary McClymont of the umbrella group
Inter-Action. The planners who called last week's UN meeting said that
conditions in Iraq 'after years of sanctions' are far worse than they were
after the last Gulf war, with 'high levels of vulnerability and
dependence'. The 1991 war caused more than a million Kurds alone to flee
the fighting and an unknown number 'probably greater' of Southern Shia.
'All but the most privileged,' said the meeting's document, 'have exhausted
their cash assets and in most cases their material assets'.

Unicef has begun to move supplies to Iraq and neighbouring countries, ready
to provide for an initial half-million people inside Iraq and some 160,000
refugees outside its borders. But the refugee agency, UNHCR, said it could
only provide tents and blankets for 100,000. UNHCR, which acts as an
umbrella organisation in times of crises, is reeling from a 25 per cent
budget cut globally for 2002. In the Geneva document the UNHCR says that it
would take $60 million and six weeks to deliver tents and stoves suitable
for winter conditions. A spokesperson for Action Aid in London said war
risked serious health problems in Iraq: 'In the event of a war, it is
inevitable that the infrastructure which is already badly affected will
begin to break down. And with that, you would see malnutrition and illness.'

Iran, Syria and Turkey have said they will take in Iraqi refugees if
necessary. But a wider crisis might force other nations,including Jordan,
to reassess decisions to keep their borders sealed.

The spirit of Christmas is now firmly encapsulated in an armour piercing
bomb. What a mess.