Administration Officials Defend Operation Iraqi Freedom

By Michael F. Flach
HERALD Staff Writer
(From the issue of 4/10/03)

Bush Administration officials last week defended Operation Iraqi Freedom in the face of growing anti-war sentiment both in the U.S. and abroad, especially from the Vatican.

This war clearly meets the Just War test "and not just at the margins," said Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council’s senior director of Near East and North African Affairs.

Abrams said "the nexus of the problem" is the combination of worldwide terrorism and the availability of weapons of mass destruction. Faced with the real possibility that 300,000 innocent U.S. civilians could be targeted by the next terrorist attack, "it is a risk that the president could not take," he said.

The primary purpose of the war is to eliminate the threat of terrorism, he said. "A by-product of the war is the liberation of the Iraqi people."

Abrams told a group of Catholic and religious journalists gathered in Washington that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is "a proportional use of force" that has destroyed only military targets with precision bombing. "We don’t want to destroy the infrastructure (schools, hospitals, historic and religious sites), and not because we don’t want to pay to rebuild them."

"We are waging the most humanitarian war that has ever been waged," said Jay Lefkowitz, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.

Abrams and Lefkowitz were responding to specific comments coming from "the people in Rome," including Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, who said the Iraqi conflict would generate terrorism and seriously wound Christian-Muslim dialogue.

"This war will generate all the extremisms possible, including the Islamic one," the archbishop said. "We must be aware of this. It will provoke terrorism. And it will inflict a great wound on the dialogue between Christianity and Islam."

Archbishop Tauran said the Vatican's outspoken opposition to the war had served a purpose even if it ultimately failed to prevent the conflict.

The Vatican "must be the voice of conscience," he said, and it spoke out to defend the value of peace, life, human rights and "above all the necessity of always making recourse to law." The archbishop denied that Vatican statements against the war were motivated by any anti-American sentiment, saying the Vatican greatly appreciated U.S. Catholics' social and charitable commitment and see Americans as "a great people."

Abrams said the administration plans to bring relief to the victims, as well as freedom. "It will be the largest relief effort in history," he said.

Already U.S. and British forces are bringing water from Kuwait and have opened Iraq’s port. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is expected to move 600,000 tons of wheat into Iraq, Abrams said.

USAID Administrator Andrew S. Natsios announced last week the contribution of an additional $200 million to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) for Iraq. This cash contribution will be used to procure approximately 324,000 metric tons of food, enough to feed 23 million Iraqis for one month.

This donation is urgently needed to provide food for the people of Iraq, and will contribute to immediate needs until additional U.S.-donated food arrives and the U.N. Oil-for-Food deliveries resume.

"This new contribution reinforces the U.S. government's commitment to meeting the humanitarian needs of the people of Iraq through our assistance program," said Natsios. "We intend to work hard to continue to increase the Iraqi people's access to food and health services."

More than 260,000 metric tons of U.S.-donated wheat, rice, vegetable oil and other commodities are already en route to Iraq, and an additional 400,000 metric tons are available as a contingency option as needed. In total, the U.S. government is providing 590,000 metric tons of food worth approximately $375 million, and $60 million in cash for costs associated with food distribution.

When asked what will be the fate of the Christian minority in Iraq after the war, Abrams replied that the U.S. will help Iraq’s varied ethnic and religious population write a new constitution with human rights guarantees and move the Iraqi people toward democratic elections.

Abrams said Saddam Hussein, if he’s still alive, could be dreaming or hoping that a third party like Russia or France will step in and ask for a ceasefire so that he can negotiate to stay in power. "That will not happen," he said.

The risk of the Iraqi army using chemical and biological weapons is still a possibility, Abrams said, but the administration has made it clear that it will punish anyone who uses these weapons of mass destruction as war criminals.

The administration is hopeful that even if Saddam gives the order, that the threat of prosecution, including the death penalty, will be enough to deter Iraqi generals from carrying out that order, he said.

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