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Index from August 2002
Note: these are broad summaries of the main topics covered under each of the dates. The links provide much more detailed lists, together with general introductory accounts.
August, 2002
- Iraqi opposition summoned to New York, where some Important People give them a few minutes of their time; Massoud Barzani is not part of the delegation - general drift of opinion towards wanting a new UN resolution - I argue that the respectable parts of the UN should organise in opposition to the UN Security Council - Tim Judah retails the story of the prisoner held by the PUK who claims he smuggled thirty refrigerator motors from Saddam Hussein to Al Qaida in Afghanistan in 2000; note that Halabja is not in the area supposedly protected by the 'No Fly Zones' - Brent Scowcroft argues against the war on Iraq - Richard Butler attacks Australian slavishness towards the United States - Norman Schwarzkopf and Wesley Clark oppose a war without allies - Lawrence Eagleburger thinks the US should turn its attention towards Syria instead - Hans Blix explains why the Iraqis are not welcoming him in ('Well, I would think that if the Iraqis conclude that an invasion by someone is inevitable then they might conclude that its not very meaningful to have inspections') - tale of the Ansar el-Islam chemical weapons laboratory - row between KDP and Turkey - death of Abu Nidal in Iraq in unconvincing circumstances - we are told that Iraq poses a threat, not only to the US but also to Japan - Qatar's foreign minister goes to Baghdad and declares that Qatar won't help the US war - Advertising magnate Charlotte Beers is charged with the job of selling the US to the Muslim world - Major-General Tawfiq al-Yassirir of the Iraqi National Coalition declares that 20,000 might join his Iraqi exile army
September, 2002
- Forces of evil come back from their holidays and the establishment anti-war mood is blown away like smoke - Mo Mowlam points out that what the US are after is a major military base in the Middle East; inspired by this, I compare what the US is doing to the world to what the Normans did to England, Wales and Ireland (dotting fortresses about the place) - Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster opposes the war - Polly Toynbee tells us that Mr Blair is only pretending to act tough in order to reduce the chances of war - Lebanese Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah (closely connected to the Iraqi Shia) says Muslims should withdraw assets held in the US - Arab pressure on Iraq to admit weapons inspectors - Gerhard Schroeder, in the course of the German elections, rules out any German participation in an attack - article by Dilip Hiro reminding us that throughout the 1980s the US refused the Iranian demand that the UN Security Council should name Iraq as the aggressor in the Iran/Iraq war - Dennis Halliday calls for an end to the veto of the UN Security Council permanent members - President Bush informs the UN of his intentions, giving them the opportunity to prove their relevance by agreeing with him - Bruce Anderson in The Independent tells us that '3,000 lives was a cheap price to pay for an early warning call. America had the shock it needed ...' - first indications of the human shield movement - Kurdish Parliament, closed since 1994, hurriedly puts itself together again - arrest of Ansar el-Islam leader, Mullah Krekar - US command structure begins process of moving to Qatar - Scott Ritter states clearly that Iraq has little left in the way of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and that it 'did co-operate to a very significant degree with the UN inspections process - David Albright questions the uses of aluminium tubes - Saddam's former mistress tells us he doesn't believe in anything and spends a lot of his time looking in the mirror - Rumsfeld proposes that war could be avoided if President Hussein would agree to go into exile - joint resolution approved by Congress authorising war on Iraq on the grounds that the Iraqis are shooting at US planes enforcing a (non-existent) UN resolution and that members of al-Qaida are known to be in Iraq (in the part of it that is outside President Hussein's control) - German Justice minister in trouble for making a rather mild comparison between George Bush and Adolf Hitler - Plaid Cymry agrees to oppose a war without a UN resolution - Bush doctrine of the pre-emptive strike - we learn that successive attorney generals have been stalling on Indict's demand that Tariq Aziz be indicted for 'taking hostages' - Khidr Hamza tells us that relatives of Iraqi dissidents are being infected with AIDS then sent to rejoin their families - British Government launches its DOSSIER - IAEA dismisses the tale of the enriched uranium from Niger - Mullah Krekar is questioned by the FBI (he sails through with flying colours)
October, 2002[9-4/10/02]: G.William Hoagland, Republican Party staff director of the Senate Budget Committee, declares that "Relative to the Gulf War it [a new war against Iraq - PB] seems surprisingly affordable" - President Bush and Congress agree very lax modalities for going to war - British Labour Party conference gives Mr Blair the go-ahead for war. The Guardian comments that 'the government won by stressing its fidelity to the "United Nations"' [my inverted commas - PB] - Jack Straw informs us that "Within these so-called presidential palaces much of the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction has taken place" - William Clinton exercises his charm and gives the Labour Party the illusion that it is opposed to a right-wing US government - first glimpse of what is destined to become "United Nations" Security Council Resolution 1441 - Richard Butler bites the hand that fed him, saying that the US is in breach of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
[5-11/10/02]: Dennis Kucinich appears as an opponent of the war - Edward Kennedy compares Bush's proposed 'pre-emptive strike' against Baghdad to Japan's pre-emptive strike against Pearl Harbour - Congress authorises force against Iraq; Hilary Clinton informs us that bipartisan support for President Bush will make war less likely - Scott Ritter confirms that the CIA used UNSCOM to collect material useful for the assassination of the Iraqi President - interesting comment on this by George Monbiot - Saudis offer the use of their territory if there should be a chapter 7 resolution - US and UK warplanes continue to bomb Iraq, killing Iraqi cvilians -
[11-18/10/02]: Open session of the "United Nations" Security Council gives the world a chance to oppose the war. The world fluffs it - President Hussein organises a referendum on his popularity in Iraq - Ahmad Chalabi informs the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs that "Saddam is the source of all terrorism in the Middle East" - Kurds complain that the US isn't helping them to prepare for war - debate on the 'UN' resolution and especially on the clause that would allow inspections to be supervised and policed by the US - accusation that Ukraine might have been selling Iraq some means of self defence - Bahrain opposes the war; Jordan allows war games on its territory -
[19-25/10/02]: Al Gore proposes a programme of innoculation in the US against biological weapons; account of Douglas Feith's team set up by the Pentagon shortly after the September 2001 attacks to manufacture intelligence that could justify war - idea floated of a deal between President Hussein and the Iraqi Nationalist opposition - Hugo Chavez, possibly intimidated by the attempted coup in Venezuela, says he 'won't support an Arab oil blockade if the US invades Iraq'. In this repect he compares unfavourably with Malaysia's Mahathir Muhammad - attempts to link Iraq to the Oklahama atrocity - President Hussein sets a large number of Iraqi prisoners free -
[25/10-1/11/02] US evangelical Christians say the Iraqi government allowed the distribution of half a million New Testaments in Iraqi schools - Book by Kenneth Pollack informs us that as a chuld President Hussein used to impale animals on white hot pokers - valuable article by Ramzi Kysia on the very impressive administration of the Iraqi ration system - anti-war demonstrations in the US - SCIRI claims that the US promised to withdraw from Iraq as soon as President Hussein is overthrown - UN military working on a bad guy biometric database - the Kuwaiti givernment seals off a quarter of its territory to facilitate US war plans.
November, 2002[1-8/11/02]: 'United Nations' resolution 1441 is passed - evidence that the votes of at least Mauritius, Cameroon and Guinea were bought - The Guardian's Martin Woollacott informs us that 'Iraq's nuclear weapons work was more advanced in 1994 than it was in 1991 - Austin College, Texas, appoints George Bush Sr to the 'Chair of Excellence in international leadership' - Congress passes Iraqi Scientists Liberation Act, offering informers and their families permanent residency in the US - George Bush Jr considers mass small pox vaccination to counter the threat to the American people from Iraq and North Korea - Ariel Sharon calls on the US to go for Iran as soon as Iraq has been dealt with - continued talk of Ukrainian and Serb deals with Iraq -
[9-15/11/02]: much discussion of the implications of Resolution 1441 (I argue that it makes little difference since the US and UK claim they don't need a resolution. Their main concern is getting the support of Iraq's neighbours, especially Turkey, and the resolution doesn't oblige them to give that support in case of a breach) - Iraqi response to the resolution in a letter to the 'UN' Secretary General - Israeli assaults on the West Bank and Gaza while the world is looking elsewhere - Kurds compain that no effort has been made by the fomentors of war to supply them with gas masks - US offers to train 10,000 members of the Iraqi opposition (this is an amusing story to follow. They end up with something in the region of 50) - [15-22/11/02] - BBC tells us that Iraqis had infiltrated UK germ laboratories - We learn that Iraq has developed a powder that would enable VX to penetrate US army protective clothing - Australia has developed a particularly deadly strain of smallpox so Iraq might have developed it too - some discussion of the role of spies in UNSCOM - US and Britain block $75 bn supplies for Iraq - US army has problems because Saudis refuse to allow them to use 'the multi-billion dollar air operations command center we built in their territory - CND threatens court action in UK over invasion - 5 former Iraqi generals address a seminar sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute - General Nizar Khazraji, potential Sunni strongman, is arrested in Denmark on war crimes charges - Babil, newspaper run by President Hussein's son, Uday, is temporarily closed - possibility that Eritrea might be used as a base for a US attack - US argues that Iraq's targetting of USUK aircraft violating Iraqi airspace is a breach of Res 1441 - The 'UN' Security Council (including the UK) refuses this interpretation, thereby implicitly admitting that the planes are not as they claim enforcing UN resolutions - attacks are intensified - Ukraine has developed a system for detecting stealth bombers but isn't allowed to sell it to the country most in need of it - [22-29/11/02] Tim Llewellyn of The Scotsman reports on the mood of the Iraqi Shia in Karbala - Joel Soler's film 'Uncle Saddam' - The Times gets very inventive on what President Hussein is doing to conceal his weapons - US wants revision of already agreed lists of what can enter Iraq - as the Liberal Democrats whine that the war is illegal without a 'UN'SC resolution, Jack Straw rightly taunts them with P.Ashdown's enthusiasm for the equally 'illegal' war on Serbia - Kanan Makiya issues a plan for the transition to democracy in post invasion Iraq - enthusiastic pro-war article from the editor of The Economist - enthusiastically pro-US Hungary reluctant to let its territiry be used to give military training to the Iraqi opposition - India wants Iraq's compliance with UN resolutions to be accompanied by the lifting of sanctions - disputes in and around German collaboration or non-collaboration - former Yemeni PM Abdul-Karim Al-Iryani says Iraq invasion will be followed by 'many civil wars'
[29/11-6/12/06]: Progress of inspections - UK government publishes dossier on human rights abuses in Iraq - surprisingly negative reaction from British media - Bahman Ghobadi (Iranian Kurdish director responsible for great films A Time for Drunken Horses and Turtles can fly) opposes the war - anti-war protests in the US, Australia and Turkey, and from UK rock groups Blur and Massive Attack - Pew Global Attitudes Survey finds big increase in international anti-US feeling - Zalmay Khalilzad becomes 'special envoy and ambassador at large for free Iraqis' - A Russian who once worked on the Russian small pox vaccination programme once visited Iraq. So there - Conflicts between the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Ansar el-Islam - Bush's military affairs adviser Eliot Cohen says; 'Turkey is obviously crucial. I don't think you could do anything without Turkey' - Iraqi army and airforce teams play football in Kurdish areas - life of oil workers in Basra - interview with Iraqi nuclear physicist and opposition leader Hussein Shahristani, who tells us that President Hussein plans to remotely detonate chemical weapons in Shiite towns in the South -
[6-13/12/02]: Iraq's full and final declaration on its weapons holdings - the full text supposedly reserved for the eyes of the inspectors is hijacked by the US - Tim Llewellyn on life inside Iraq - International Crisis Group tells us that most most Iraqis would favour a period of rule by the US - Robert Fisk reports that the Iraqi army may have tested poison gas on 5,000 largely Kurdish prisoners in the early eighties - conditions of life in and around Halabja (under the government of Jalal Talabani) - Iraq slashes wheat imports from Australia - Iraq cancels deal with Russia's Lukoil to develop the West Qurna oil field - al-Hakim of SCIRI claims he has proof of Iraqi WMDs but the US won't listen - 'thousands' of Iraqis queuing up to fight Saddam - Abdul Jabbar al-Kubaisi welcomed back in Iraq as possible leader of a non-collaborationist opposition - blue collar opposition to war in the US including John Sweeney, President of AFL-CIO -
[13-20/12/02]: US army to train 1.000 Iraqis - Hungarian Defense Ministry says they will be accompanied by 2,000 US military personnel and won't engage in combat training - Warmonger Kenneth Pollack indicates that he doesn't think the US administration have 'smoking-gun evidence' for the existence of Iraqi WMDs - inspections continue - Richard Lugar, new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calls them 'a palliative for many countries who don't want to do anything' - discussion of Iraqi declaration, including weak critique by Colin Powell - USUK bombing raids in southern Iraq - Nelson Mandela arttacks the US for its 'diplomatic piracy' - US opposes Germany as new chairman of 'UN'Security Council sanctions panel - second international banking conference held in Baghdad - long and interesting interview with Abdul Jabbar al-Kubaisi on possibility of pluralist politics in Iraq under President Hussein - crackdown on Iraqi emigres trying to send money to relatives in Iraq - Anthony Cordesman opposes the invasion: better to let Iraq stew under sanctions and entrust the business of oppressing the Shiat to Saddam - Madeleine Albright also favours mass starvation and disease (ie sanctions) over war - study on post-Saddam strategy released by Council on Foreign Relations and James Baker III Institute for Public Policy -
[20-27/12/02] Practical problems of US ambitions to interview scientists outside Iraq - Iraq invites CIA to join the weapons inspectors - Christmas opposition to war from British churches including 'Blair's priest (Fr Timothy Russ, of the RC parish near Chequers) - proposal that Gulf War veterans could sue firms listed as weapons suppliers in Iraqi declaration - US tries to woo Turkey by promising that the Kurds won't get control of oil round Mosul and Kirkuk - Turkey renews US military's right to use air base at Incirlik - Iraqis shoot down a US drone - Germany wins chairmanship of 'UN'Security Council sanctions committee - Niger accuses US of libel over claim that they sold uranium to Iraq - Uday Hussein's journal Babil resumes publication.
January, 2003 February, 2003 March, 2003 April 2-9, 2003 April 9-16, 2003 April 16-30, 2003 April 30-May 14, 2003 May 14-28, 2003