| Author | Message | | Guest | | Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2002 7:07 am Post subject: UN chief issues secret orders for war in Iraq |
| So the Zionist (JINSA) extremists (Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Woolsey, Cheney, etc.) pushing for an invasion of Iraq (for Israel and oil) are going to drive the UK and US economies down the drain with this kind of expenditure (but these "Israel firsters" don't care about the human suffering that will be inflicted as long as their beloved Israel comes out okay):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/23/brits-pull-support-for-iraq-invasion-to-thwart-zionists.php
UN chief issues secret orders for war in Iraq
From James Bone in New York
Agencies told to prepare for civil unrest and 900,000 refugees
THE United Nations is making secret contingency plans for a war that would halt all Iraqi oil production, “seriously degrade” the country’s electricity system, provoke civil unrest and create 900,000 refugees, The Times has learnt.
Internal UN documents predict that the worst fighting will be in the three central governorates around Baghdad, with the Kurdish-controlled north remaining largely free of conflict. But it will take a month after war breaks out before the predominantly Shia south is calm enough for UN humanitarian workers to work there.
Although formally expressing the hope that war can be averted, UN relief agencies are already positioning emergency supplies and updating evacuation procedures for the hundreds of international staff now inside Iraq.
“The UN expects that there will be full compliance by Iraq . . . and that, consequently, there will be no new humanitarian crisis,” one document says. “Nevertheless, UN agencies must ensure that they are adequately prepared for the full range of possible scenarios.”
Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, is trying to keep the preparations secret for fear of signalling to Iraq that weapons inspections are futile and a US-led attack is inevitable.
But he ordered staff to begin contingency planning last month after the Security Council set tough terms for resumed inspections in Iraq. His Canadian deputy, Louise Fréchette, is chairing regular meetings of officials to prepare for a possible humanitarian crisis.
Confidential UN planning papers paint a grim picture of the effects of an attack against Iraq: they predict that production of oil will cease, the port of Umm Qasr on the Gulf would be shut down, and the bombing of bridges would cripple the railway network and make road travel difficult between the east and west of the country.
The electricity grid would be seriously disrupted, with collateral damage to water and sewage systems. Government stocks of commodities such as grain would also be hit.
Of the 900,000 predicted refugees, the UN estimates that about 100,000 would need immediate help.
“It all seems perfectly reasonable, but when it actually happens, it will be different,” one person who reviewed the papers said. “It always is.”
At an unpublicised meeting in Geneva on December 13, the UN appealed to more than ten donor nations, including Britain, to provide $37 million (£23 million) to fund preparations for a crisis.
The Rome-based World Food Programme said that it had started to put in place sufficient food for 900,000 people for a month. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has a stockpile of supplies for 250,000 people ready to move at 72 hours’ notice, but has only enough tents and blankets for 100,000 people. It could take 12 weeks and $60 million to deliver enough supplies.
The UN Children’s Fund, which has a warehouse in Denmark, has started moving supplies to Iraq and four neighbouring countries for 550,000 people inside Iraq and another 160,000 expected to spill into neighbouring states.
A major source of tension in the planning is the relationship between the emergency operation and the large UN “oil-for-food” programme that has been overseeing relief supplies inside Iraq for the past seven years.
The UN estimates that 16 million Iraqis, or 60 per cent of the population, are highly dependent on the monthly food basket provided under the programme | |  | | Guest | | Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2002 8:12 am Post subject: Zionist Warmonger Rumsfeld Blows Hard for War |
| WASHINGTON (Dec. 23) - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned North Korea on Monday against seizing on Iraq to press a nuclear weapons program and said Washington could fight and win two wars at once.
''I have no reason to believe that you're correct that North Korea feels emboldened because of the world's interest in Iraq,'' he told a reporter after Pyongyang took steps over the weekend to unfreeze a nuclear reactor.
''If they do, it would be a mistake,'' he added at a Pentagon briefing, saying the U.S. military was perfectly capable of fighting two major regional conflicts at once, if necessary.
''We are capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other,'' he said. ''Let there be no doubt about it.''
North Korea said on Sunday it had dismantled U.N. monitoring equipment at a nuclear reactor it had mothballed under a 1994 non-proliferation deal with the United States aimed at ending its suspected nuclear weapons program.
Pyongyang said it was reactivating the Yongbyon reactor to generate electricity. But the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, said the North also had broken U.N. seals on about 8,000 spent fuel rods in a cooling pond at Yongbyon -- a possible prelude to recovering weapons-grade plutonium.
The Clinton administration had been prepared to go to war in 1994 to bar the reclusive communist state from extracting plutonium that could be used to build as many as five or six nuclear bombs in as little as four or five months.
Asked if President Bush's administration would stick to such a policy, known as the ''red line'' beyond which Washington would brook no North Korean brinksmanship, Rumsfeld said, ''The situation today is somewhat different from then.''
Secretary of State Colin Powell consulted France, Russia and Britain on Monday and said the United States wanted a peaceful resolution, said State Department spokesman Philip Reeker.
''We will not give in to blackmail,'' he said. ''And we're not going to bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements that it has signed.''
''PERFECTLY RATIONAL''
Rumsfeld said diplomacy ''seems to me a perfectly rational way of proceeding,'' drawing a distinction with Iraq, where he said many years of diplomacy had fallen ''flat on its face.''
''The situation in North Korea is a fairly recent one,'' he went on. ''The diplomacy that's under way there is in its early stages with the United States and the interested neighboring countries.''
In Moscow, Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov accused Bush on Monday of having goaded North Korea by branding it an ''axis of evil'' state along with Iraq and Iran. Bush did so in his State of the Union address in January.
''How should a small country feel when it is told that it is all but part of forces of evil of biblical proportions and should be fought against until total annihilation?'' Mamedov told the Vremya Novostei daily newspaper.
The State Department dismissed his comments as absurd, noting they contrasted with the official Foreign Ministry reaction.
North Korea said it was unfreezing Yongbyon after the United States and other countries halted fuel supplies to sanction a once-secret highly enriched uranium program acknowledged by Pyongyang in October.
Rumsfeld said the country had no need for the reactor, which was at the heart of a crisis defused by an oil-for-nuclear compliance deal known as the 1994 Agreed Framework.
''They don't need a nuclear power plant,'' he said. ''Their power grid couldn't even absorb that.''
Analysts said Pyongyang appeared intent on leveraging U.S. preoccupation with Iraq to press its demand for a nonaggression pact and an end to what it views as a U.S.-led economic isolation campaign.
''The North Koreans probably have concluded that they have some flexibility now in committing provocative acts without a high risk of U.S. retaliation,'' said Larry Niksch of the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a policy research group, said Pyongyang may have concluded that a victory in Iraq would boost U.S. clout with reluctant partners, adding to its isolation.
Peter Brookes, the Pentagon's former chief policymaker on the North, told Reuters Pyongyang was involved in a ''very dangerous game of brinksmanship, extortion and opportunism.''
Reuters 17:09 12-23-02 | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
