Iran warned the United States on Monday against establishing an interim military government in neighbouring Iraq if it pushes ahead with plans to invade.
”I hope this information on installing a US military officer in charge of Iraq is only a rumour,” said Iraq’s foreign ministry representative Hamid Reza Asefi.
He cautioned that such talk, first floated in a New York Times article and then later confirmed by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, ”is perhaps part of the psychological war, but those who advocate such ideas do not know the reality of the region.”
Asefi urged the international community to consult with Middle Eastern countries before striking Iraq. Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a trusted advisor to Iran’s supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, meanwhile, reiterated Iran’s neutrality in case of a US attack.
”I hope that no war breaks out. But in case of a US attack against Iraq, we will observe a position of neutrality,” he said. On Sunday Rafsanjani also criticised plans for a US military occupation of Iraq, saying it would only increase anti-US feeling in the region.
In Turkey on Monday, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami spoke out loud and clear against any US war plan. ”The world and our region are facing a very dangerous initiative … We are opposed to any unilateral action against Iraq,” Khatami told fellow leaders of the 10-member Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO), the Anatolia news agency reported.
Khatami also called on Baghdad to fulfill its ”international obligations” and conform with UN security council resolutions. Countries in the region should ”protect Iraq’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” he added.
Meanwhile, Iraq was already fighting on all fronts: at home a presidential referendum, abroad a campaign to win over Arabs and other ”friends” and internationally a rearguard action at the United Nations.
Domestically, Iraq has mobilised to ensure the absolute success of a vote to give President Saddam Hussein a new seven-year term of office.
”Iraqis, Arab Kurds and members of the minorities say ‘Yes’ to the leader Saddam Hussein,” reads a giant banner in the arrivals hall of Saddam International airport. The authorities hope to better the 99,96% the incumbent won in the last and first referendum in 1995.
Tuesday’s vote, for which the doors have been opened to hundreds of foreign journalists, will herald ”the ultimate victory against aggressors,” said Monday’s Iraq Daily, quoting the official Iraqi News Agency.
The journalists however are showing less interest in the referendum than the atmosphere in Baghdad ahead of the anticipated unleashing of US military might against a country broken by 12 years of UN sanctions.
On the diplomatic front, Iraq has sounded the warning bells. Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz predicted at the weekend in Beirut that an attack on Iraq would only be the prelude to a series of interventions the United States is lining up to bring the whole region under its boot. However until today, and despite Arab neighbours being formally against a war on Iraq, there has been no real movement to support Baghdad against Washington’s strategy.
Even on the streets, after repeated appeals to the Arab masses, little has happened in the Arab world. It is in the West, even the United States and as far away as Australia that the biggest protests against another US-led war have taken place.
Worse still for Iraq, US war preparations are steaming ahead. Washington is dispatching more troops to neighbouring Kuwait, which Iraq invaded in 1990 only to be ousted seven months later, and the US army is shifting a major command centre to nearby Qatar, if only temporarily for the time being.
At the United Nations, Iraq has repeatedly offered full cooperation for the return of UN weapons inspectors, after nearly four years of refusing to entertain any resumption of monitoring. Baghdad sent two letters to the world body and one to Vienna over the weekend to try to ensure the inspectors will come back despite US efforts to first push through a new Security Council resolution giving the experts a far stronger mandate which can be automatically enforced militarily.
Anywhere, any time, including so-called sensitive presidential sites, seems to be Iraq’s message to the inspectors. However Washington picked up on the differing contents of the letters themselves, as well as previous unfulfilled pledges, to dismiss them as more ”word play” from the regime.
The stage is now set for debate at the UN Security Council on Wednesday when French and Russian resistance to Washington’s demand for the right to use force the moment Iraq disobeys will come under close scrutiny.
Baghdad meanwhile is clinging to October 19 as a date for the return of inspectors. – Sapa-AFP