OPPOSITION CONTINUES
In the run-up to the debate in the Security Council, opposition to a war gathered steam. One of the principal opponents of an attack on Iraq has been Pope John Paul II, whose personal envoy, Cardinal Pio Laghi met last week with Bush in the Oval Office.
Following the meeting the cardinal gave little away on the message he took from the pontiff.
“The purpose of my visit was to deliver a personal message of the Holy Father to the president regarding the Iraqi crisis, to expound upon the Holy See’s position and to report on the various initiatives undertaken by the Holy See to contribute to disarmament and peace in the Middle East”, the envoy said in remarks to the National Press Club.
“Out of respect for the president and because of the importance of this moment, I am not in a position to discuss the substance of our conversation, nor am I able to release the text of the personal letter of the Holy Father to the president”.
However, as Laghi relayed a likely anti-war message from the pope, Bush made clear his intention was to disarm Iraq, a White House spokeswoman said.
The US president “recalled his obligations to the American people” during the 30-minute meeting, and he also “stressed the importance of protecting the Iraqi people”.
The pope has repeatedly expressed his opposition to US moves to launch military strikes on Iraq, stating last week that such a war lacked moral or legal justification.
The cardinal’s plea for Bush to pull back from the brink of war came as the pontiff pressed for international efforts to avoid war in an address to mark Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent in the Western Church.
The pope said world leaders should “examine their consciences” and “work together to spare humanity another dramatic conflict”, and he urged Christians around the globe to pray and fast on Ash Wednesday to remind people of the long years of suffering endured by Iraqi citizens as a result of an international embargo since the 1991 Gulf War.
The pontiff’s Ash Wednesday appeal was supported by the World Council of Churches, which brings together most of the world’s Eastern Orthodox and Protestant denominations. In London, two lawyers argued that a war against Iraq, even with a new UN resolution, would be a clear violation of international law.
Even if a resolution overcameFrench, German and Russian opposition and cleared the UN Security Council, it would not sanction war, said lawyers Rabinder Singh and Charlotte Kilroy of Matrix Chambers in London.
The draft resolution -- submitted to the United Nations by Britain, the United States and Spain -- asserts that Iraq has “failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in Resolution 1441” adopted last November.
But a legal opinion by Singh and Kilroy on behalf of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and other anti-war groups said that this wording “would not authorize the United States and the United Kingdom to use force against Iraq if [the resolution] were adopted.
“In the present circumstances as known to us, if there is no further resolution clearly authorizing force, the US and the UK would be acting in violation of international law if they were to attack Iraq”.
Singh and Kilroy’s legal opinion will form part of an international campaign by lawyers and non-governmental organizations to hold Washington and London accountable in law for any conflict.
Lawyers in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and other countries will be using their argument to pressure their governments to act in accordance with the law.
Philip Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, a campaigning group specializing in international law, said: “This opinion leaves no room for doubt. Without a specific Security Council authorization war will be illegal. This draft does not give that authorization”.
CND chairman Carol Naughton said the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair “wants it both ways. It is fully aware that all this talk about a ‘second resolution’ is just a smokescreen for illegality and is trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes”.
The Foreign Office said declined to comment, saying it had yet to see the legal opinion. But a government source said that the legal authority for war was contained in Resolution 1441.
“If it is not explicit in the draft, it is implicit because it refers back to 1441 in which the authority for war is explicit”, the FO source said.
In a related development, some 7,000 peace demonstrators marched in the Scottish capital Edinburgh last week, while a petition against war on Iraq signed by students and faculty at Oxford University was to be hand-delivered to Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The demonstrators, some carrying signs showing Blair’s head glued to Conservative former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s body, marched in front of the United States consulate before converging on the Scottish Parliament building.
Labor MP for Glasgow George Galloway told the cheering crowd: “The UN is being bullied corrupted and threatened. This war is not about diplomacy. It is about gangsterism and the British government is playing a crucial role”.
Scottish Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan said that according to the World Health Organization, the first 48 hours of war could unleash up to 800 cruise missiles upon Iraq, killing up to 500,000 people.
At Oxford University, more than 700 staff and 1,300 students signed a petition against military action in Iraq, to be delivered to Blair’s Downing Street offices.
Among their number were four current and former college heads, 29 fellows of the Royal Society and British Academy and nearly 80 professors, including the master of Balliol College, Andrew Graham.
The petition was set up by two Oxford students at St. Catherine’s College, Una Galani, a first-year English undergraduate, and Kimon Daltas, a graduate student in music.
Daltas said: “The number and intellectual caliber of the people who have signed this petition is proof that opposition to the war is not a case of foolish pacifism, but of knowledgeable concern about its legitimacy”.
In Washington Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy called for more time for UN weapons inspectors to do their work in Iraq, stressing that the Bush Administration had not made a case for war.
“Al-Qaeda -- not Iraq -- is the most imminent threat to our national security. Our citizens are asked to protect themselves from Ossama [bin Laden] with plastic sheets and duct tape, while the Administration prepares to send our armed forces to war against Iraq. Those priorities are wrong”, the Massachusetts senator said in remarks to a Methodist legislative conference.
“The Administration has not made a convincing case for war against Iraq, or its costs, or its consequences”, Kennedy suggested, adding, “War with Iraq runs the very serious risk of inflaming the Middle East and provoking a massive new wave of anti-Americanism in other countries that may well strengthen the terrorists, especially if the Muslim world opposes us.
“War must always be a last resort. All options must be pursued. Inspections still have a chance to work. Progress is difficult. But as long as inspectors are on the ground and making progress, we must give peace a chance, so that war with Iraq does not distract us from dealing as effectively as possible with the obvious and ongoing threat of terrorism by Al-Qaeda and the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
“We cannot be a bully in the world school yard and expect cooperation, friendship and support from the rest of the world”.

IRAQ’S KURDS FEAR A ‘BETRAYAL’
After years of being gassed, bombed, executed or fleeing in terror, Iraq’s Kurds should have been all smiles when a US envoy told them that President Saddam Hussein’s days were numbered.
But after a key meeting at Salahaddin, in the Kurdish-controlled area of Northern Iraq, between the Iraqi opposition and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush’s point man on regime change, Kurdish officials were left wondering whether their dreams of turning the page on a long history of suffering was about to be cast aside again by Washington.
Chief among Kurdish concerns was the status of a deal between the United States and Turkey, the political and military details of which have yet to be disclosed but are subject to alarmist speculation.
In return for the use of Turkish soil as a launch pad to attack Baghdad -- and therefore a key northern front -- the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) said it feared Washington had given Ankara the green light to pour in thousands of Turkish troops into Northern Iraq.
Officially, Turkey insists it only wants to forestall a refugee crisis as well as the creation of an independent Kurdish state which could set an example to its own restive Kurd community.
But Sami Abdelrahman, the KDP’s deputy prime minister, said it was more a case of Turkey seeking to grab back an area that used to be a part of the Ottoman Empire, from which modern Turkey and Iraq were carved out after World War I.
“This is 19th-century expansionism and colonialism”, he said, hitting out at the US in a comment that was to overshadow the four days of opposition talks in Salahaddin.
“To allow Turkish forces into Iraqi Kurdistan despite the total objection of our people is a betrayal”, he said.
KDP leader Massoud Barzani was also fuming at the meeting’s closing press conference.
“Even if Turkish troops are under US command, this is not acceptable to us. The Americans are perfectly aware of our position... and the Kurdish people will rise to the challenge of any conspiricy”.
Although Turkey’s Parliament unexpectedly refused to allow US forces to deploy on its soil, the KDP said it had been led to believe up to 40,000 Turkish forces could establish a 25-kilometer-deep buffer zone into Iraqi Kurdistan if Ankara finally strikes a deal with Washington.
Such a presence could deny the Kurds key border crossings to their other neighbors Syria and Iran, and by consequence lucrative revenues from customs duties, revenues which have helped keep the state-within-a-state afloat since it fell out of Baghdad’s control in 1991.
The Iraqi Kurds are also enraged at suggestions that Ankara wants a say in the formation of a post-Saddam government, and may be wanting the estimated 60,000-strong peshmerga, or Kurdish militiamen, disarmed.
“The peshmerga will not be disarmed, in fact they will be armed more!” shouted Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) leader Jalal Talabani when asked if he was ready to start handing over weapons.
The spat was also an unwelcome distraction at a time when the Kurds would prefer to have been busy looking south towards a strip of territory between the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, where one-third of Iraq’s oil is tapped and which they see as within their future federal boundaries.
But in this the Kurds are also hitting problems: Turkey is concerned the oil could bankroll independence moves, and Northern Iraq’s largest ethnic Turkmen party -- which insists Kirkuk and Mosul are not majority Kurd -- are threatening to call in their big brothers from the north if the Kurds roll into the cities.
Furthermore, the control of Iraq’s oil fields and the distribution of their wealth remains uncertain.
Several delegates meeting in Salahaddin, political headquarters of the KDP, said US special envoy Khalilzad had asked the opposition to agree to US “protection” of the oil fields for an undisclosed period -- a demand that was rejected.
Khalilzad, a hawkish former oil executive of Afghan extraction, asserted that oil was not discussed but said “securing Iraqi infrastructure... for the benefit of the Iraqi people would be one of the objectives of the coalition should the use of force become necessary”.
The White House, meanwhile, hailed as “courageous” the Iraqi opposition meeting and renewed its commitment to a broad-based government in a post-Saddam Iraq.
For its part, the New York-based group Human Rights Watch on has expressed concern over Turkey’s plans to send troops to northern Iraq in case of war because of the country’s poor record in its own bloody struggle against Kurdish rebels.
“If Turkish operations in Northern Iraq bear any resemblance to those in Southeastern Turkey, we can expect to see a human rights disaster”, Elizabeth Andersen, the groups’ executive director of the Europe and Central Asia division, said in a statement.
Human Rights Watch called on Turkey not to use suspected or convicted rights offenders in any operation, and urged independent monitoring of a possible Turkish military intervention.
Turkey was involved in a heavy crackdown on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which waged a 15-year armed campaign for Kurdish self-rule in Southeastern Turkey.
More than 36,000 people, most of them PKK rebels, were killed in the conflict, which led to allegations of gross human rights violations on both sides.
The group also called for close scrutiny by four of Turkey’s NATO allies -- the United States, Britain, France and Germany -- which have sold weapons to Ankara.
“Military assistance should not be a one-off decision to offload weaponry and then move on... It should entail monitoring and reporting to ensure that the arms are used responsibly, inaccordance with the laws of war,” Andersen said.

REGIME CHANGE ‘WOULD DO LITTLE FOR IRAQI STABILITY’
Overthrowing Saddam Hussein might give the United States more clout in the Middle East and beyond, but it would not necessarily guarantee a safer, more stable Iraq over the longer term, according to Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs.
In a report, “Iraq: The Regional Fallout”, the London-based research group explored three scenarios for Iraq if war breaks out -- a quick US military victory and occupation, a coup d’etat against Saddam, and a Vietnam-style protracted military conflict.
“Regime change in Baghdad will deliver to the US much greater regional and international leverage, but it may well not affect the socio-political dynamics within Iraq itself.
“If so, both the coup d’etat and the US victory scenarios would preserve the status quo in the region, but would also leave Iraq as a potential source of violence, instability and WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in the medium and long term”, it said.
It rated the chances of a coup against Saddam as “not great”, while a quick victory would tempt Washington to take a “minimalist approach” to deal with Iraq’s internal problems -- not least because US voters will want Bush to focus more on a flagging US economy.
Protracted conflict, meanwhile, would produce “the worst possible outcome” for Iraqis, the world community and Bush himself, depending on the success of Saddam’s plans for stalling a US invasion.
“Iraq’s plans to defend itself have made a virtue out of necessity”, the report said, with the command of Iraqi troops decentralized “down to the lowest possible level” and centered on urban areas.
“The hope is that by giving local control to a senior military officer, resistance will continue even if Baghdad is cut off”, the report said.
On the regional fallout of an Iraq war, the institute said Syria and Jordan would be economically hard hit by the disruption of oil and trade links built up over years of UN sanctions on Iraq.
Turkey’s economy would also be hit, but the bigger concern for Ankara will be the impact among its large Kurdish community of any bid by Iraqi Kurds to assert formal political independence in the midst of war.
Iran, meanwhile, would have mixed feelings: it would not regret seeing the back of Saddam, but at the same time it would see US intervention as another episode in its encirclement by US forces and client states.
In addition, all Iraq’s neighbors -- Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey -- expect a “flood” of refugees that they will not want to accommodate for more than a short period, the report said.
“In this respect, the neighboring states will have an interest in seeing a US-led war move swiftly to a decisive outcome, enabling rehabilitation and rebuilding”.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, is one of Britain’s most respected foreign policy think-tanks. Six of its Middle East experts contributed to the report.