There are indications that the United States is planning to use nuclear weapons in the coming war on Iraq, in defiance of international law, writes Vincent Browne
According to a report in the Los Angeles Times last week the circumstances in which nuclear weapons would be used by the US would be to attack Iraqi facilities located so deep underground that they might be impervious to conventional explosives and to thwart Iraq's use of chemical or biological weapons. The report was written by William M. Arkin, a former member of US army intelligence who is now a "military affairs analyst" and who writes for the Los Angeles Times.
This report has not come out of the blue. In the US State Department's Nuclear Posture Review, submitted to Congress a year ago, it is stated: "Nuclear weapons could be employed against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack (for example, deep underground bunkers or bio-weapons facilities)." (pages 12 and 13 of the report).
Indeed, reports that the US military was developing what is known as "low-yield nuclear weapons" have been circulating for some time. The journal of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reported on this two years ago and commented: "The use of any nuclear weapon capable of destroying a buried target that is otherwise immune to conventional attack will necessarily produce enormous numbers of civilian casualties. It went on: "By seeking to produce usable low-yield nuclear weapons, we risk blurring the now sharp line separating nuclear and conventional warfare and provide legitimacy for other nations to similarly consider using nuclear weapons in regional wars".
The Los Angeles Times report has been reproduced in newspapers around the world but has not attracted much attention. It reported that "the current nuclear planning revealed in interviews with military officers and described in documents reviewed by the Los Angeles Times is being carried out at STRATCOM's (the US Strategic Command) Omaha headquarters, among teams in Washington and at Vice-President Dick Cheney's 'undisclosed location' in Pennsylvania".
In 1996, the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion to the UN General Assembly, stated that "the threat or use of nuclear weapons" was unlawful, although it left open the possibility that the use of such weapons might be lawful "in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of the state would be at stake".
Meanwhile, the Americans are busy constructing weapons of mass deception to justify the coming war and these are being honed to fix a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. This will be part of the focus today when Colin Powell addresses the UN Security Council.
In an article in the current issue of New Yorker, a flavour of what we are to expect can be tasted. Teams of Pentagon and CIA officials have been invited to engage in mind games to hypothesise how there may well be a link between the two. The quality of the "evidence" can be gleaned from the following quote by George Tenet, head of the CIA: "American intelligence believes that al-Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993 and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-1990s." In the last annual definitive study of terrorism by the US State Department, Patterns of Global Terrorism, published in May of last year, there is no suggestion of any connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda in the section dealing with state-sponsored terrorism.
Now the idea has arisen that there is indeed a link that this claim centres around an organisation known as Ansar al Islam and a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Ansar al Islam was formed in late 2001 and certainly has links with al-Qaeda.
It is based in northern Iraq, near the Iranian border. But this territory is outside the control of Saddam Hussein - it is part of the territory "protected" by the US and British airforces in Kurdistan
The evidence of any links between Ansar al Islam and Hussein are tenuous, but even if such links were established it would prove no more than that Saddam was encouraging a group in the Kurdish area that was destabilising the control of that area by forces supported by the US. There is no evidence that Ansar al Islam has any part in terrorism directed at the US. The head of this group is, allegedly, a cleric, Mullah Krekar, who is living openly in Oslo, from where he has denied any involvement.
As for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he may be or have been senior in al-Qaeda and it may be he received hospital treatment in the last year or so in Baghdad, where his leg was amputated, after he had been injured in Afghanistan. It may also be that he had contact with Saddam Hussein prior to his joining Ansar al Islam in northern Iraq and it may be Saddam gave assistance to that organisation through him. But so what?
We are likely to hear much more about Mullah Krekar and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ansar al Islam over the next few days, unless of course the Security Council decides to focus instead on the terrorism of the Catholic Workers Movement in their terrorist assault with a hammer on an American plane at Shannon.