Find amicable solution to festering Iraq issue

August 2nd marked a dozen years since Iraq's surprise invasion of Kuwait. That day is indelibly imprinted on my psyche. I can never forget my own emotions when I first learned the shocking news from an irate colleague while at my desk in Dubai.

From that day forward Christiane Amanpour, a novice reporter with CNN, and a youthful looking Peter Arnett, became regular guests in our homes and we lived and breathed "the war".

I can also never forget the day the war was over either. Not only is February 28 – my birthday – on that day in '91, I rode through the streets waving a UAE flag out of the roof of my car like many thousands of others, joyous that the threat was gone.

Little did I realise then that while the conflict was over for us, the suffering was only just beginning for the Iraqi people. Neither did I envisage the prospect of the Iraqi people being hurled into a war, not of their own making, some 10 years on.

A comprehensive report issued jointly on August 6 2002 by 10 major non-governmental organisations in association with Save the Children UK says that Iraq's humanitarian suffering is being held hostage to international power politics.

The report goes on to state: Over 400,000 Iraqi children, under the age of five, have died due to the results of the punishing UN sanctions. Over one-quarter of the under-fives suffer chronic malnutrition and in marked contrast to pre-'91 days, the Iraqis suffer one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the world.

Only 41 per cent of the population have regular access to clean water. Stress and psychiatric illnesses have ravaged families and society.

Despite the Oil-for-Food programme, which provides a mere $200 annually per capita, Iraqi citizens subsist on an exceedingly low per capita income which may be at or below the $1 per day World Bank threshold of absolute poverty.

Surely the West should be helping these people, not planning to bomb them! The report calls for the integration of Iraq back into the world community, an end to sanctions and to U.S./UK bombing of the North and South of that country, and the unfreezing of Iraq's overseas assets in return for Iraq allowing weapons' inspectors back in.

The U.S. president, on the other hand, demands an enforced regime change with little consideration for humanitarian concerns and the loss of innocent lives this will inevitably entail.

This begs the question: Is Saddam Hussain really an evil dictator threatening the rest of the world with weapons of mass destruction as Bush likes to portray him? In January 2000 during his State of the Union speech, the American leader referred to Iraq as a 'terrorist state' in his usual good versus evil style rhetoric.

We all saw the U.S. attempts to link Hussein with 9-11, firstly by erroneously announcing that one of the 19 hijackers had met with an Iraqi secret service agent in Prague and later unsuccessfully trying to link Iraq with the anthrax scare.

Foiled in regards to a 9-11 linkage, the American administration has changed its tactic and now insists that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Bush, flushed from his regime-change success in Afghanistan, wants to finish the job his father left undone and rid the world of Saddam. Did I say success? Only a success in so far as the U.S. spin-masters, in both the government and the media, attempt to paint it while ignoring the fact that Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Ayman Al Zawahiri are still on the loose.

In recent months, two Afghan ministers have been assassinated and the Afghan President Hamid Karzai is walking around with burly American military minders.

Evaluating pros and cons

While the hawks in the White House and the Pentagon, with Dick Cheney at the helm, push for a military solution to what they perceive as an omnipresent menace to humanity in the form of Saddam, Congress is in the process of evaluating the pros and cons of such an attack.

Gulf War veteran, ex-Green Beret and military analyst to Fox News Bob Bevelaqua says that the military option "isn't going to be a cakewalk. We don't want to be caught up in a Bin Laden/Mullah Omar scenario - 'I just saw Elvis in the valley again'".

He also warns of Hussein's intention to take the fighting to the urban centres, instead of the desert, which will lead to huge losses in civilian lives.

The British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who since 9-11 has shown his fidelity towards the Bush administration, and has tentatively supported a military option to topple Saddam is coming under ever-increasing pressure from his own ministers and backbenchers to recall parliament from its summer recess. Many in his cabinet believe that parliament should vote on the wisdom of proceeding along this aggressive road.

One of many British parliamentarians who is completely opposed to any adventure in Iraq is the Scottish MP George Galloway who has said: "Only the U.S. and some British ministers seem to be ready to involve themselves in what would be an act of savage madness."

Blair may, indeed, be getting cold feet and finding it more and more challenging to support the American stance.

According to a poll conducted by Channel 4 only 34 per cent of the British people would support any war with Iraq, while another British telephone poll puts the 'nay-sayers' as high as 91 per cent.

An outspoken Oxford Science Don, Richard Dawkins, told The Guardian that Bush was just as much a danger to world peace as Saddam, adding: "It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair were to be brought down through playing poodle to the non-elected and deeply stupid little oil-spiv."

Is America's hostile stance towards Iraq little but an attempt to protect Israel? Israel is the militarily strongest player in the region with stocks of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and yet America chooses only to point a finger at Saddam, saying that the Iraqi leader cannot be trusted.

Even if we can sympathise with this hypothesis, it is hard to understand why the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – found responsible by an Israeli commission for the massacres in the Lebanese refugee camps , Sabra and Shatila – is seen as being any less likely to set-off a nuclear holocaust.

Surely the man behind the war crimes committed in Jenin and responsible for dropping a one tonne bomb into a heavily populated area in Gaza, should not be trusted with weapons of mass destruction either?

Bush has already given the green light to Israel to retaliate in the event that it comes under attack from Iraq, unlike his more circumspect father who restrained Israel's hand during the Gulf War in a successful attempt at limiting the conflict.

The Editor of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds, Abdel-Bari Atwan has a more practical view of America's motives believing that the U.S. is out to control the Iraqi oilfields to boost its own flagging economy.

In the meantime, Saddam is winning the public relations battle. He has offered to have further talks with the UN concerning weapons inspectors and was told that whether he agreed to their return or not, this would not change Bush's demands to to