Greenpeace is opposed to the war against Iraq. We are part of the Stop the War coalition and will continue to campaign for a peaceful, diplomatic solution.
Greenpeace opposes the war because:
- It will have devastating human and environmental consequences.
Most of the health, water, sanitation and power systems in Iraq, destroyed during the last Gulf war, remain unrestored. Food supplies depend almost entirely on rationing, which is vulnerable to civil disorder and administrative breakdown.
A conventional war (one in which no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons are used) could kill over a quarter of a million people, most of them civilians. (The last Gulf War killed 200,000 Iraqis). Famine disease and social dislocation could kill another 250,000. If the war escalates to involve chemical or nuclear attack, casualties could be as high as four million, and there would be a legacy of toxic and nuclear contamination to deal with for generations to come. - Bush is clearly trying to get control on Iraq's oil reserves.
As Nelson Mandela has said, an attack on Iraq would be "clearly motivated by George W Bush's desire to please the arms and oil industries of the USA". Iraq's known oil reserves are second in size only to Saudi Arabia's. The head of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella opposition group, has said that "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil" if he is running the country.
The company that would benefit most from 'regime change' in Iraq, according to analysts at Deutsche Bank, is ExxonMobil (Esso in the UK), a company that funded Republican candidates to the tune of more than $1.2 million in 2000. ExxonMobil is also behind Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and admits that it has a vested interest in keeping the US hooked on oil. This is why Greenpeace, with other groups, is calling on everyone to boycott its products.
The British Government has also announced that one of the top five priorities for foreign policy is securing access to energy supplies. Yet Blair still denies that an attack on Iraq has anything to do with oil. - War is an ineffective way to deal with weapons of mass destruction
We fully support peacefully disarming Iraq, and indeed all nations that have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including the United Kingdom. But pre-emptive war against states possessing or suspected of possessing WMD do not provide a stable basis for controlling or abolishing them. This approach would require repeated armed interventions against numerous countries. States known to have nuclear weapons outside of any form of international control include India, Pakistan and Israel; North Korea is openly seeking to acquire them . The Bush administration has stated that at least 13 countries are pursuing biological weapons research. Does Bush intend to attack each of these in turn?
What is needed instead is a collective international arms control and disarmament system. The framework already exists through formal bodies such as the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, and treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention.
But rather than being strengthened, this delicate framework is being undermined by the hypocrisy of existing nuclear weapons states, and by the actions of the Bush administration in particular. If Bush and Blair are genuinely concerned about WMD, they should recommit themselves to the processes of arms control, nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.
