Iraq: Fabricated pretexts and a war for conquest
An interview with Michel Chossudovsky
JON ELMER
Guerrilla Radio, 31 March 2003
Audio: listen
Jon Elmer, Guerrilla Radio: Professor Chossudovsky, could you share your perceptions on the first two weeks of ‘official’ war in Iraq?
Michel Chossudovsky: The war is being fought using the so-called Blitzkrieg doctrine, which in fact emanates from the Third Reich – Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a great admirer of German military doctrine. Blitzkrieg is when you bomb excessively around the clock, with a maximum amount of damage; it is based also on the concept of “shock and awe,” which is essentially taken again from the German, sturm und drang [shock and stress], and was first tried out on the Spanish village of Guernica, in the Basque Region of Spain, in 1937, by the German Luftwaffe.
It is an absolutely criminal war. It is targeting civilian structures; it is a blatant violation of the Nuremberg Charter; it is a violation of the UN Charter; and the pretext for waging this war is fabricated, totally fabricated – because the hidden agenda is essentially to establish an American sphere of influence in that region, to conquer vast oil reserves. Iraq has 11% of the world’s oil reserves, which is five to six times the United States. The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” is just a pretext to wage a war of conquest.
JE: How much of a consideration to the current war is the fact that Iraq recently switched their official currency for oil transactions from the US Dollar to the Euro, especially given the possibility of OPEC switching to the Euro as well?
MC: I think that is a consideration, but it is not strictly the switching of the currency of Baghdad or Venezuela, or any country, from the dollar to the Euro; it is more generally the encroachment of the Euro over the hegemony of the Dollar as a world currency. I have written on that in War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11. Since the advent of the Euro it has been competing with the US Dollar in an area extending from the Balkans right through Central Asia, in countries where national currencies have been destroyed and where these countries are using either the Dollar or the Euro as a proxy currency. This control over currency systems is in effect the ultimate control, because it means control over institutions, control over people, control over resources. You don’t even need to own those resources; you simply own the instruments of money creation and credit and so on, so you can ultimately determine what is spent, and who spends it. You control governments as well – that is the ultimate instrument of neo-colonial conquest.
JE: How far back would you trace this plan to invade Iraq, and why have they launched this massive attack now?
MC: I would go back to the security doctrine of the Clinton administration in 1995, and what they called “In Theatre Strategy.” It says very clearly that the objective is oil. It also says that Iraq is first, and Iran is next in line, according to the strategy for the conquest of the region.
From the tip of Saudi Arabia all the way through the Caspian Sea basin, that whole area is now militarized. The war has been in the pipeline for several years before September 11th – you could say it goes back to the Gulf War, but in fact there were reasons why they didn’t invade at that time. They wanted to use the first war in Iraq to militarize that whole region, and also to use the pretext of war to channel massive sales of military equipment to the countries of the region – mainly to Saudi Arabia, but also to Egypt.
And you can’t dissociate the war in Iraq from the war in Afghanistan, or dissociate it from the war in the Balkans. Indeed, we’ve been in a continuous war since the early 1990s: the Gulf war, the civil wars in Yugoslavia, and the war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan serves as a land bridge for pipeline routes from the Caspian Sea Basin. It is a hub: it has borders with China, with the former Soviet Union, and it was considered strategic.
JE: Senior Pentagon advisor Richard Perle said in an interview with PBS Frontline just after September 11th that war in Iraq was a priority, “because having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed the Saddam’s regime, the message to the others is ‘you’re next’. Two words. Very efficient diplomacy”. On Friday (March 28, 2003) President Bush threatened Iran and Syria – should this belligerence be taken seriously, could this be a signal of the next phase of this war?
MC: They’ve been threatening Iran, Syria and North Korea for some time now. The whole concept of the “rogue state” simply refers to countries that are black-listed, essentially because they don’t adopt the free-market reforms that other developing countries have. They constitute nations that are not entirely controlled by Washington, which is why in fact, they are threatening these countries. But I don’t see military action against Syria or Iran in the near future. It may erupt spontaneously, but I don’t see an American military action in that regard. But they do want to control those borders. And now Iran has taken a very firm stance – they have said they will not allow the installation of a proxy US regime on their immediate border.
I think that people have to realize the seriousness of this crisis, because the United States and Britain have stated that they do not exclude the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq. These statements have been made many times, and they have to be taken very seriously. In his State of the Union address, Bush said we are going in to "liberate Iraq"; a few days earlier his aide Andrew Card stated that they will use nuclear weapons if they are attacked by weapons of mass destruction.
The British made an even stronger statement. Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon said that Iraq “can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we’d be willing to use our Trident nuclear weapons.” A Trident nuclear bomb, which would be launched from submarines in the Persian Gulf, is six times more destructive than Hiroshima. So we are very much on the verge of a major catastrophe, if indeed these weapons are used. And they could be used, particularly if the US is beginning to lose the conventional war.
JE: Israel is another country that has openly threatened to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, if attacked. I want to ask you about the role that Israel plays. For instance, the recently-named American coordinator for civilian administration in Iraq for the army of occupation, Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, is a man who, just after the beginning of the current Intifada, signed his name to a statement blaming Palestinians for the violence in Israel/Palestine and saying that a strong Israel was an important security asset to the US. What is Israel’s role?
MC: First of all, it should be clear that Israel is an unofficial member of the Anglo-American military alliance. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is the fifth largest in the world, after the United States, Russia, France and China, and before Britain, and its level of sophistication actually in terms of delivery system is more advanced than that of Britain. Its nuclear warheads are directed not just against Baghdad, but against all major capital cities in the Middle East, and it has said that it will use nuclear weapons if attacked by conventional weapons.
There is also a not-so-secret plan in Israel to initiate a policy of mass deportation of Palestinians under a war scenario – so-called “transfer” – which is being debated in the Israeli media right now. The war could unleash a situation in Palestine and in the broader region because these various war theatres are being linked – particularly when you have people leaving Palestine to fight in Iraq. In the eyes of the Palestinian people, the war in Iraq is their struggle, the same struggle. So from the point of view of Israel, they are in very close communication – both military and intelligence – with the United States. In fact, it was from Israeli sources that we found out which date the war would start. There was a leak, from Israel, which had already identified that the war would start on that particular day (March 19, 2003). The Israeli military is very informed, they are closely consulted, they have joint command consultations. This is part of the equation which could lead to the broadening of this war beyond the borders of Iraq.
JE: Islamic Jihad said this weekend that they are sending suicide bombers to Baghdad. Is a broadening conflict useful for the pretext of waging war throughout the region?
MC: It serves one very limited objective: it gives credibility to the so-called war on terrorism, to claims that these Islamic groups are working hand in glove with Saddam Hussein. It suggests that Islamic Jihad and the resistance of the Iraqi people somehow coincide, which they don’t. It is also the secular Palestinian movement (which broadly coincides with Palestinian civil society) that is going to Iraq.
There are a lot of Iraqi