John Pilger, the
British journalist, has visited Iraq and reported extensively on
what he has seen. Reading his commentary, one begins to
understand how brutal lies can be.
Before the Gulf War, Iraq had one of the lowest infant
mortality rates in the world. Today it is the highest. The
economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council
denied Iraq the equipment it needed to clean up the battlefields
from the Gulf War. The battlefields needed to be cleaned up
because the depleted uranium that was discharged by American and
British bombs carried with them a silent death that was far more
devastating than the initial blasts would have suggested. There
are regions in Iraq where as many as 40% of the children living
nearby now have cancer. It is not unusual for several children in
one family to have cancer. Those who don't have cancer today are
expected to get it later in life.
The death rate for children under 5 was
running 4,000 per month in the year 2000 when one of the articles
I am referring to was written.[1] The sanctions, which
Pilger calls, "the most ruthless embargo in modern history," is
killing mostly children. The children of Iraq are dying of hunger
and malnutrition, dysentery and other diseases associated with the
lack of sanitation. The children are dying for lack of medicines
and medical supplies. The only painkiller doctors can offer their
cancer ridden patients is aspirin, because the sanctions preclude
the purchase of morphine. It was American bombs that took out
public sanitation and the general infrastructure of the country.
Apparently anything that might have been of value to someone in
uniform was a target even if it was also vital to the general
population. The sanctions have been unnecessarily vindictive and
cruel.
As far as I can tell, the American strategy
as it applies to Iraq has been... "If we destroy life, as these
people know it, perhaps they will blame Saddam Hussein and run him
out of office." But that is only part of the strategy. It
appears to me that the other part is... "If we destroy life as
these people know it, we can then come in, control the oil,
and no one will be able to do anything about it."
I think this is all about oil, not about terrorism. There is no
greater terrorism than when it rains US bombs. And after each
rain storm, we call the dead—collateral damage. They call the
dead— family and friends. This is not about Saddam's evil
intentions. When Saddam poisoned the Kurds, the US Government
said nothing. Saddam Hussein is a product of the CIA and American
policy, but that is another story.
In 1996, when then Secretary of State Madeline Albright was
asked during a 60 Minutes interview about the hundreds of
thousands of children in Iraq who have died because of the sanctions, and whether she thought
the price was worth it... she said, yes, she thought it was worth
it. SHE thought it was worth it. Who has a right to think such a
thing or to make such decisions about other people's children...
in my name, in your name?
So you could argue, "Don't blame us for the death of these
children, Saddam Hussein could have stopped the sanctions at any
time. Blame him." Well I do blame him. But that doesn't absolve
us from the part we played. We knew or should have known that
Saddam Hussein would rather let his people suffer than give in to
outside pressure. So we knowingly chose to pursue a strategy that
guaranteed his people WOULD suffer. And we didn't stop when we
saw the results. We used the pain and deaths of these children to
try to pressure Saddam Hussein to do what... leave town — an
ignorant, unworthy, cruel policy.
A year after Albright's appearance on 60 Minutes: "...in an
interview with CNN reporter Peter Arnett, Osama Bin Laden directly
stated that 'A REACTION MIGHT TAKE PLACE as a result of U.S.
government's execution of over 600,000 Iraqi children by
preventing food and medicine from reaching them.'" [2]
Did George Bush know all this when he said the reason
terrorists hate us is because they hate freedom and democracy?.
Of course he did. I'm not saying all terrorists are rational or
that they all know what they are are fighting for. But Bush was
lying and he knew it. And so did the press and every other
government official who works within a 50 miles radius of the
White House, and this hypocrisy is also known in the halls of
every other foreign government.
When a plaintiff comes into a United States court, he is
expected to come to the court with 'clean hands' or the court will
not grant relief. To have 'clean hands' means that the party
bringing the action is not engaged in immoral or illegal acts. The
United States does not have 'clean hands.' Can you guess why the
Bush team does not want to prosecute terrorists in a public court
of law? Can you imagine that if these criminals were prosecuted in
public view, they might have an opportunity to argue that the
plaintiff does not come to this court with 'clean hands'? Is it
any wonder that Bush refuses to acknowledge the authority of the
World Court to potentially charge a US citizen with crimes against
humanity?
If George Bush ends up removing Saddam Hussein from power,
maybe the children of Iraq will be better off than they are
now. But that's not a certainty. How many innocent civilian lives
will be lost in the war? Would you care to guess? If children or
other innocent civilians had any currency in the formation of US
policy, most of the sanctions would have been lifted a long time
ago, and we wouldn't now be worried about terrorism in the first
place.
This is about oil. Trading basic human decency for oil. Oil is
costing us our humanity, our freedoms, our self respect, and
before too long perhaps the lives of more of our own children. And
what will our children think of us when they eventually find out
what our government has been up to? None of us is innocent,
because WE are the government. Remember...? WE THE PEOPLE. Is war
the only science we know? The people who represent us, are now,
and have been for a long time, out of control and out of touch.
Enough is enough. We each need to accept our responsibility as
citizens before it's too late. And if we can't come together to
find new common ground and formulate a strategy that is based on
principles of honor and basic human decency, then perhaps between
our apathy and government's negligence, the Great Experiment will,
after all of this, have finally come to naught. Start by checking
out this story. Here are the referenced links:
Source:
