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Five Days That
Shook The World:
The Battle for Seattle
and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
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Published on February 18
BEAST IN GOLD
BRAID:
GENERAL PINOCHET
The General Turns
Out to Be a Coward.
When Police Knock
at His Door and Threatended to Slap Cuffs on him, Pinochet Fainted
EMINEM:
A Hired Gun from the
Poor Part of Town, Who Preys on the
Powerless, Extorts
Money from the Poor
and Celebrates a
Thuggish Brand of
Gangster Capitalism
BOVE OF MILLAU:
If There's One Organizer
Symbolizing the Worldwide Counterattack on Corporate Agriculture
It's Jose Bove
Published on January 30
THE TERRORIST'S
RETURN:
THE CRIMES OF SHARON
From Qibya to
Beirut:
Ariel Sharon's
Bloody Record
FAKING IT
Democrats Roll
Over on Ashcroft
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
They All Love
Anne Veneman
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Gore Gets More
Votes, Doesn't Care
What William Carlos
Williams Really
Thought About
The Beats
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Al
Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
New Stories:
CounterPunch Coverage
of Election 2000
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February 26, 2001
When In Doubt,
Kill Iraqis
W: First Blood
Bombing the Iraqis should properly be
listed as part of the Inaugural ceremonies, a man not being truly
President of the United States till he drops high explosive on
Baghdad or environs. The new team evidently felt that the Commander
in Chief could not be allowed to leave the jurisdiction, even
to Mexico, without unleashing planes and bombs against Saddam,
for whom the bombardment produced the effect of widespread sympathy
across the world for Iraq.
Bill Clinton delayed this portion
of his inaugural ceremonies to June 27, 1993 when he was urged
by vice president Al Gore to order a salvo of cruise missiles
supposedly in retaliation for an alleged Iraqi plot to kill George
Bush SR when he visited Kuwait in April of 1993. Both Clinton
and Bush were somewhat reluctant about the sortie.
"Do we have to take this
action?" Clinton muttered to his national security team,
as the cruise missiles on two carriers in the Persian Gulf were
being programmed. Gore advised a demonstrations of national resolve
was of paramount importance. Clinton's reservations were amply
justified. Eight of the twenty-three missiles homed in with deadly
imprecision on a residential suburb in Baghdad, one of them killing
Iraq's leading artist, Leila al-Attar.
Feasting on shrimp, cocktail
canapés and diet Coke, the White House group watched CNN's
Wolf Blitzer announce the strike; the misfortune of the errant
missiles and al-Attar's death were never mentioned. Clinton's
pollster Stan Greenberg, who did daily surveys on the popular
sentiment, reported to the gratified Commander-in-Chief that
bombardment of Iraq caused an uptick of eleven points. Since
the Clinton Administration was at that time in the process of
its first meltdown, this was a welcome ray, and one no doubt
remembered by the new Bush team, possibly eager to shift the
focus from the headline hogging former president. Bomb your way
into favorableheadlines has been the policy of every president
since the Second World War.
Of course, these bombardments all violate
international law. There is no UN provision for such
assaults. UN Resolution 688, sometimes referred to as a
document legitimizing the no-fly zone bombardment makes no reference
to a right to take over Iraqi airspace.
There was nothing new about
the declared motive for last week's bombing raids, described
as "protective retaliation". Just over a year ago,
after similar raids, the British Defense Secretary, Geoffrey
Hoon, invoked the sorties as being "in pursuit of legitimate
self-defense", a phrase hard to read without laughing out
loud.
There's nothing new about this
particular bombing, which the Iraqis say killed some civilians.
The US and Britain have been routinely bombing Iraq for much
of the past decade, with no discernible effect beyond the slaughter
of about 500 Iraqis overall, a death count which only looks scrawny
in comparison to the million or so, mostly children, who have
died as a consequence of sanctions since they were imposed a
decade ago.
Secretary of State Colin Powell had
barely settled into his new office before he was affirming this
murderous sanctions policy, whereby a US-dominated UN committee
in New York routinely plays God in decreeing what can and cannot
be shipped to Iraq.
UN officials working in Baghdad have long agreed that the root
cause of child mortality and other health problems is not simply
lack of food and medicine but the lack of clean water (freely
available in all parts of the country prior to the Gulf War)
and of electrical power, now running at 30 percent of its pre-bombing
level, with consequences for hospitals and water-pumping systems
that can be all too readily imagined.
Of the 21.9 percent of contracts vetoed as of mid-1999 by the
UN's sanctions committee, a high proportion were integral to
the efforts to repair the water and sewage systems. The Iraqis
submitted contracts worth $236 million in this area, of which
$54 million worth--roughly one-quarter of the total value--have
been disapproved. "Basically, anything with chemicals or
even pumps is liable to get thrown out", one UN official
revealed. The same trend has been apparent in the power supply
sector.
The proportion of approved/disapproved
contracts does not tell the full story. UN officials refer to
the "complementarity issue", meaning that items approved
for purchase may be useless without other items that have been
disapproved. For example, the Iraqi Ministry of Health once ordered
$25 million worth of dentist chairs, said order being approved
by the sanctions committee--except for the compressors, without
which the chairs are useless and consequently gathering dust
in a Baghdad warehouse.
In February of 2000 the US
moved to prevent Iraq from importing fifteen bulls from France.
The excuse was that the animals, ordered with the blessing of
the UN's humanitarian office in Baghdad to try to restock the
Iraqi beef industry, would require certain vaccines which, who
knows, might be diverted into a program to make biological weapons
of mass destruction. For sheer bloody-mindedness, however, the
interdiction of the bulls pales beside an initiative of the British
government, which banned the export of vaccines for tetanus,
diphtheria and yellow fever on the grounds that they too might
find their way into the hands of Saddam's biological weaponeers.
It has been the self-exculpatory
mantra of US and British officials that "food and medicine
are exempt from sanctions". This, like so many other Western
policy pronouncements on Iraq, has turned out to be a lie.
So now the wheel turns full
circle. Back in 1991 Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and top uniformed
Pentagon man Colin Powell urged bombardment and President Bush
I approved. In 2001 Powell and Cheney are at Bush II's elbow
as he approves his administration's first military adventure.
Is there a strategy, beyond Inaugural chest-thumping? Well, it
changes the subject from what the Bush administration proposes
to do about a man who would probably fare as ill in a UN Tribunal
on War Crimes as Saddam, viz., Ariel Sharon, Israel's new prime
minister.
Beyond this "signal" to the
world about priorities in Bush time, there could be the outlines
of a new Iraq policy, whereby the new government is signalling
its readiness to embark on a far tougher stance towards Iraq,
beefing up aid to the main opposition group in exile, the Iraqi
National Congress (INC), led by Ahmad Chalabi. In the late 1990s
Chalabi's cause was pressed by Republicans in Congress, most
notably Jesse Helms and Trent Lott. A bizarre alliance, stretching
from Helms to The New Republic to Vanity Fair's
Christopher Hitchens, pressed Chalabi's call for the US to guarantee
"military exclusion zones" in northern Iraq and in
the south near Basra and the oil fields, to be administered by
the Iraqi National Congress.Such guarantees could set the stage
for a new military assault on Saddam.
Against the continuation of
sanctions and bombing sorties this is an unlikely prospect, but
George W. Bush could at least be toying with the thought that
at last the Clinton-Gore campaign's slurs against his father
for not finishing off Saddam will be avenged. CP
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