Flames of the Iraqi Holocaust

Once again, people in Iraq are emerging from bomb shelters to find their streets blown to rubble by the latest attack. Once again, there will be more graves to dig, more injuries to treat, and more hungry children to worry about. Iraq is a shattered country that the United States continues to pummel with explosives, even as its people suffer through a holocaust of proportions that can scarcely be imagined by average Americans.

The 1991 Gulf War left Iraq's electrical and water systems in ruins and its economy broken; subsequent sanctions, in combination with the rampant corruption of Saddam Hussein's regime, have prevented repair and rebuilding. As a result, famine and disease have climbed to near-epidemic heights. The hardest hit, of course, have been young children, too weak to withstand the brutal conditions. According to a UNICEF report published last April, more than 4,000 Iraqi children are dying of malnutrition and disease each month. Since the embargo was imposed in August, 1990, annual per capita income has fallen from $2,600 to $60; the price of wheat has increased by one million percent; and about one million Iraqi children have died.

As far as I can tell, Saddam Hussein is a heavy-handed dictator with a dangerously aggressive streak. But nothing that Saddam has ever done can come close to the devastation and human suffering that the United States has inflicted and continues to inflict on the people of Iraq. Amnesty International estimates that since 1979, Saddam's military regime is responsible for approximately 130,000 deaths (which is horrible). But in the past 8 years, US policies in Iraq have killed about 10 times as many people.

In this context, the lofty American rhetoric that we hear on the news and in government press conferences is farcical. When President Clinton announced the latest attack in a televised speech last week, he actually said with a straight face that Iraq represents a "clear and present danger" to its neighbors and to the United States. The claim is so absurd as to be offensive, seeing that Iraq lacks the resources to even feed its children, and none of Iraq's neighbors, not even Iran or Kuwait (whom you'd think would be concerned if Saddam were so dangerous), support America's military aggression. The President also stated that Iraq is the only country to have used weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Turkey, Indonesia, and Israel have all used chemical weapons with American consent, and the United States has used atomic weapons on Japan and chemical weapons on Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. Of course, Clinton was lying through his teeth again; but strangely enough, lies about sex result in impeachment in the House of Representatives, while lies used to justify the killing of innocent people overseas go unnoticed.

Throughout the 1980s, the United States strongly supported Saddam's military regime, supplying Iraq with chemical weapons to fight Iran and declining to denounce Saddam after he used those very weapons on Kurds in his own country in 1988. In fact, the US government never criticizes brutal thug tactics as long as its own status as the biggest, richest thug on the planet remains unchallenged. For this reason, the US expressed no outrage when Turkey invaded Cyprus, when Israel attacked Lebanon, when Morocco invaded the Western Sahara, or when Indonesia invaded East Timor. The outrage only came when Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait threatened to snatch control of large oil reserves from the ubiquitous puppet-strings of American corporations.

When Saddam realized in early 1990 that he had stepped on the wrong toes (i.e. the economic interests of American corporations), he attempted to back down from armed conflict. Between April and December, 1990, Saddam made several offers to withdraw his troops from Kuwait and destroy all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, if Israel would also pull its troops out of illegally occupied territories and destroy its illegal weapons. The US rejected these offers. Saddam then offered to open negotiations to work on an agreement to "ban all weapons of mass destruction in the region." Again, the US refused. Clearly, the Bush administration was determined to avoid the negotiating table and flex its muscles in an all-out war.

At the end of the Gulf War, the US had a clear opportunity to support a Shi'ite rebellion in the South that might have overthrown Saddam's regime. If we had wanted Saddam out of power, we could have provided arms and funding to the Shi'ite movement. Instead, the US stood by and allowed Saddam to crush his opposition. Obviously, the US doesn't actually support democratic movements in Iraq.

In the most recent episode, the provocation was the release of a report by Richard Butler, chief inspector for UNSCOM, which claimed that Iraq has been obstructing inspections. In fact, UNSCOM has inspected 128 new Iraqi sites in the past month, and Butler's accusation is based on only five incidents. These include a 45-minute delay before gaining access to one site; refusal to grant an American inspector interviews with all of the undergraduate students in Baghdad University's Science Department; and insistence that inspectors be accompanied by Iraqi officials on Fridays, the Muslim holy day. It seems to me that if 128 inspections yield only five incidents of this nature, the effort is going rather smoothly. But Richard Butler reacted by ordering his entire team to suddenly leave Iraq. Within hours, in flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the will of the Security Council, American bombs were falling. According to Scott Ritter, a former UNSCOM inspector who resigned earlier this year in protest, "What Richard Butler did last week with the inspections was a set-up... The US has perverted the U.N. weapons process by using it as a tool to justify military actions."

The grim truth of the matter is that Iraq has become a favored arena for televised showcases of American violence, which are used not only to justify astronomical military expenditures, but to send a message to countries around the world (especially Arab countries) that if you step on the wrong toes, you'll soon find yourself looking up at 500 tons of falling explosives. In a nutshell, the United States is an outlaw nation run by an élite class of violent, corrupt, power-hungry men. Through their institutionalized control of the mass media, the élite manufacture consent among the general populace by selecting and suppressing facts, by demonizing enemies, and by using lofty rhetoric and appearances to turn violent acts into righteous crusades against evil. Regrettably, this is how your tax money ends up contributing to human suffering on a massive scale, feeding the flames of the Iraqi holocaust.