Yesterday two warnings were given as to the critical situation in Iraq and of US plans to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iran.
Award-winning US journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib tortures story, warned that US President George Bush is pushing forward plans presented by the Pentagon to launch simultaneous nuclear ‘bunker bomb’ strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The idea of using nuclear weaponry has seen some members of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff considering resigning, but Bush is determined to push ahead, Hersh reports.
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw yesterday denied Hersh’s claim saying: ‘The idea of a nuclear strike on Iran is completely nuts.’
Straw added on the BBC’s Sunday AM programme that although it was right to view the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme with ‘high suspicion, there is no smoking gun, there is no “casus belli”.’
He claimed the UK would not accept a pre-emptive attack on Iran, and he was as ‘certain as he could be’ that neither would the US.
Straw said: ‘We can’t be certain about Iran’s intentions and that is therefore not a basis for which anybody would gain authority to go to military action.’
The UK foreign secretary also disagreed with a warning from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on the situation in Iraq.
On the third anniversary of the deposing of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Mubarak stated that a civil war ‘had pretty well started’ in Iraq.
He was asked by the Al Arabiya TV station what effect an immediate US troops withdrawal from Iraq would have.
Mubarak said: ‘Now? It would be a disaster.’
He added: ‘It would become an arena for a brutal civil war and then terrorist operations would flare up not just in Iraq, but in very many places.
‘It’s not on the threshold (of civil war). It’s pretty much started. There are Sunnis, Shias, Kurds and those types which come from Asia.
‘I do not know when the situation in Iraq will stabilise. I personally do not see a solution to the problem in Iraq, which is practically destroyed now.’
Straw said: ‘I don’t deny for a minute that there’s terrible carnage.
‘Why I hesitate about saying there’s civil war is because we’re on the verge of seeing the beginning of a democratic and permanent government there.
‘It is a high level of slaughter, so I understand why people are saying this.’
He claimed: ‘What’s happening is that (Jordanian al-Qaeda militant) al-Zarqawi and other terrorists associated with al-Qaeda and some of the Ba’athist extremists are trying to provoke a civil war.
‘So far, despite huge slaughter, they have not succeeded, above all, because of the restraint exercised within the Shia community by the Ayatollah Sistani and by other leaders.’
Straw asserted: ‘I have spoken to many Shia leaders in Iraq and indeed elsewhere. So far as Iraq is concerned these people are Shia. . . they are Iraqis first.’
Leaders of the puppet Iraqi government’s dominant Shi’ite alliance were meeting yesterday to discuss the deadlock over forming a new puppet government of national unity, four months after the ‘democratic elections’.
