http://www.counterpunch.org/bushbombs.html
When In Doubt, Kill Iraqis
W: First Blood
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair,
Counter Punch,
02/26/2001
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.
