"No member state of the United Nations can unilaterally enforce a Security Council resolution without expressed approval by the Security Council. The U.S. had such authorization in 1991 regarding the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait -- but it has no such mandate now. If the U.S. could unilaterally attack Iraq for its violations of a U.N. Security Council resolution, then Russia could unilaterally bomb Israel for its many violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions." - Stephen Zunes, zunes@usfca.edu Zunes is chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.
Table Of Contents
Military Aspects
Political Aspects
I. Economic Plight in Nothern and Southern Iraq
IA. Kuridsh Plight
After the end of the Gulf War, the effective economic siege of Iraq ran on with no end in sight. The Kurds, urged by the West to rise up against Saddam Hussein, had been forced to flee to the northern mountains; and they, and the rest of the Iraqi people, continued to suffer under the growing strangulation brought by merciless sanctions. In May 1993 the UN Security Council had created a new demarcation between Iraq and Kuwait, to produce 'for the first time the dynamic for stability, prosperity and tranquillity in the region'. Little publicity was given to the fact that the new demarcation was to Iraq's disadvantage - so further fuelling the Iraqi grievances that had helped to provoke Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
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A Kurdish woman from Iraq sits with her children in a refugee camp in
Turkey in April 1991. After losing the Persian Gulf War in early 1991, Iraq
persecuted its Shiite and Kurdish minorities, who then sought refuge in
Turkey and Iran.
(Click to Enlarge) |
It was now increasingly clear also that the Kurds, long persecuted by Saddam Hussein and newly punished by punitive UN sanctions, were suffering growing oppression from Iran. In April of 91 Iran had begun shelling the Kurds on the northern Iraq border, forcing 5000 Kurds to flee - about a half deeper inside Iraq to avoid the fresh onslaught. The United Nations High Commission er for Refugees (UNHCR) was straggling to resettle this new wave of refugees, while throughout Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq the people continued to suffer from Iraqi persecution and the UN blockade. For example, at Dohuk's main hospital about 30 children a day were being admitted suffering from waterborne diseases since Baghdad cut off the region' s electricity supply in August. The hospital' s director declared: 'The number of people we are seeing with typhoid and infectious hepatitis is double this time last year... we don't have the medicines, intravenous fluids and medical equipment. We need help desperately.' Whatever Bagh-dad's policy motives its own supplies of medicines and medical supplies were fast running out because of the UN blockade: even with the will to do so, Baghdad could not have continued supplying the Kurdish regions.
IB. Death in Southern Iraq (Back to Top)
A United Nations report (published 23 November 1993), prepared for the UN's special rapporteur for Iraq, Max van der Stoel, provided information about southern Iraq and the economic plight of the country as a whole. The report noted the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian settlements in southern Iraq, the use of arbitrary powers of arrest and detention, an effective embargo to starve the inhabitants of the area, and the draining of the southern marshes which had brought social and cultural damage to the region. At the same time the report broadly agreed with the Iraqi government that the UN sanctions had caused severe damage to the economy and a significant increase in infant mortality. Reflecting the Western posture, the report urged that Baghdad fulfill UN resolutions in order to secure the lifting of sanctions. In late-1993 Rolf Ekeus, the chairman of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in charge of scrapping Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, stated that he would need about six months before he would be able to recommend to the Security Council that the commission had completed its task (18 months later, the question has still not been resolved).
Now Iraq was being forced to withdraw Iraqi citizens and assets from what had been its own territory. Thus the UN Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission (UNIKOM) said: 'On 13 December we received a positive response from the Iraqi authorities about the removal of the Iraqi population and their assets on the Kuwaiti side of the newly demarcated border.' It was reported by UNIKOM that in Umm Qasr the initial arrangements to remove Iraqis had 'started smoothly on a small scale'. At the same time alarm was continuing to mount about the plight of the Shia Arabs in the Marsh areas, now forced to flee by what some observers were depicting as Saddam's 'man-made drought.' More than 7000 Iraqi Shias, most of them Marsh Arabs (Ma'dan), had fled to Iran since mid-1993, swelling the 50,000 refugees that the Iranians had been sheltering since 1991. Baghdad, admitting its increased military action in the marshes, was now dubbing the region a haven for 'brigands and criminals'. In February 1994 Saddam Hussein reportedly opened dykes to flood rich farming land south-east of Al-Amarah, apparently displacing tens of thousands of people (Sharristani: 'This is a clear attempt at genocide against the southern Iraqis to punish them for the uprising of Basra').
On 28 February the United Nations announced, against all the earlier claims from many sources, that following an UNSCOM investigation there was no evidence that Iraqi forces had used chemical weapons against the southern Shias. This conclusion, given little publicity, did not deter opponents of the Iraqi regime from further accusations. However, few observers doubted that Saddam Hussein was trying to reassert his authority in southern Iraq by military campaigns and mass expulsions. At the end of March the families of some 100 imprisoned clerics were being expelled from the town of Najaf, one of the holiest places in the Shi'ite world. At the Al-Khoei foundation in London Abdul Majid al Khoei, son of the late Grand Ayatollah in Iraq, commented: 'Saddam appears determined to destroy Najaf as a spiritual centre for Shi'ites. There used to be 8000 clerics in the town; now there are less than 1000.' Many of the expelled people, all related to the clerics and theologians seized after the failure of the Basra uprising, were expected to settle in Iran.
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Malnurished, sick, and dieing.. a mother overlooks her child.
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UN sanctions on Iraq were continuing - and with them the mounting holocaust among the Iraqi people. Journalists could talk of 'sanctions which have all but destroyed one of the most advanced countries of the developing world', but the outrage that this dire circumstance should have generated in the West was largely absent. Would the 'crushing burdens and suffering of the Iraqi peoples be indefinitely prolonged? Did Washington, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher had hinted, intend to keep Iraq permanently weak and impoverished - even if the Saddam regime were to fall? Was this part of the new American plan for the Middle East? Rolf Ekeus, the UNSCOM chief, was yet again expressing his concern that without some 'light at the end of the tunnel' Iraq would have little incentive to co-operate with UNSCOM and other UN bodies.
II. Westren Propoganda's Fabricated War (Back to Top)
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Father nursing child with
pneumonia, a common
complication of measles.
(Click to Enlarge) |
By now the appalling plight of the Iraqi people, forced to suffer under the seemingly endless US-orchestrated embargo, was common knowledge: reports on their privations and miseries appeared even in peak-time television broadcasts in the United States and Britain. Increasingly it seemed that such publicity, allied to the cynical economic calculations of such states as Russia and France, would at last force a relaxation of the genocidal sanctions. In these developing circumstances, with Washington perceiving a growing threat to its policy of inflicting starvation on the Iraqi people, US strategists decided it was time to launch a fresh propaganda initiative. In early October 1994 the United States and its pliant allies, as a fresh ploy to justify to continued impositive of draconian sanctions, announced that Iraqi forces were again threatening the security of Kuwait: two Iraqi army divisions were supposedly advancing to join four others within 20 miles of the Kuwaiti border. President Clinton warned: 'It would be a great mistake of Saddam Hussein to believe that for any reason the US would have weakened its resolve'. Soon Washington was acting to counter the new 'threat': thousands of US troops were despatched to the Gulf, fresh Patriot anti-aircraft missiles were speedily transported to Kuwait, and US warships equipped with the highly accurate Tomahawk cruise missiles were moved closer to Iraq. Britain predictably supported the American response and sent a few extra forces to the region to demonstrate solidarity with the US posture.
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The United States dispatches a carrier group, 54,000 troops and warplanes. Click to Enlarge |
Soon Washington had reportedly secured the emergency deployment of 36,000 further US ground troops to the area (some journalists queried the figure, suggesting an element of 'black propaganda'), backed by an extra 350 warplanes - including B-52 bombers and F-15E fighters. President Clinton, unconsciously signalling the difference between Washington and the rest of the world, declared: 'We will not allow Saddam Hussein to defy the will of the US and the international community. We want facts, not promises; deeds, not words.' And no, said US Defence Secretary William Perry, a pre-emptive military attack on Iraq could not be ruled out. In such an atmosphere, Washington emphasised, there could be no thought of relaxing sanctions. Quite the reverse. They should be intensified. The Iraqi people were not dying fast enough.
A tide of US-orchestrated propaganda had swept through the media. Few Western newspapers or radio and television commentators were prepared to hint at even the possibility that the US propaganda offensive was a cynical and self-serving ploy. Again the Security Council was suborned, shamelessly enlisted to underwrite the Washington propaganda. On 8 October 1994 the Council expressed 'grave concern at Iraqi troop movements towards border with Kuwait'; with the SC presidential statement requesting the Secretary-General 'to ensure that the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission (UNIKOM) redoubles its vigilance and reports any violation of the demilitarized zone... or any potentially hostile act.' The statement included an Iraqi assertion that the United States 'and its collaborators in the region, particularly the rulers of Kuwait, are determined to prolong the embargo as long as they can in order to kill the largest number possible of Iraqis through the policy of starvation and deprivation'.
Thus a fresh wave of Western forces had again flooded into the Gulf region, not to deter Iraq from any new military adventure but to create a climate in which it would be possible to maintain the punitive sanctions. The new Iraqi 'threat' was a total fabrication, requiring a new torrent of black misinformation, soon exposed for the sham it was by perceptive observers. Thus the reputable journalist Robert Fisk commented that reporters on the Kuwait-Iraq border had not been able to detect any signs of aggressive Iraqi intent. One solitary Kuwaiti tank was spotted near the frontier, and on 'the other side of the border, there were even slimmer pickings'. UN officials disclosed that their reconnaissance aircraft, which provide them with a 20km view across the frontier, 'had not observed a single tank or personnel carrier'. The few Iraqi policemen at the border regularly begged for food. Said one UN officer: 'We're not supposed to give them anything, but it's hard to turn them away when they're hungry.' Even Israel, usually a reliable propaganda ally of Washington, suggested that the 'crisis' had been manufactured by the United States. Yitzhak Rabin and senior Israeli army officers 'stated frankly that Saddam Hussein had neither the air cover nor the manpower to invade Kuwait, that the Republican Guard divisions were not deployed in an aggressive posture, that there was, in short, no impending catastrophe'.
Hospitals say they are short of even the most basic medicine. |
What was indisputable was that Iraqi children were continuing to die in large numbers because of the US-sustained sanctions. Thus the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reported that infant mortality in Iraq had tripled since the Gulf War; and UNICEF stated that 2.5 million nursing mothers, pregnant women and babies faced 'severe malnutrition' in late 1994. It now emerged that major picture agencies were refusing to use photographs of Iraqi babies that had died of starvation because they were 'too gruesome'. Commented Fisk: 'Thus did a non-existent war receive more coverage than real death.. '
IIA. Iraq Commits to Recognition of Kuwait (Back to Top)
In October 1994 the Iraqi government, through the mechanism of a joint Iraqi-Russia statement, confirmed its willingness to recognise Kuwait as a sovereign state: 'Iraq confirms its readiness to solve the issue of recognising Kuwait's sovereignty and borders as decreed by Security Council resolution 833 in a positive manner.' Now yet another US pretext for maintaining sanctions on Iraq had been removed. Washington was predictably unimpressed. The US military build-up in the region continued as a response to the new Iraqi 'threat': it would be 'dangerously misguided', declared Warren Christopher, to ignore Saddam Hussein's 'colossal misadventures' -one of which (Iraq's invasion of Iran) the US had supported - and to relax sanctions.
Now Washington was threatening fresh air strikes against Iraq, with the US proposing also the possibility of imposing a demilitarised zone that would extend 44 miles (in contrast to the present six miles) into Iraq. On 16 October senior Clinton administration officials warned Iraq that if the Iraqi military units were not withdrawn from southern Iraq then American air strikes would follow. It now seemed clear that Washington, prepared to use a UN 'flag of convenience' when possible, had no worries about taking unilateral action. Thus Madeleine Albright, speaking on a television talk show, was happy to announce that the area of Iraq south of the 32nd parallel was 'vital to US interests' and that the United States was prepared to go it alone: 'We will behave multilaterally when we can and unilaterally when we must.' In short the United States had vital-interest claims on Iraq and the attitude of the international community was largely an irrelevance. Russia and France were suggesting that a further UN resolution (in addition to SCR 949) would be needed for fresh military attacks on Iraq. Washington, by contrast, was already asserting that it already had a UN 'green light' for a fresh bombing onslaught on the Iraqi people.
IIB. Since when is Palace building against UN resoltuions? (Back to Top)
There was moreover another reason, in American rhetoric, why the 'international community' should continue to deal harshly with Iraq. Madeleine Albright informed the UN Security Council that Saddam Hussein was building 'pleasure palaces'; and she distributed photographs around the Council to prove it. If Iraqi babies were dying it was Saddam's fault: in the peculiar logic of Washington, if Saddam's policies were harming the Iraqi people it was essential that the United Nations strive to harm them further. The absurdity was quickly pointed out by commentators and diplomats. Said Sergei Lavorv, the Russian UN envoy: 'I don't recall that building palaces was prohibited by Security Council resolutions.' And voices were raised to suggest that if Washington was contemplating further military action against Iraq the matter should first be raised with the United Nations.
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Iraqi mother and diseased child - an all to often common scene in Iraq.
(Click to Enlarge) |
In Iraq the situation was continuing to deteriorate. What had been one of the most advanced health, education and welfare systems in the Arab world was now in what seemed to be a state of terminal collapse. The reports of visitors, aid workers, journalists and others all painted the same grim picture. For example, Oxfam's Monica Press commented: 'The whole lot is breaking up. In the long term we are looking at a severely retarded country.' Significantly enough, the 'battered Iraqi tanks chugging north-wards' looked ill-equipped to threaten Kuwait or anywhere else: many vehicles 'look as if they will conk out at any moment, and some already have.' In makeshift hospitals patients with burns, heart disease and kidney problems - now denied access to medicines - were being left to die; thousands of children were dying every month; diabetics without insulin were going blind; and polio and other diseases, previously eradicated, had returned. At the same time unrest was mounting in Baghdad and elsewhere. In October 1994 two bombs exploded in Baghdad - one, in a baby-food container, killing three policemen and a church official. And the regime was now extending the use of mutilations and amputations (of ears and hands) to deter crime: pictures of a severed hand, first shown on Iraqi television, appeared in various Western newspapers (for example, in The Independent, London). Pundits expressing proper horror at such developments routinely failed to note the common incidence of such horrors in Saudi Arabia, a much favoured Western ally.
IIC. Iraq's unrecognised recognition of Kuwait (Back to Top)
In early November the National Assembly in Baghdad, formalising the earlier concession, passed a resolution recognising Kuwait's sovereignty and current (redrawn) borders. Again the United States, via the mechanism of White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers, remained resolutely unimpressed: 'There are a number of other elements in UN resolutions that Iraq must adhere to before we can even discuss lifting sanctions'; and a Foreign Office echo sounded in London: '... this is only one of the things we have been looking to Saddam to do.' Critics of the negative Western response were now commenting that 'sanctions will never be lifted because the US and Britain do not trust Saddam not to pose a threat'. And there were signs also that even the goal of removing Saddam, implicit in much USFLIK rhetoric though absent in all UN resolutions, would not be sufficient to relieve the plight of the Iraqi people: perhaps sanctions would be retained if the West did not approve of Saddam's successor.
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Poverty striken Iraqi children
(Click to Enlarge) |
It is important to note the plight of the most vulnerable of the Iraqis - the children. Thus when Professor Magne Raundalen, the world renowned child psychologist, travelled to Iraq with the International Harvard Study Team to study the mental health of children he encountered 'the most traumatised child population' he had ever witnessed. The children, 'trapped within their trauma', had given up playing games, because such activities reminded them of dead playmates (80 per cent of children had lost friends or siblings in the conflict); and now they could not confide in their parents who had shown themselves unable to protect their children from bombs and missiles. The trauma, normally expected to lessen with time, was 'intensifying because of the climate of hunger and deprivation.'In mid-1995 this is the apocalyptic situation that the United States and Britain are keen to preserve and extend.
IID. Growing International and Domestic Hostility (Back to Top)
In early 1995 there were further signs that France and Russia were keen to see at least a partial relaxation of the draconian sanctions - to the point that France earned a rebuke from Washington and London. On 6 January Iraq's foreign minister Tariq Aziz met Alain Jupp in Paris in a move towards restoring relations. Christine Shelly, for the US State Department, commented: 'Now is not the time to make gestures towards Iraq'; and a Foreign Office spokesman in London said that this was 'not the moment to relax pressure on Iraq... Now there was mounting evidence that such pressure was intensifying the miseries of the Iraqi people: starvation and disease were destroying whole swathes of the Iraqi population, there was escalating crime (with reports of fresh coup attempts), and the regime was extending its reign of terror through brandings and amputations. At the same time a seemingly resilient Saddam Hussein was seeking to exploit the tensions and conflicts between the various Kurdish factions, and defiantly advertising the manifest divisions in the formerly solid anti-Iraq coalition. In broadcasts on state-run television and radio Saddam declared: 'Over the past as well as previous years Iraq continued to foil evil intentions to isolate it from the international community.
Burning flags outside the UN office in Baghdad. |
Those in the anti-Iraq camp have been facing increasing resistance that has weakened their influence. The number of enemies is decreasing and these enemies have become desperate or near desperate.' The UN sanctions, he asserted, would not force Iraq to submit: Iraq's enemies had 'failed in their bid' to weaken the resolve of the Iraqi people. On the same day (17 January 1995) several thousand demonstrators paraded in the streets and burned the US flag in front of a UN office in Baghdad; while state-run newspapers attacked the United States as a 'monster devoid of any reason to support its criminal acts'. A front-page editorial in the government newspaper al-Jumhouriya denounced the US for killing tens of thousands of its people by cutting off vital supplies of food and medicines:
Remember the one million people killed by America. Remember the sufferings of the embargo which have entered every lraqi house. Engrave in the memory of your children the name of the criminal [Washington] whose harm against Iraq has never been done by any other criminal in history.
In northern Iraq, soon to suffer a massive Turkish invasion, the Kurds continued to fight amongst themselves - in part through personal and political rivalries and in part 'over profits to be made from smuggled oil and cigarettes'. Here, to the dismay of Western strategists, there was little prospect of a coherent anti-Saddam Kurdish coalition. Thus British Minister of State Douglas Hogg expressed his 'sadness and disappointment' at the renewal of fighting. How, he wondered, could the Western air patrols over Kurdistan - designed to protect the Kurds from Saddam - be justified when the Kurds were seemingly intent on slaughtering each other? Any student of realpolitik could have answered Hogg's disingenuous question: with Saddam's real and invented derelictions the chosen target, any Kurdish disarray was a secondary matter - indeed, a weak lraq and a weak Kurdistan, added to the congenial prospect of an expansionist Turkey, could well be judged helpful to the West's ambitions over lraqi oil.
The US/UK faction in the UN Security Council lost no opportunity to proclaim why sanctions should be maintained on a more or less indefinite basis. Perhaps Saddam Hussein was still hiding weapons of mass destruction (the Iraqi defector Wafiq al-Sammarrai was claiming that anthrax bombs and Scud missiles had been buried around the Salah al Din region). How could it ever be known that some such weapons were not hidden somewhere? Perhaps Saddam would again 'threaten' Kuwait. How could it ever be known that he would not. At least it was known that Saddam continued to persecute his minority groups in Iraq (in violation of SC Resolution 688) - though Washington and London never said why the persecution of minorities in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Guatemala et al. did not deserve an equally punitive UN response. In short, if Saddam Hussein could not be trusted how could sanctions ever be lifted?
The growing international hostility to sanctions - deriving in part from obvious commercial calculation, in part from (non-governmental) humanitarian agitation - was increasingly putting pressure on the United States and Britain (supported by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and few other states) to modify the cruel sanctions regime. Some movement on this front, Washington judged, would be prudent. Already, in Western propaganda, SC Resolutions 706 and 712 allowed Iraq to sell up to $1.6 billion of oil to fund humanitarian purchases of food and medicines. It was seldom emphasised that any such sale would be administered by the United Nations, and that a substantial part of the revenue would be used for a host of other purposes (not least, to compensate Kuwait). No serious observer would expect any sovereign state to voluntarily surrender its principal resource asset to a hostile international body committed to the overthrow of that state's government. No Western strategists could have imagined that Saddam Hussein would donate Iraqi oil to a US-dominated UN committee to sell as it saw fit. If such resolution provisions were too incredible to be taken seriously, what was their purpose? Obviously to provide useful propaganda instruments whereby the Iraqi regime itself could be held responsible for the starvation and disease now spreading through the entire Iraqi population. This propaganda ploy was used again in March 1995 when announcements in Washington and London - as a prelude to the predictable Security Council authorisation - suggested that Iraq might be allowed to sell increased amounts of oil for humanitarian purposes. Still the revenue would be paid into a UN escrow account; still there would be many calls on the money; still nothing would be done to mitigate the gross violation of Iraqi sovereignty that any such scheme would represent. But now even the re-jigged version of 706/712 was thrown into question.
IIE. Iraq imprisons two 'civil defence contractors' (Back to Top)
The seizure of two Americans in southern Iraq in March offered a further propaganda opportunity to the West. If Saddam Hussein was callous enough to imprison two innocent 'civil defence contractors' who had 'strayed' inadvertently across a border protected by various UN checkpoints and a wide anti-tank trench then he must bear the consequences. The preferred option, declared several US congressmen, was a new military strike against Iraq. Failing that, it was clearly necessary to maintain sanctions on Iraq into the indefinite future. The one million innocent Iraqis - men, women, children and babies - starved to death by UN sanctions were not enough. The Christian strategists in the West knew where their priorities lay.
In September the UN World Food Programme (WFP) published a further report, based on the findings of an assessment mission to Iraq. The FAO News Update Summary (26 September 1995) noted the increased prevalence of stunting among toddlers, many with 'old man's faces', in a country where 'nearly everyone seems to be emaciated'.
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Severely malnurished Iraqi child: "This was comparable to the
worst scenarios I have ever scene" - WFP Emergency Support
Officer
(Click to Enlarge) |
Dieter Hannush, the WFP Emergency Support Officer, on returning from the mission, commented: 'After 24 years in the field, mostly in Africa starting with Biafra, I didn't think anything would shock me. But this was comparable to the worst scenarios I have ever seen.' And Mona Hamman, WFP's Regional Manager, declared: 'There actually are more than four million people, a fifth of Iraq's population, at severe nutritional risk. That number includes 2.4 million children under five, about 600,000 pregnant/ nursing women and destitute women heads of households as well as hundreds of thousands of elderly without anyone to help them.'
Most ordinary Iraqis get their basic food and medical supplies via the U.N.'s "oil-for-food" programme (UN resolution 986 implimented in December 1996), which allows Iraq to export oil under strict supervision as an exception to the oil embargo in place since the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Two-thirds of funds from the oil sales go to buy food, medicines and other supplies for Iraq's people; the other third pays U.N. costs and war reparations. Iraq is theoretically permitted to sell up to $5.256 billion of oil over six months, which the U.N. says is the amount needed to meet the basic needs of Iraq's 22 million people. But Iraq, in fact, is only expected to raise about half that because of low oil prices and its poor infrastructure.
III. Desert Fox (Back to Top)
In late 1998, the House Republicans faced an historic vote to impeach President William Clinton.A president who commited perjury in court, as Clinton did repeatedly, should be ousted, or resign. No matter how much Americans love charming Bill, Congress has a duty to enforce the law.
Clinton's counter-attack to his Impeachment hearings involved a number of issues. First came the smiling photo-ops of Clinton doing the statesman shtick in Israel and Gaza. Meanwhile, in Washington, Democrats were loudly warning that if Clinton were impeached and tried by the Senate, there would be no one to run the world, not to mention the USA, and just when malefactors like Saddam Hussein were waiting to strike.
The U.S. launches Operation Desert Fox -- an airstrike on Iraq designed to divert attention away from President Clintons impeachment. |
Next, bomb the usual Iraqis! The Clinton Administration ordered UN arms inspectors to raid Baath party headquarters in Baghdad, Saddam's political nerve center, an act guaranteed to provoke the Iraqis. Baghdad reacted as expected, denying the intelligence agents called `inspectors' admission to these highly sensitive political offices. Clinton had succeeded in provoking a major foreign crisis right when the House was about to pillory the philandering president.
Bombing Baghdad is always the tonic of choice for ailing presidents. However, the world's one billion Muslims are about to begin celebrating the holy month of Ramadan, and Christian Arabs the Christmas season. In the Middle East, carpet bombing Muslims during Ramadan is not looked upon well. Still, Clinton seemed to have decided infuriating the entire Muslim world against America is worth the boost blasting Iraq it will give his endangered presidency.
UN decides to halt inspections on Iraq |
It was the United Nations, not Iraq, that chose to halt the inspections. Now, if it really thought Iraq was about to whip up a weapon of mass destruction, why did it halt inspections? It could have continued the inspections while protesting the exclusion of the Americans. Instead the United Nations pulled out. The obvious inference to be drawn is that the United Nations, despite its lies to the contrary, does not really think that Iraq has any weapons of mass destruction.
And let's look at the issue of whether or not the United States is acting in good faith. Why do you suppose Iraq reached that conclusion? Perhaps because, after nearly seven years of full-time inspections and the supervised destruction of missiles, manufacturing plants, warheads and stores of chemical weapons, the United States still refuses to lift sanctions on the grounds that somewhere in this little country something may be hidden. But there is an even better reason to justify the Iraqi position.
Earlier this year Madeleine Albright made an official, public speech in which she said plainly and explicitly the sanctions were not going to be lifted no matter what the Iraqis do as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power.
Albright said, and the president confirmed it in a message to Congress, that the United States will not lift the sanctions no matter how cooperative the Iraqis are, no matter what proof there is that they have no weapons of mass destruction. In short, the inspections are just a pretense.
Since Desert Fox, the US and Britain have continued to enforce their illegally created "no-fly" zones over Iraq via monthly bombing (see Military Aspects). Iraq has remained true to its promise not to allow US investigators called 'weapons inspectors' entrance back into Iraq. Today, (late 1999) despite continuing opposition by Russia, China and France, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright continues to push the United Nations to revive U.N. inspections of suspect weapons sites in Iraq.
Parade of Dead Babies |
The current US policy of bombing Iraq every few months, is futile and wrong, an exercise in gunboat diplomacy worthy of 19th Century imperialist Great Britain, not the world's greatest democracy and defender of human rights. Responsibility for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children from disease and malnutrition - these are UN figures - must be equally shared by Saddam and the US government. The continued torment of Iraq is provoking rage against Americans across the Muslim world. As the confrontation continues.. so does the murdrer of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives.
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