| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2003 4:44 am Post subject: U.N. SEES 500,000 IRAQI CASUALTIES AT START OF WAR |
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Forwarded Message:
Subj: [Fwd: (U.N. SEES 500,000 IRAQI CASUALTIES AT START OF WAR)(washingtonpost.com: Congress's Rollover on War)]
Date: 1/7/03 6:54:17 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: alhewar@alhewar.com
U.N. SEES 500,000 IRAQI CASUALTIES AT START OF WAR
Irwin Arieff, Reuters, 1/7/03
http://www.yahoo.com/news/
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - As many as half a million Iraqis could require
medical treatment as a result of serious injuries suffered in the early
stages of a war on Iraq, U.N. emergency planners said in a document
disclosed Tuesday.
The total includes some 100,000 expected to be injured as a direct result
of combat and a further 400,000 wounded as an indirect result of the
devastation, according to estimates prepared by the World Health
Organization, the document said.
The confidential U.N. assessment was drafted a month ago but an edited
version was posted Tuesday on the Web site of a British group opposed to
sanctions on Iraq
(http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/info/undocs/war021210.pdf)...
"The resultant devastation would undoubtedly be great," the U.N. planners
concluded. The estimates were based on material from several different U.N.
organizations…
U.N. officials had previously disclosed that as many as 4.5 million to 9.5
million of Iraq's 26.5 million people could quickly need outside food to
survive once an attack began.
War would also produce a huge refugee problem, driving some 900,000 Iraqis
into neighboring countries, with about 100,000 of those requiring immediate
assistance as soon as they arrived, according to the U.N. estimate…
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washingtonpost.com: Congress's Rollover on War
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15012-2003Jan5?language=printer
washingtonpost.com
Congress's Rollover on War
By William Raspberry
Monday, January 6, 2003; Page A15
A lot of us who have voiced bafflement and frustration about President Bush's success in selling his logic for a war against Iraq have been strangely silent about the constitutionality of such an undertaking. We've behaved as though the question of war is a matter of presidential discretion.
Well, it isn't -- or at any rate, it shouldn't be. It's right there in the Constitution -- Article I, Section 8 -- that Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war. Nor do I find anything to suggest that Congress may delegate its war-making authority to the president.
And yet the assumption is that the war on Iraq will begin when the president wants it to begin -- perhaps with a heads-up to Congress that it has happened. Almost everyone I know assumes that it's the president's call. The war hawks assume it, the latter-day peaceniks assume it, Congress itself assumes it. Which probably means that it is, at least in practical terms, a fact.
Not a particularly reassuring fact, however. Leaders of Congress are old enough to recall the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that laid the (phony) rationale for President Johnson's escalation of the conflict in Vietnam -- another war Congress never got around to declaring. I suspect a few Americans wish Congress hadn't been so quick to roll over for LBJ. Are there no similar misgivings today?
But it isn't Bush's rationale for war that concerns me here, although it seems no less phony than Johnson's. It is the constitutional legitimacy of it.
One might argue that, given the evolution of war since Article I was written -- the ability of nations now to strike quickly, across great distances and with devastating power -- the American president needs the authority to respond instantaneously, without congressional debate.
But the seemingly inevitable war on Iraq is not an emergency of the sort that got us into World War II, our last declared war. The nearest thing to a Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack on the United States was Sept. 11, 2001, which, despite Bush's efforts to have us believe otherwise, had next to nothing to do with Iraq. Whatever military action we take against Iraq and its hated leader, Saddam Hussein, will be the result of sober calculation over a considerable time. In those circumstances, why shouldn't Congress invoke its constitutional prerogative?
One possible answer is that Bush, in response to his critics, took the matter out of congressional hands when he brought it before the United Nations. Iraq's offenses, he argued there, were offenses against the United Nations, not against the United States per se. He made a strong case that future defiance on Saddam Hussein's part should prompt a military response from the United Nations. But Bush didn't get everything he sought at the United Nations. He wanted language that, in effect, made military action automatic upon a finding of material breach of the agreements Iraq had signed.
Some argue that America's power to make war really resides in the White House -- in what Vice President Cheney has described as an "inherent presidential power" to defend "vital national interests" -- no matter what it says in the Constitution. That's one possible explanation of why Bush won't seek a congressional declaration of war. Another may be his recollection that the 1991 resolution to approve military action by the elder Bush against Iraq -- which, remember, had occupied Kuwait and had been condemned as an international aggressor by the United Nations -- passed the Senate by only five votes.
The rationale would be weaker this time -- essentially that Iraqi violation of the U.N. resolutions will be ample ground for a U.S. assault on Baghdad. Maybe the younger Bush is afraid the votes wouldn't be there -- though I can't imagine why. This has been such a rollover Congress -- not, I suspect, because members support the president's determination to go to war but because opposing it is the more controversial posture.
The trend of recent years has been for politicians to avoid controversy when possible. Candidates would rather attack an opponent's proposals than make any of their own. Most controversial legislation passed at the state and local level seems to have come by way of referendum -- with no politician having to take a strong public position.
So I don't imagine the men and women of our national legislature will step forward and tell the president that, under the separation of powers, declaring war is a congressional responsibility. I just think they ought to.
(C) 2003 The Washington Post Company
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http://www.alhewar.com/support.html | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2003 11:45 pm Post subject: Iraq: 'Devastating' War Planned by Warmongering Bush & B |
| Subj: Iraq: 'Devastating' War Planned by Warmongering Bush & Blair
Date: 1/8/03 3:35:17 PM Pacific Standard Time
BAGHDAD, Iraq (Jan. 8) - Coalition warplanes struck air defense targets in southern Iraq on Wednesday for the second time this week, and a key Iraqi official said the United States and Britain were bent on war with Baghdad to subjugate the Middle East.
In Moscow, meanwhile, Iraq's ambassador to Russia dismissed rumors Saddam Hussein might go into exile to avoid war and said the Iraqi leader would ''fight to the last drop of blood'' to defend his country.
Concerns war is imminent have mounted, with the United States and Britain announcing the dispatch of thousands more troops and weapons to the Persian Gulf region because of misgivings about Iraq's commitment to abandon weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq insists it has no such weapons and maintains that claims to the contrary by Washington and London are simply a pretext for war.
''The aggressors in Washington and London are preparing for a devastating aggression against ... the people of Iraq, and they would like once again to destroy the City of Peace (Baghdad) as they did in 1991,'' Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told a visiting South African delegation Wednesday.
Aziz said U.N. arms inspectors, who returned to Iraq in November after a four-year hiatus, had strayed beyond the search for weapons of mass destruction.
''They are searching for other information about Iraq's conventional military capabilities, the Iraqi scientific and industrial capability in the civilian area, and also espionage questions,'' Aziz said.
U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki denied those allegations and said U.N. officials had received no formal complaint from Iraqi authorities about alleged espionage.
The United States has accused Saddam of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and says it will use force if necessary to disarm him. Iraq insists it has destroyed its biological and chemical weapons and halted its nuclear program and the making of banned missiles. There have been no known instances of serious problems encountered by the inspectors since they began work Nov. 27.
Nevertheless, the pace of the U.S.-British buildup has accelerated. The American battle staff that would run a military campaign against Iraq is beginning to assemble at a command post in the small gulf state of Qatar, U.S. officials said.
Tens of thousands more combat forces are scheduled to flow into the region over the next few weeks. Some U.S. soldiers landed Wednesday in neighboring Kuwait, but U.S. officials refused to say how many or identify their units.
Among the other forces expected to deploy from U.S. bases in the next several days are F-15E and F-15C fighters and B-1B bombers. Still, U.S. and British officials insist war is neither imminent nor inevitable.
As the buildup continues, U.S. warplanes struck Wednesday against air defense communication sites between the cities of Al Kut and An Nasiriyah. The U.S. Central Command said the attacks occurred after Iraqi air defense forces fired anti-aircraft artillery at U.S. planes patrolling the southern ''no fly'' zone and Iraqi military aircraft entered the zone.
On Monday, U.S. planes targeted two Iraqi military radars near the city of Al Amarah. Iraqi officials said two people were killed and 13 were injured in Monday's attacks.
Meanwhile, the official Iraqi News Agency said Saddam held a third day of meetings Wednesday with military and militia commanders, encouraging them not to fear a technologically superior foe.
''In aerial combat, there is a disparity in weapons, but on the ground, men fight with their guns and it's enough for the men to have bombs, bullets, a loaf of bread, water and a gun,'' Saddam was quoted as saying. As long as Iraqi forces receive the support of the people, ''the enemy will be defeated,'' Saddam added.
With tensions rising, Philippine Foreign Minister Blas Ople said Arab governments were trying to convince Saddam to step down and go into exile. Ople, speaking to reporters in Manila, said he learned of those efforts by Arab ambassadors whom he refused to identify.
The German newspaper Tageszeitung said Russian officials had been in Baghdad since November evaluating chances of Saddam stepping down. In a report for publication Thursday, the newspaper said Russian President Vladimir Putin would send a special envoy to Baghdad to finalize details if Saddam appeared willing to accept the Russian offer of exile.
Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency quoted an unidentified ''high-ranking Russian official'' as denying that Moscow was working toward Saddam's departure, saying there were ''no grounds for the Iraqi leader to request political asylum anywhere, including in Russia.''
Iraq's ambassador to Russia, Abbas Khalaf, told the Interfax news agency that Saddam will not leave his country and will ''fight to the last drop of blood.''
Khalaf called reports that Saddam might leave the country ''absolute nonsense'' and ''part of Washington and London's psychological war against Iraq,'' Interfax said.
AP-NY-01-08-03 1508EST | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
