Ostensibly, it is a war to disarm Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime of weapons of mass destruction. But "oil" wealth, rather than such "weapons" seems the real target.

There is yet to be a "CARICOM Statement" informing the Community's people why our governments also feel --- as I think they do --- that war against Iraq is really not an intelligent and desirable response to the post-September 11, 2001 declaration to combat international terrorism.

The UN inspectors are yet to come up with any "smoking guns" and the head of the inspection team keeps urging the George Bush administration to make available what hard evidence it claims to have about Saddam's concealed weapons of mass destruction. They will be presenting a report to the UN on Monday.

What is at stake is not the prize of locating weapons of mass destruction --- as possessed by the USA and Israel. The prize for "regime change" in Baghdad is the oil wealth --- the second largest in the world --- that is Iraq's, but which George Bush wants to control and share with an astonishingly compliant British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

The anti-war lobbies in Europe and America are expanding, and so too are the voices of influential European and North American leaders, academics, think-tank advisors and social commentators.

Bush, however, remains stubbornly wedded to the war hawks around him, among them Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, former top employees of mega oil corporations.

Latest critics of the "war-now" policy of Bush, following the warnings/reservations of such U.S. foreign policy stalwarts like Henry Kissinger, are Senator Edward Kennedy and Coretta Scott-King, widow of slain civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr.

As France and Germany widen their disengagement from the war cries of America, President Bush is becoming almost hysterical as he declares "impatience with our allies".

He insists that "if Saddam will not disarm, we will do the job". Read that "do the job" to mean wiping out as many Iraqi lives as it takes --- women and children included --- to place in U.S. hands control of Iraq and its oil reserves under a Washington-backed "democratic" regime.

The famous English writer of some of the most widely read spy novels, John le Carre, in a scorching analysis in the `New York Times' of January 15 on the "madness" of Bush's coming war against Iraq, said that how the U.S. President succeeded in "deflecting America's anger from (Osama) bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history..."

"Baghdad", wrote le Carre, "represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the U.S. or Britain. Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, if he's still in possession of them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes' notice..."

It is a sad commentary on the state of democracy at a time of threatened war by superpower USA that there has been no democratic debate at the 189-member UN itself.

And here, in our neck of the woods, governments seem to feel they can continue to take cover behind factors of limited size and resources to rationalise the shocking failure to come up with a collective CARICOM position on Bush's coming war with Iraq.

In appealing for the UN inspectors to be allowed more time to complete their assignment in Iraq, Senator Edward Kennedy said that "this is the wrong war at the wrong time".

If Washington insists on going ahead, he stressed, it could "feed a rising tide of anti-Americanism overseas".

Is anybody in the Bush administration listening?