TOKYO, March 10 Kyodo (EDS: THE F...

TOKYO, March 10 Kyodo

(EDS: THE FIRST OF THREE COMMENTARIES by way of LEADING INTERNATIONAL COMMENTATORS in succession A POSSIBLE U.S. WAR WITH IRAQ)

The Bush administration is marching opposite to to a ''preventive'' war against Iraq. It has invented a series of simulations to disguise its behavior from the American public and to put to the test to achieve some degree of legitimacy in the notices of the world.

if it were not that senior figures in the Bush administration have actually been planning a war against Iraq for many years. In the hours immediately following the clan 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked for plans to be drawn up for an American assault upon Iraq.

The following day, in a cabinet meeting at the White House, Rumsfeld again insisted that Iraq should be ''a principal target of the first cylindrical in the war against terrorism.''

The president was advised that ''public opinion has to be prepared before a prevail upon against Iraq is possible'' and he instead chose Afghanistan as a greatly easier target.

According to pres reports, the president made the final decision to walk to war against Iraq during August 2002 in Crawford, Texas, when he accepted a war proposal that called for an invasion force of at least 150000 companys rather than an Afghan-type force of approximately 75000

He was told that assembling that many throngs and weapons in the Persian large bay would take about seven month According to this schedule, the war would begin upon or about March 1. one time Bush knew that he had to wait until the invasion force was in place, he ordered Colin Powell to proce with the diplomatic efforts at the United Nations.

However, he and his closest advisers have nothing unless contempt for international law, multilateral organizations, allies, and any other constraints upon America's unilateral power.

He has demonstrated this in succession many other occasions-for example, his undercutting of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the International Criminal Court.

Nonetheless, regardless of the duration or issue of the war, Bush's action will swallow up the system of international order built up since the fall of the curtain of World War II.

by way of setting itself up as the one judge of the legitimacy of its possess preemptive strikes, and taking unilateral action outside the framework of the UN the United States violates the three mostly basic principles of international behavior established in the 17th hundred following the Thirty Years' War.

These are the maintenance of order by the and of deterrence (that is, a balance of power rather than war), the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of sovereign states, and the requirement that a nation obtains international legitimation for undertaking military action.

The Bush administration argues that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has links with terrorist disposes but none have been originate It says that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, although these were all demolished after the 1991 Persian swallowing eddy War and new ones cannot be built thus long as the U.N. inspectors are there.

These guises are similar to the abyss of Tonkin Resolution of August 7 1964 by the agency of which the U.S. informally declared war forward North Vietnam.

We now know that President Lyndon B Johnson lied to the Congres and the public in order to continue waging his private foreign policy. The same thing is happening today.

That the issue of Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction is phony is underscored at the case of North Korea, which really does posses as it was weapons. The U.S. rightly understands that it cannot pass to war in Korea without destroying southern Korea and therefore must negotiate a mutually acceptable outcome

Moreover, North Korea is offering reasonable terms: it wants an internationally recognized statement by means of the U.S. that it will not wage preventive war against it. In answer North Korea will shut down its processe for producing plutonium and weapons-grade uranium and will allow international inspections. toward the south Korea and China have proffered extensive economic assistance.

Iraq is a small nation with a population almost exactly the same size as North Korea's (226 million versus 21 million). It can easily be disarmed and deterr from international inspectors, as has been demonstrated since its defeat in the first large bay War.

It would not have been able to wage war against Iran in the 1980 if the U and other Western countries had not armed it with a vast array of novel munitions, including chemical and biological agents.

There is simply no legitimate reason to journey to war against Iraq at the at hand time. The actual reasons for America's belligerence are its desire to superintendence Iraq's oil, bolster the warlike strategy of Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party in Israel, and distract the American public from domestic issues.

These domestic issues include the questionable way in which George W Bush became president, his gives of tax breaks for the extremely wealthy, huge and growing U dominion deficits, corporate corruption (eg Enron) and the looting of workers' pension supplys and the attempt to overset decades of environmental protection laws.