Annan's affirmation

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan made two important statements in his BBC interview aired on Wednesday with regard to the US war against Iraq, which lend further moral weight to an overwhelming international opinion on the subject.
He termed the war as "illegal" and also said that given the present security situation in Iraq elections could not be held as per the schedule.
Though at first he was a bit reluctant to utter the difficult word - apparently for fear of provoking the ire of the sole superpower - but when directly confronted with the question if the war was 'illegal' he responded, "Yes, if you wish."
Once the barrier was broken he was more at ease to offer an elaborate enunciation of his position. "I have indicated," he went on to state, "it was not in conformity with the UN Charter; from our point of view, from the Charter point of view, it was illegal."
He also expressed the hope that the world would not see another "Iraq-type operation for a long time...without the UN approval and much broader support from the international community."
Now that the world's official conscience-keeper has finally brought himself to say what majority of the international opinion has been saying all along, what would be its logical implications?
The US itself set a precedent for denunciation when in 1991 it led the first Iraq war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
Since that occupation was regarded as illegal, Iraq was forced to vacate Kuwait and pay huge war reparations to it. Going by that example and also international law, the US must withdraw from Iraq without any further ifs and buts.
And it must also pay reparations to the country for having waged an illegal war against it. As a consequence of the US illegal and immoral attack on Iraq, an estimated 30,000 Iraqis - 10,000 civilians and 20,000 military-men, many of them teen-aged boys were killed in the invasion phase while the occupation has continued to claim the lives of countless others. And thousands more have been maimed for life.
The country's economy and its entire infrastructure are in a state of total ruin. Of course, the US, the great pretender to the role of civilised preceptor, regards itself as more equal than others.
It has no qualms in proclaiming that the international laws and norms of civilised behaviour that were applied to Iraq vis-à-vis Kuwait cannot be brought to bear on its own actions in Iraq.
And in that the 'civilised' world's leader has the near complete backing of what it calls the 'free' media. Things being what they are, if anything can force the US to vacate aggression it is not going to be a moral sense of right and wrong within America, but the will of the Iraqi people to resist the occupation of their land.
The Iraqis, in fact, have amply demonstrated that they are not going to accept colonisation of their country. They have been offering a fierce, united resistance to occupation. A just leaked classified National Intelligence Estimate, prepared for President George Bush's enlightenment, which appeared in The New York Times on Thursday, has spelt out, from the American standpoint, a dark assessment of the prospects in Iraq.
In its most favourable portrayal of the situation, the Estimate describes "an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms." It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Kofi Annan says that credible elections cannot be held in Iraq if the security conditions continue as they are now.
The situation, though, can change for the better if the US decides to withdraw from that unfortunate country, handing over control to the UN. Once the people know that the occupation is coming to actual end, and the UN is there to ensure peace and security, supervise elections and transfer power to a genuinely elected - rather than the present US selected - government, the resistance will naturally end.
That is the only way to restore peace in Iraq, and an honourable option for the US to extricate itself from the quagmire it has created for itself out of lust for the Iraqi weather.