Material Breach: US Crimes in Iraq

"D-Day of December 8th quietly approaches," writes Heather Wokusch, "the day Iraq must provide the UN Security Council with a complete accounting of its weapons programs, plus its civilian chemical/biological/nuclear production and research activities. Even though UN weapons inspectors have criticized the December 8th deadline as unrealizable, the consequences for missing it will be catastrophic: Iraq will be in 'material breach' of UN resolution 1441, and therefore subject to swift and decisive military action."

But at this point, UN 1441 seems little more than a whitewash pretext for a US-led attack on Iraq. With US warplanes patrolling Iraq's no-fly zone, bombing raids against Iraq ongoing, multiple aircraft carriers on alert and 60,000 US troops currently in or around the Persian Gulf, it's clear the war has already begun, "material breach" or not. When it's convenient for the Bush administration, Iraq will be found to have violated some aspect of the UN resolution, and the current buildup and covert military activity will explode into an all-out attack.

The justification (that Iraq's Hussein violates international law with his weapons of mass destruction and is thus a menace to world peace) seems a bit ironic in light of US actions in Iraq these past eleven years...

Read on.