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With Calcium and bribes, US ready for war
NEW YORK- Ralph Nader, a former presidential aspirant and one of America's foremost consumer advocates, once remarked that the real "weapons of mass destruction" are double cheeseburgers served in fast food restaurants which are primarily responsible for the growing obesity among Americans.

And that's a far cry from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons which the US is relentlessly pursuing in Iraq- but not in India, Pakistan or Israel.

Last week a full-page ad in the New York Times, replete with hundreds of signatures, proclaimed in bold headlines that the impending US war with Iraq was President George W. Bush's "Weapon of Mass Distraction."

The ad said that the Bush administration is pushing for a new conflict in the Middle East because it will "take our minds off our failing economy, our broken education system, the environmental meltdown, the healthcare emergency, the raids on social security, the corporate scandals and the new $157 billion budget deficit."

The signatories said: "We the people of the United States, are not willing to send our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, to die for politics or oil."
The war is inspired essentially by a domestic agenda for an upcoming election. And both politics and oil are right on top of that agenda. So far, the US and Britain appear to be the only two countries determined to wage a war that could result in the deaths of hundreds and thousands of Iraqi civilians and American soldiers.

The Pentagon has estimated that in a ground war involving about 250,000 US soldiers, there is a probability of about 10 percent casualties on the American side.

If US forces enter Baghdad, the civilian casualties on the Iraqi side could be equally horrendous.

By all reckoning, it is a heavy price to pay for the elimination of a single obdurate head of state who continues to defy the US while sitting on top of the world's second largest reserves of oil: a commodity the Americans are willing to die for.

At the United Nations, the remaining three veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council - France, China and Russia - are standing tough. A visibly annoyed Bush lashed out at the world body last week when he said that the United Nations lacks backbone - because it is not willing to play the game by his rule book.

"And we will work with members of the Security Council to put a little calcium in the backbone, so this organisation is able to more likely to keep the peace as we go on down the road," he added.

But behind closed doors, the horse-trading has begun as Americans exert pressure on Council members. The Russians are seeking guarantees of profitable commercial deals if Iraq falls into the hands of the US or in the alternative they want American silence over Russian atrocities in Chechnya.

The Chinese are willing to abstain if the Americans will keep their traps shut on human rights violations and suppression of a Muslim uprising in China. France wants to ensure that a newly-democratic Iraq under a US command - Afghanistan-style - will help the French get back their onetime prolific arms market in Baghdad.

As it seeks the blessings of the "international community," the US is desperately in need of a Security Council resolution.

To get this, the US needs nine positive votes in the 15-member Council - and no vetoes. Besides the five veto-wielding members, the Council also has 10 non-permanent members with no vetoes.

Of the 10 non-permanent members, the US is expected to receive support from Norway, Bulgaria, Singapore, Colombia and Ireland. The other five non-permanent members, namely Mexico, Mauritius, Cameroon, Guinea and Syria, are being heavily lobbied by the US, mostly in their respective capitals.

Phyllis Bennis, Fellow of the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies, says the US effort to win support in the Security Council is already leading to the kind of over-the-top bribes and threats that characterised the run-up in 1990 to the passage of resolution 678 authorising war against Iraq.

At that time, she said, every impoverished country on the Security Council, including the former Zaire, Ethiopia and Colombia, were offered free or extra-cheap oil, courtesy of Saudi Arabia and the exiled Kuwaiti royals, orchestrated by the United States.

Ethiopia and Colombia were also offered new arms packages, after years of being denied military aid, because of war and human rights violations.

The only two countries that voted against the 1990 resolution authorising a war against Iraq were Cuba and Yemen. But minutes after Yemen said "no'', the US ambassador turned to the Yemeni diplomat in the Security Council chamber, and said: ''That will be the most expensive vote you would ever cast.'' Three days later, said Bennis, the US slashed its $70 million aid budget to Yemen.

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