New PressInfo on TFF's site from June 8, 2002

T F F   P r e s s I n f o   1 5 2

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June 11, 2002

A   U S   W A R   A G A I N S T   I R A Q   M U S T   B E   P R E V E N T E D   N O W

Christian Harleman, TFF board & Jan Oberg, TFF director

Remember von Clausewitz's brilliant formulation: "before you go to war you must decide what kind of peace you want.

" With 200,000 U.S. troops and possibly some more sucked in during the fighting, what will the U.S. and the West do to control and run the affairs of Iraq? In short, how do you govern 25 million people, many, if not the majority, of whom are vehemently opposed to the West and do not trust the U.S. after all they have been through?

>From where do the war planners and responsible foreign-policy makers expect to gather enough well-educated, experienced and honest Iraqis to run the post-Saddam Iraq they hope for? Would they serve a foreign Governement for anything but the money and privileges they expect and would they, with that main motivation, be the leaders and civil servants the citizens need? Or would we end up witnessing civil war, coups, plots and uprisings - of which there exists plenty in Iraq's modern history - in the wake of a U.S. invasion and departure?

What would it mean for the citizens of Iraq if the UN and the incredibly hardworking humanitarian organisations, Care, Unicef, Caritas, Red Cross Federation, ICRC, etc. were forced to evacuate? The Oil for Food program (to which we shall return in a later PressInfo) operates efficiently thanks to both the Iraqi government - whose distribution of food and medicine in the words of a high-ranking international is "second to none in actually reaching those in need" - and to the wide variety of national and international humanitarian organisations.

No one who has visited Iraq can possibly doubt that a new war will have unspeakably cruel consequences for the civilian population. Everybody also knows that the Iraqi elite has not exactly suffered at any point due to the sanctions or the bombings.

This is the first PressInfo in a series about Iraq, based upon TFF's fact-finding mission.

© TFF 2002 Y

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