Charley Reese
Columnist
An Iraqi mother has a question for us: "Why are you
killing my innocent child?"
Well, what's your answer? Why are we killing her
innocent child and the innocent children of thousands of
Iraqi families? Why are we destroying Iraq?
Before we came, Iraq had one of the highest living
standards in the Arab world, with an extensive
health-care system, clean and abundant drinking water,
sewage-treatment plants, electric power-generation
plants, free education for all, a network of social
services and a thriving intellectual and cultural life. Today
the country is in ruins. We have wreaked more death
and desolation than the Mongol invaders.
Why? Is it because our politicians say Iraq's president,
Saddam Hussein, is a bad person? But how could the
500,000 Iraqi children we've already killed have
overthrown him?
George Bush and the U.S. Army failed to overthrow
him. Two separate rebellions instigated by the Central
Intelligence Agency failed to overthrow him.
Innumerable assassination attempts have not so much as
put a scratch on him. So why do we expect that killing
4,500 Iraqi children per month is going to overthrow
him?
By the bye, those numbers of dead children are United
Nations numbers, not Iraqi. All you liberals so in love
with world government must surely believe the United
Nations. The question posed by the Iraqi mother was
posed to a Canadian member of parliament, Svend
Robinson, who wrote an article about his second trip to
Iraq that was published by the Globe and Mail. This
mother had just been told by an Iraqi doctor that her
sick baby was doomed. They had no medicine.
Robinson points out the absurd and hypocritical
restrictions the United Nations committee places on the
money Iraq is allowed to earn from selling limited
amounts of oil. These restrictions have prevented Iraq
from buying the medicines and other basics it needs.
Iraq was told, for example, it could not import cloth,
which it wanted to do to provide jobs for unemployed
seamstresses sewing sheets for hospital beds. Oh, no,
the cloth might be put to military use. Children have no
pencils. After all, graphite is a dual-use commodity, and
so it goes.
The fault is yours and mine. It is our government that
insists on maintaining an economic embargo nine years
after the last Iraqi soldier left Kuwait. We also continue
to conduct an ongoing undeclared and unconstitutional
war by bombing northern and southern Iraq on a weekly
basis.
Not only is this policy cruel, vicious, immoral and a war
crime by any rational definition, it is also not in America's
national interests. Even the heads of Arab governments
who don't like Saddam Hussein are finding it increasingly
difficult as their own people grow angrier and angrier
about the unjustified suffering being imposed on innocent
Iraqi civilians.
I attribute the U.S. cruelty toward Iraq to pure malice. I
do so because I know that people in Washington are not
so stupid as to believe that an embargo that has failed
for nine years is suddenly going to work. I know that
they are not so stupid as to fail to realize that the
embargo in fact strengthens Hussein politically and
enriches him materially. He gets rich because his
government controls the smuggling. I know that people
in Washington do not believe that Iraq has any hidden
cache of weapons that would threaten anyone. They
know full well that the only country in the Middle East
with a large store of weapons of mass destruction is
Israel.
This insane policy has sewn a harvest of hatred that
innocent Americans will be reaping for the next hundred
years. Unless you are willing to confront that Iraqi
mother and tell her to her face that it's necessary for her
child to die, you ought to take a stand against the
embargo.
Published in The Orlando Sentinel on January 27, 2000.