Projections for 250,000 ground troops in Iraq (including 25,000 British). Threats to use nuclear weapons in conflict with any one of a range of countries, even if those countries show no signs of using, or do not have, nuclear weapons themselves. US Secretary of State Colin Powell tries to reassure us - by saying that the USA has no "short-term" preparations for such nuclear attacks.
And medium term?
Those are the latest war plans leaking out of a Washington puffed up with arrogance and confidence after its easy victory in the third of its "globo-cop" wars in the last eleven years - Afghanistan 2001 following Kosova 1999 and Kuwait 1991 as a war where the USA won by huge high-tech bombardments and with almost no casualties on its side.
The US military budget is now 40% of the world's total, and bigger than the budgets of the next nine powers combined.
The US strategists evidently hope that a short, sharp deployment of gigantic military power will make Saddam Hussein's army crumble without much fight, and quickly clear the way for the USA's favoured groups of Iraqi oppositionists to take over. The subsequent ending of the economic sanctions against Iraq will both neutralise the Arab and international protests which the USA must surely expect against an attack on Iraq, and cement the political stability of a new Iraqi government.
Saddam Hussein's regime is one of the most loathsome in the world. A US-backed replacement could hardly be worse. It is possible that in the tumult of war democratic and working-class forces could assert themselves. Saddam's Iraq is an "imperialist" oppressor of nations - the Kurds - in a way that the USA, preferring the "imperialism of free trade", is not. The labour movement in Britain should have solidarity not with Saddam - not even against the USA - but with Iraq's workers, democrats, and oppressed Kurdish minority.
Yet, even if we could be confident that the US strategists' plans will work out, we could not support the USA as "globo-cop" at the expense of many Iraqi civilian and conscript deaths and casualties. (US bombing has killed about 4000 civilians so far in Afghanistan; somewhere up to 2000 in Serbia and Kosova; tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts in the 1991 war). However much the Iraqi people hate Saddam, they do not want US bombs and troops. We want to see Saddam overthrown by the people of Iraq, not by US superpower.
In fact, we cannot be confident at all of the plans working out. It is almost a built-in certainty that the USA's growing military arrogance will some time overreach itself and plunge the world into protracted devastation - unless a worldwide labour movement outcry checks it first.
The British labour movement has a special responsibility. Britain is the only sizeable power in the world to endorse the USA's plans for war in Iraq. Even Blair's New Labour MPs are split on this. A bold, vigorous mobilisation against the war by the trade union movement can force Blair to back down from his support for George W Bush, and encourage sections of the US trade union movement to come out against war. It can isolate Bush and stop the war. We cannot and should not rely on the United Nations to do this job. It depends on us.
