My Experiences
in America Regarding
Iraq
By Wade Frazier
(January 10, 1999)
"...For a peek into our boys' mentality during the Gulf War, the U.S.
Air Force's 77th Tactical Fighter Squadron published a songbook before
the bombing began, describing their plans for Iraq. The only part that
can be reproduced in polite company was this little ditty:
Phantom fliers in the sky,
Persian-pukes prepare to die
Rolling in with snake and
nape,
Allah creates but we cremate.
A Panamanian Prelude
Attacking Iraq
The Continuing War
Where Do We Stand Now,
and What Can We Do?
Footnotes
In 1990 I was recovering from my experiences with Dennis
Lee. Dennis Lee has been the highest profile free energy
promoter in the world the past several years. I used to
be his business partner. He didn't start out promoting
free energy, but a heat pump that saved about 70% on
energy bills if you converted from gas or oil heating,
and over 80% if you were using all-electric heat. It was
a vastly superior technology, and the best heating
system the world market has ever seen. I saw our venture
get attacked in three states by the government, acting
on behalf of the electric companies, culminating with
Dennis being thrown into jail on fabricated charges with
a million-dollar bail in the town I was raised in
(Ventura, California). He spent two years behind bars as
a political prisoner. Those events happened in the late
1980s. Other parts of my book and/or web site deal with
that issue. Dennis himself has written a number of books
about his experiences, usually written from his jail
cell.(1) Those events shattered my life, and it has
taken years to recover from the experience, and I will
probably always be dealing with the aftermath of it.
I eventually realized that my indoctrination by school,
the media and other authority sources presented a
worldview starkly different than what I saw with Dennis.
I was beginning to read alternative media publications
like Lies of Our Times, Covert Action Information
Bulletin, and joining organizations like the Christic
Institute. In 1990 I moved to Ohio and experienced the
first war our nation waged since I became an adult.
Bombing Libya and invading Grenada and Panama were also
unpleasant events for me, but what happened in Iraq was
on a vastly larger scale.
I lived in Dayton and worked at a bank's headquarters in
a small town called Wilmington. Nearly one hundred
people worked at the headquarters. When the bombs
finally started dropping in January of 1991 the office
virtually erupted in cheering. By that time I was
informed enough to know that Iraq had made several
withdrawal proposals, all summarily rejected by United
States. I knew that the United States had fabricated its
"coalition" by bribing and threatening nearly all the
nations involved. We were making deals like forgiving
billions of dollars of debt for nations that joined the
coalition (for instance, Egypt, $7 billion), and
threatening aid cutoff and vengeance to those who
didn't.(2)
Also I knew something about the region's history, how
Europe had been exploiting the region for sometime, and
when Britain officially pulled out in the 1920s their
actions nearly guaranteed the strife we see there today.
For instance, Iraq was literally a nation created by the
British drawing lines on the map. Iraq was an invention
of Britain, imposing a national identity on a land of
tribes.(3) If you look at Iraq on the map, you'll see a
large nation that is almost completely landlocked. Iraq
has only about 20 miles of coastline, and its only port
is actually upstream on the Shatt al Arab (the waterway
formed by the joining of the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers) at Al Basrah, known as Basra to westerners.
Kuwait was carved out from Iraq rather arbitrarily. Both
were parts of the Ottoman Empire (Kuwait being a
district of Iraq) until the British moved in. An oil
rich region was intentionally landlocked by Britain's
power politics.
I also knew that Iraq had legitimate grievances with
Kuwait. Their national borders were literally drawn up
by Britain, and Iraq had always maintained that Kuwait
was part of Iraq, and had to be held back by Britain
from simply invading and annexing Kuwait. The
Kuwait/Iraq border was long disputed, particularly
around the rich Rumaila oilfield. Kuwait may have
drilled into Iraqi oil fields while Iraq was occupied
with fighting Iran. A bone of contention that led to
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was Kuwait's refusal to lease
two uninhabited islands to Iraq, so Iraq could have a
port on the Persian Gulf.
I also caught the whiff of possible propaganda being
purveyed to justify the subsequent devastation of Iraq.
For instance, a friend angrily called me up one day in
October of 1990, telling me the story of Iraqi soldiers
taking hundreds of babies out of incubators in Kuwait,
letting them die so Iraqi babies could have the
incubators. Also I heard George Bush telling the world
about Iraq's imminent threat to Saudi Arabia, and the
American media swallowed it whole.
The incubator story sounded exactly like the wartime
propaganda nations have always used to dehumanize the
enemy. Columbus made up the story of Caribbean
cannibalism almost out of the thin air.(4) Corts
concocted the tale of Aztec cannibalism in 1522 after he
had conquered them, writing to the Spanish crown that
his foes carried provisions of "roasted babies", helping
to justify his conquest of a people far more civilized
than the Spanish were.(5) The incubator story was eerily
similar to English tales during World War I that told of
German soldiers killing babies. Baby killing/eating is a
classic wartime propaganda ploy, but the American media
were true believers, repeating the story endlessly.
Remember the bomb-disguised-as-a-toy story concocted
about the Soviet Union in the 1980s? Those kinds of
stories are virtually always suspect, particularly when
a nation is beating war drums like the U.S. was.
Seven U.S. Senators actually cited that incubator
"incident" as part of their justification for going to
war. The incubator story was prominent in the media for
months as the Bush administration garnered support for
the military action against Iraq. I heard other dubious
reports about Iraq and their intentions. I had studied
enough wartime propaganda to doubt what I was hearing,
and it later turned out that the incubator story, the
Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia and other influential
stories were fabrications. While the incubator story got
widespread and repeated airing, the American media
barely reported Iraq's willingness to negotiate a
withdrawal. Several withdrawal proposals were tendered,
and all immediately rejected by the Bush administration.
Bush proudly said he didn't negotiate with people like
Hussein, whom he compared to Hitler. Bush even had the
gall to call Hussein's invasion of Kuwait a "naked
aggression." That came from a man who ordered the
invasion of Panama, which was a far more unjustified,
murderous and "naked" aggression than the invasion of
Kuwait was. Instead of laughing at Bush's rank
hypocrisy, the media applauded his high principles.(6)
The tale of Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of
incubators and leaving them to die was given in
heart-wrenching testimony at the Congressional Human
Rights Caucus by a young woman who called herself
Nayirah, who said she witnessed it. That "atrocity" was
later exposed as an outrageous lie. It was discovered
that the Nayirah was the Kuwait ambassador's daughter,
and an American public relations firm, Hill and
Knowlton, coached her performance. Kuwait hired Hill and
Knowlton to "manage" the perception of Kuwait's
situation.(7) The incubator story may have been the
deciding factor for the Senate's narrow approval for
Bush's declaration of war on Iraq. George Bush's speech
about the Iraq army massing in Kuwait in preparation for
an invasion of Saudi Arabia also turned out to be a
lie.(8)
Those weren't just shameful lies, they were murderous
lies, designed to incite a nation into committing mass
murder. Those Americans who cheered the Gulf War were
manipulated with lies and deceit into supporting mass
murder.
A Panamanian Prelude
The first casualty of any war is the truth, and the
Pentagon had practice in muzzling the press in Panama a
year earlier. It wasn't until the Academy Award-winning
documentary The Panama Deception came out that many
Americans found out what was being hidden about our
blatant, illegal and murderous invasion of Panama. As
Napoleon said, if you can keep the truth quiet long
enough so the people do your bidding, the truth coming
out later doesn't really matter.
Panama was in many ways a warm-up for Iraq. The Western
Hemisphere has been taking a beating from Europe for
over five hundred years. First it was the Spanish who
invaded, enslaved and annihilated the native population
of the Western Hemisphere. Then it was the Portuguese,
who to their disappointment didn't find gold-plated
civilizations in South America to plunder like the
Spanish did. As the native slave supply died off due to
disease, starvation, overwork and violence, the
Portuguese and Spanish raped Africa, bringing captured
Africans to the New World to replace the native slaves
(The Portuguese obtained them, the Spanish bought
them.). A century later it was the English, French and
Dutch who moved in, generally repeating the pattern of
invasion, exploitation and genocide that the Spanish and
Portuguese did.(9) African slaves eventually repopulated
regions that had been completely shorn of its native
population, like the Caribbean and Brazil.
Those events were the two greatest demographic disasters
in world history, devastating the populations of three
continents. Probably somewhere between 50 and 100
million natives inhabited the Western Hemisphere when
Columbus stumbled into it in 1492.(10) By the year 1600
about 90% of the native population had been killed off.
The same thing happened wherever the white man showed up
with his Eurasian/African diseases and greedy, murderous
mentality, whether it was Iceland, Hawaii, Australia,
New Zealand or the South Pacific.(11) And killing the
natives to further clear the land, enslaving them when
possible, did not help matters. The
European-African-American slave trade killed ten of
millions of people and displaced/ravaged many millions
more.
After nearly three centuries of carnage one colony waged
a war to break free of the mother country, and the
United States was born. The United States then embarked
on its own imperial expansion, one that was as murderous
and greedy as anything the European powers ever did.(12)
A generation after the nation's founding, and soon after
repeated drubbings by the British, where they even
sacked the American capital, President Monroe formulated
his famous policy. The Monroe Doctrine in essence said
that if anybody was going to play bully in the Western
Hemisphere, it was going to be the United States. It was
couched in the flowery rhetoric of "protecting" the
Western Hemisphere, but in the end it staked out Latin
America as the United States' imperial backyard. The
facts of history have borne that out beyond any
reasonable doubt, though to the degree Monroe saw the
ultimate consequences of his policy is debatable.
Between 1798 and 1945 the United States sent its
soldiers abroad in 168 separate events. Of those 168
events, 85 times the troops were sent to what was or is
known as Latin America.(13) Sometimes they were
relatively minor skirmishes with the European powers or
the locals, or providing protection for American
interests. Other times they were outright invasions to
overthrow the government and install U.S.-backed
dictators, or to occupy a country so their revolutionary
(desire for freedom) tendencies were held in check, or
to seize lands from the European powers, like how the
United States seized Puerto Rico, Cuba and the
Philippines (?!) in the Spanish-American War. I don't
know of one instance of those troops being sent for
clearly humanitarian reasons. Maybe a few can be argued
that way, like attacking slave-running ships in the
the1820s, but it is literally only a few. Soldiers are
not missionaries or Red Cross workers. Violence is not a
humanitarian undertaking. Later in this piece Smedley
Butler, arguably the most respected man who ever ran the
Marines, gives his opinion on just whose interests were
being protected/promoted by those military actions.
The story of Panama is a textbook example of the United
States' imperial oppression of Latin America. Similarly
to how Iraq was an invention of Great Britain, Panama is
an invention of the United States. Europeans had used
the Isthmus of Panama since the 1500s in crossing
between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Spain had plans
to build a canal across the Isthmus in the 1500s. There
was talk by various parties throughout the 1800s
regarding building a canal across the Isthmus. The
Americans began using the Isthmus in earnest during the
1840s as their empire expanded across the North American
continent. The Isthmus was an important and strategic
transportation lane. The Frenchman who initiated the
Suez Canal construction formed a company to attempt a
Panamanian canal in 1880s, but had abandoned the effort.
The Panama region was part of Colombia and had been so
nearly continually since the Latin American revolutions
that overthrew Spanish rule around 1820. Panama had an
uneasy relationship with Colombia for generations, with
a number of revolts, but was relatively independent in
1900. Throughout the 1800s the United States never
supported Panamanian notions of independence from
Colombia. But when Colombia proved uncooperative in
letting the United States "buy" part of the Isthmus, the
U.S. had a remarkable and sudden change of heart
regarding Panamanian independence. The U.S. militarily
supported a Panamanian revolution that succeeded in
1903, and then quickly set aside part of Panama for
itself in an agreement signed with the French. The new
"nation" of Panama was barely consulted before dividing
it with the Canal Zone.
The new Panamanian citizens were far from free. The U.S.
sent troops to the region a number of times before the
"revolution." Those were the days of Teddy Roosevelt's
Big Stick Diplomacy. Roosevelt would later frankly
remark regarding his acquisition of the Canal Zone, "I
took it." The U.S. military occupied the Canal Zone from
1903 to 1914, and used their military muscle numerous
times to keep those pesky Panamanians in line. Panama's
independence was often more imaginary than real, which
became the standard situation throughout Latin America.
The Monroe Doctrine became appended in American politics
with the Roosevelt Corollary, which nobly stated that
the U.S. was appointing itself to the selfless task of
sometimes exercising "international police power" on its
Latin American neighbors, for their own good of course.
During the 1900s dictatorships ran Panama, like
virtually all of Latin America. Strongmen came and went
throughout Latin America, and the life expectancies of
their regimes were often directly proportional to how
obedient they were to U.S. interests. A dictator who
allowed the U.S. business interests a free hand could
look forward to a long and profitable tenure. Those who
had wild notions of freeing their people from the yoke
of neocolonial oppression quickly found themselves out
of a job, and perhaps also lost their lives.
America's influence over the Latin American nations only
increased after World War II. And new U.S. agencies were
being established to keep control by more sophisticated
methods than merely using brute force, such as the CIA.
The international arena also transformed when the
European empires collapsed. The royal colonialism of
Europe has given way to corporate colonialism. A number
of the methods of exploitation work similarly, but with
different faces on the exploiter side. Corporate coffers
instead of royal coffers are filled.(14) The bottom line
is that the average people - the ones who do the work -
are still exploited by the white man's world.
Neocolonial institutions like the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund help enforce the world
order, where the people in the "developing" nations are
enslaved to the industrialized world.(15)
Anybody who thinks that our invasion of Panama had
anything to do with "restoring democracy" or stopping
the drug traffic is invited to watch The Panama
Deception (It is available at most video stores. It won
the 1992 Academy Award for best documentary.). Or one
can read the work of people like Noam Chomsky, Edward
Herman, William Blum, and many other scholars of their
stature. The intent and effect of our invasion of Panama
was the opposite of restoring democracy, and the drug
trade probably doubled through Panama after we invaded
and installed a puppet government.(16)
Just like Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega is no nice guy.
He came up through the ranks of the military, like most
Latin American dictators. But he was very valuable to
the United States' interests, and was well paid by the
U.S. for providing his services, apparently over
$100,000 a year by the CIA. Sure, Noriega had his hand
in drug running, but it is also likely that people like
George Bush, Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton also had their
hands in drug running over the years.(17) Noriega
succeeded Omar Torrijos as Panama's leader. Torrijos
wasn't your typical banana republic dictator. He was the
closest thing to a democratic leader as Panama ever had,
and was beloved by the Panamanian masses because he
enacted many policies that benefited the average person,
and he was decidedly wary of the imperial influence of
the United States. Torrijos died in a plane crash in
1981 that many think was not an accident, but sabotage
and murder by Noriega, with CIA help. If that is true,
it was merely a day at the office for the CIA.(18)
The American invasion of Panama was a classroom for
perfecting methods of overthrowing a government,
installing a dictatorship, wiping out the political
opposition and keeping the news from the American
people. From the moment the United States invaded Panama
they engaged in extraordinary measures to keep the news
from the American people about what was really
happening. The United States military's effort during
the first three days of the invasion was so successful
that there exists virtually no independent video footage
of the invasion. The American media was tightly
controlled, their correspondents not being allowed to
independently witness or record anything. They sat under
the watchful eye of the military for the whole invasion,
not being allowed to go anywhere important. Media
personnel from other countries were detained, jailed,
and in the case of Spanish news photographer Juantxu
Rodriguez, summarily executed on the street by United
States soldiers for the crime of taking pictures.(19)
U.S. soldiers raided, ransacked, shut down and arrested
the personnel of every organization in Panama critical
of the United States' invasion. The U.S. military
immediately took over the television stations in Panama
and began broadcasting their own programming. The
leaders of the puppet government that the United States
installed upon invading drew up lists of people and
groups who were truly fighting for democracy in Panama,
and who might be politically opposed to the new regime.
The United States military rounded up thousands of
people on those lists and threw them into prison,
sometimes for years, with no charges ever being filed.
The people who got that treatment were college
professors, newspaper editors, union leaders, human
rights activists, etc. In short, all the truly
democratic leaders in Panama were imprisoned. And George
Bush had the incredible, Orwellian audacity to say his
invasion "restored democracy" in Panama. And as Bush
uttered those words, our politicians in Washington gave
him a standing ovation.
One big reason the United States muzzled the media was
so the true devastation visited on Panamanians by the
invasion would go unreported. The Pentagon said only 250
Panamanian civilians died in the invasion. The reality
was that about 4,000 people died and 20,000 were left
homeless. The United States military invaded and burned
the El Chorrillo district of Panama City in a display of
callous disregard for civilian casualties. But by
detaining or executing journalists the military was able
to keep that news quiet. And there were other things
they wanted to keep quiet about. For instance, it
appears that they were trying out some new weapons
systems in the invasion. There were numerous reports of
people literally melting and vehicles being cut in two
by what appeared to be a laser-type weapon.
The United States military tried covering up their
murders as best they could. In echoes of the crematoria
at Auschwitz, the military apparently bulldozed bodies
into piles on the beaches and had bonfires, trying to
destroy the bodies, then dumping the remnants into the
ocean. They even took over the hospitals and morgues,
seizing their records and detaining doctors and the
hospital staff. There were ten doctors on duty at Santo
Toms Hospital on December 20, 1989. Nine of them were
fired, arrested or driven into hiding. The Red Cross was
denied access to places like El Chorrillo for several
days. But our military heroes were not able to destroy
all the evidence of their mass murders. Months after the
invasion, while the Pentagon was still saying with a
straight face that only 250 civilians had died, mass
graves began to be unearthed in Panama. Fifteen mass
graves were discovered (with more probably undiscovered
and unreachable in the Canal Zone), and one more big lie
of the U.S. government was exposed. As the mass graves
were exhumed, the victims in them gave mute testimony to
what kind of invasion really went on in Panama. There
were victims with bullet holes in the backs of their
skulls, victims with their wrists tied together, victims
in their '70s, children, victims wearing casts on their
arms and legs, etc.(20)
The American people cheered the invasion, brainwashed as
they were. Manual Noriega was transformed into public
enemy number one, and America wanted him brought to
"justice." As usual with those kinds of imperial
behaviors, the invasion of a nation to apprehend their
head of state for crimes he supposedly committed is an
act virtually without precedence in world history. It
was a flagrant violation of all international law,
condemned by the United Nations and throughout the
world. The American people easily swallowed the
rationale of invading Panama to apprehend Noriega, as
usual. As the scholar Jos De Jesus Martinez said, it is
hard to believe "how Americans can be so stupid" as to
believe the rationale they were fed regarding Panama's
invasion. Indeed. I have to ruefully admit that I have
now seen literally dozens of situations like the one
surrounding American opinion on Panama, and I am no
longer surprised.
The exercise of controlling the press during the
Panamanian invasion was a mere warm up for the Gulf War.
The United States controlled the information regarding
the invasion so well that it reminds one of Stalinist
Russia or Nazi Germany. And in a great irony, the
invasion of Panama happened right after the Berlin Wall
fell. I clearly remember when the Berlin Wall was
falling and the world was cheering. I was wondering what
George Bush would have to say about it. Do you remember?
I do. Instead of some impassioned speech about freedom
and the historic nature of the peaceful collapse of an
empire, Bush seemed shocked and afraid by what happened,
mumbling something about needing to keep things under
control, then he turned around and invaded Panama. To
anybody with functioning senses and a modicum of reason,
all our rhetoric about being the land of the free and
the home of the brave must have seemed about as hollow
as a blimp hangar.
Attacking Iraq
I am not justifying Saddam Hussein's behavior. The man
is a despot who used chemical weapons on his Kurdish
population, began a senseless war against Iran and
invaded Kuwait. Saddam is in good company regarding
using chemical weapons on Iraqis. Winston Churchill also
used chemical weapons on Iraqis, even proudly justifying
it.(21) Nearly all the Middle East nations are
dictatorships (often euphemistically called kingdoms),
and Britain set them up that way. That is consistent
with a long-standing Western practice of installing
dictators in their client states. The native populations
are more easily controlled with dictatorships.
Democracies in client states have always been anathemas
to the U.S. and Western Europe. That is because
dictators can effectively exploit client state
populations, and democracies are difficult to control.
Dictators act as our proxies, keeping the population in
line while their nation provides the U.S. and its
corporate structure with cheap bananas, tin, wood,
shoes, oil and other commodities. Meanwhile the
dictators and the plutocratic elite at the top live the
high life, and the masses suffer greatly.
Our overthrow of Iran's government in 1953, installing
the Shah atop one of the more brutal dictatorships of
modern history, was our standard meddling with other
nations, visiting disaster onto their people. When Iran
had their revolution in 1979 and stormed the U.S.
embassy, taking those hostages while calling the U.S.
the "Great Satan", few Americans knew how justified
their rage was. Our media doesn't like telling the
people the whole story, particularly one that puts the
U.S. government and the commercial interests (oil
companies in that instance) in a bad light.(22)
My office in Wilmington had a sound system that played
mellow music at low volume during the day. It was a
pleasant background to work to. The men that ran the
bank were big military boosters, their office walls
adorned with photos of relatives in uniform. The day the
bombs began dropping the music was replaced with a
news/talk show played at high volume. The night before,
as we began bombing them, the U.S. media was dominated
with ex-generals and other hawks rhapsodizing about the
bombing. I remember hearing one ex-general on the radio
exulting about the air show over Iraq, calling it a
"great day to be a soldier." That day at the office I
was treated to the loud blast of war coverage. During
that day it was announced that we had destroyed Iraq's
air force, so there was no air resistance from Iraq, and
one of the bank's owners came running out of his office,
listening raptly to the announcement, nearly thrusting
his fist into the air. It was hard to maintain my
composure, and very hard to get any work done.
Then the war coverage was interrupted by a talk show.
The host sounded like a protg of Rush Limbaugh. In all
of Ohio there was only one protest of the war, at least
as far as our media presented. About twenty students
protested at the University of Cincinnati. For a state
of over ten million people, twenty people amounted to
less than .0002% of the population. The talk-show host
made those few protesting students the subject of his
show. He asked his listening audience if those students
were "stupid or evil." And his callers were unanimous in
their condemnation of anybody daring to protest our
bombing of Iraq. One caller cleverly said that the
students were "stevil."
A week later the first letter to the editor I ever wrote
was on its way to the Dayton Daily News. They published
it on February 5, 1991. Here it is.
As the United States subdues another enemy in freedom's
name, or so it is said, the blood of our children will
again be spilled for the noble cause. It could be very
profitable at this time to consider an ancient strategy.
Many years ago, a radical genius offered a means to
absolutely destroy one's enemies. The succeeding years
have proven the tactic too outrageous and
incomprehensible to even attempt. History tells us that
practically nobody has ever gathered the courage to see
the strategy through.
The ancient extremist theorized that his maneuver would
not only win the day, but could be used over and over to
annihilate any and all enemies. The bizarre theory
involved the obscure and very, very rarely used strategy
of loving the enemy.
This country was not officially founded in that
radical's name, nor are his theories officially
recognized here, but the person's work and life
supposedly has many adherents in this country. You could
fool me.
His ideas were far ahead of his time back then, and they
seem equally far ahead of the present time. When ever
will the example of the life of Jesus actually be taken
seriously? I hope soon, for the sake of us all,
including those awful Iraqis.
It was my first experience in writing to a newspaper, it
was the first thing I had published, and it was my first
experience with editing. The newspaper edited out "or so
it is said" from that first sentence. That changed the
tenor of my letter a little, particularly my intended
irony in using the word "awful" to describe the Iraqis.
But I was glad they published what they did, and maybe
it caused a few people to reconsider their lusty cheers
for the bombing. Right next to my letter was printed the
wit and wisdom of Hughie Sprinkle, whose sentiments
reflected the public attitude better than mine did.
Hughie wrote, "The only sensible way to win the war and
save American lives is to nuke (Iraq), using neutron
bombs. Kill them all - man, woman and child. Kill'em
quick and kill'em good. Then bulldoze the area over, and
begin again."
One might think Mr. Sprinkle's opinion was from the
lunatic fringe. It wasn't. At about the same time as my
letter and Mr. Sprinkle's were published, the Dayton
Daily News ran its weekly Cal Thomas column. Thomas is a
nationally syndicated columnist, a man who calls himself
a Christian from the conservative tradition. In Thomas'
column he also called for dropping nuclear weapons on
Iraq. And Thomas was not alone on the national stage
with his opinion. Thomas wrote that nuking Iraq would
"save lives." He obviously didn't mean the lives of
Iraqi citizens.
What made the sentiments of Thomas and Sprinkle truly
bizarre was that the events in Iraq and Kuwait obviously
weren't a "war" in any meaningful sense of the word. In
the words of American soldiers, what happened in Iraq
was a "turkey shoot." Iraq was virtually defenseless to
our record bombing campaign. It was the most intense
bombing campaign in history. We'll never know exactly
how many Iraqi soldiers died in that "war." Credible
estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000 soldiers dying.
And it wasn't Iraq's elite Republican Guard that was
decimated. The dead were mainly Iraqi conscripts. The
vast majority never even saw an American soldier before
they died. They generally died in their shelters and
trenches, huddling from the awesome devastation raining
from the air.
The United States tried out many new weapons in Iraq.
Americans generally only heard only about the Patriot
Missile system that we used to shoot at Iraqi Scuds.
Barely reported was the Iraqi population's suffering or
the other neat weapons used on Iraq. Those realities
were hidden from the American people. Pentagon censors
screened virtually every American news report that came
from Iraq. What the American people were treated to
daily were propaganda exercises led by Norman
Schwarzkopf, now in America's pantheon of heroes. Once
in a great while some truth made it through to the
public, and it was usually by the Los Angeles Times and
CNN, two non-members of the eastern oligarchy.
For instance, in the Los Angeles Times on February 24,
1991 John Balzar brought a little reality to the Times
readers with his front page article titled "Apache
Copters: Deadly Havoc in the Dark of Night." Balzar was
able to watch night vision gunsight footage from the
briefing room. He told of what he saw.
"They looked like ghostly sheep flushed from a pen -
Iraqi infantrymen bewildered and terrified, jarred from
sleep and fleeing their bunkers under a hellish fire.
One by one, they were cut down by attackers they could
not see or understand. Some were blown to bits by bursts
of 30-millimeter exploding cannon shells. One man
dropped, writhed on the ground, then struggled to his
feet; another burst of fire tore him apart... Even
hardened soldiers hold their breath as the Iraqi
soldiers, as big as football players on the television
screen, run with nowhere to hide. These are not bridges
exploding or airplane hangers. These are men."(23)
The weapons used in the Gulf War were truly horrific.
Bombs that explode at waist level were not the kinds of
smart bombs our newsmen oohed and aahed over. By the
Pentagon's own numbers, ninety-three percent of the bomb
tonnage used by America in the Gulf War wasn't "smart."
Missiles that turned around buildings in quest of their
targets were the evening news fare, but the vast
majority of what we dropped onto Iraq was the good old
dumb kind, about 70% of it missing its target. If
Americans had seen what was really going on in Iraq, I
hope they would not have cheered so loudly.
During the Gulf War some of the weapons systems deployed
are considered the most powerful weapons short of a
nuclear bomb. One is called a fuel-air bomb. The bomb
works thusly: there are two detonations; the first
spreads a fine mist of fuel into the air, turning the
area into an explosive mix of vast proportion; then a
second detonation ignites the mixture, causing an
awesome explosion. The explosion is about the most
powerful "conventional" explosion we know of. At a
pressure shock of up to 200 pounds per square inch
(PSI), people in its detonation zone are often killed by
the sheer compression of the air around them. Human
beings can generally withstand up to about a 40-PSI
blast. The bomb literally sucks the oxygen out of the
air, and can apparently even suck the lungs out through
the mouths of people unfortunate enough to be in the
detonation zone. And our military used it on helpless
people. The U.S. also dropped a bomb called "Big Blue"
with a specialized high-tech explosive mixture that can
produce up to a 1,000-PSI shock wave, a magnitude only
exceeded by nuclear weapons.(24) That kind of shock wave
turns a body into hamburger, even if no shrapnel hits
it.
Some of the other weapons systems deployed are called
"bouncing" bombs. "Adam" was one of those bombs used in
the Gulf War. It is euphemistically called an
"antipersonnel" bomb. What the bomb does is bounce up to
about waist high after it hits the ground, so when it
explodes it has a better chance of eviscerating the
"personnel" on the ground unfortunate enough to be near
it. Another novel weapon deployed in the Gulf War was
dubbed "The Beehive." The Beehive is a bomb that spins
at high velocity, spitting out 8,800 pieces of
razor-edged shrapnel in all directions, producing a
"Swiss-cheese" effect on anybody near it. As the Los
Angeles Times reporter who wrote about those weapons in
1991 observed, "The mechanics of death and destruction
are a grim affair. The military's scientific approach
and its philosophies - for example, its preference for
wounding vital organs over blowing off limbs - can be
deeply disquieting to anybody who imagines such matters
are left to chance. Many people would rather not know
about the gruesome details."(25) Norman Schwarzkopf
never regaled the press with footage showing the results
of those weapons.
While the bombing was going on America leaped into a
frenzy of jingoistic support. Yellow Ribbon campaigns
blanketed the nation. The bank where I worked had a Red,
White and Blue Day at the office, where everybody was
supposed to wear those colors and pose for a company
group picture. I was working as a temporary employee at
the time, and decided to not toe the line, maybe risking
my job. I wore black and green that day, and found a way
to disappear when the group photo was taken, amidst the
chest-beating cheers. Concurrently there was an office
campaign to send Valentines to American Persian Gulf
soldiers. It wasn't an optional program. Over the sound
system each department was summoned to a room to sign
those Valentines. There was an irony: Valentines to
soldiers annihilating a helpless enemy, an enemy that
was their ally a few months earlier. I also left the
building when my department signed the Valentines.
And I vividly remember on Valentines Day the "news"
blaring from the office speakers as the U.S. media was
spinning an event from February 13th, when the United
States military bombed one of Baghdad's bomb shelters.
The U.S. said their intelligence told them the bomb
shelter was actually a military headquarters, and they
sent a sophisticated bomb that penetrated the shelter,
obliterating its interior. But the shelter was filled
with women and children huddling from the nightly
bombings of Baghdad. About five hundred women and
children died. And on Valentines Day the American
airwaves were filled with "experts" trying to spin that
disaster into a propaganda ploy by Saddam Hussein. One
rationale the "experts" concocted was the logic that
since Baghdad had few bomb shelters, only a small
percent of the population could hide there, so therefore
those woman and children were pawns of Hussein, and
their deaths the responsibility of Iraq, not America. I
was nauseated.
And CNN's intrepid Peter Arnett in Baghdad did things
that made him hated by the U.S. government: he made
reports the Pentagon couldn't censor. He visited the
bomb shelter and witnessed the fact there was no
evidence of a military installation. Arnett did a
similar thing when he witnessed the milk factory we
bombed while we claimed it was a chemical weapon
facility. Arnett toured the bombed ruins and found it
was indeed a milk factory. He toured the factory the
summer before, as it was producing milk.(26)
Those incidents were similar to our 1986 bombing of
Libya, with Ronald Reagan telling the world he had
"irrefutable" proof that Libya was behind the bombing of
a nightclub in Germany which killed some U.S. soldiers.
That nightclub bombing was Reagan's rationale for
bombing Libya, which killed up to 100 people, including
children. It turned out that Reagan was lying when he
said that, for he had no "irrefutable" proof. The
"proof" was allegedly NSA-intercepted communications
between Libya and its embassy in East Berlin. Not even
the Germans, who helped decode the messages, believed
the "proof".(27) The complete "intercepted"
communications have never been made public, and the U.S.
promised the "irrefutable" proof to Britain and France
because they allowed their countries to assist the
bombing raid (It was launched from Britain and flew over
France.). Our allies let us bomb first and provide proof
later. When it came time to provide the proof, the U.S.
admitted it didn't have any, a betrayal reported
throughout the world...except in the U.S. mainstream
media.
The same situation happened when we bombed a Sudanese
pharmaceutical lab in the summer of 1998, in retaliation
for the "terrorist" bombings in Africa. Our government
said there was incontrovertible evidence the lab was
being used for producing substances that could be used
in chemical weapons. Once again we lied to the world,
and that ironclad evidence has simply vanished when
subjected to scrutiny. Sudan has been the stage for
famine and other disasters in recent years. That
pharmaceutical lab was about the only one in the
country. How many children will die because of that
action? You can be sure the American media will not
speculate about it. It is going straight into the memory
hole, so Americans can cheer the next time we bomb
somebody on a whim.
Those days in 1991 were among the most alienating of my
life. I was never more ashamed of being an American.
While the bombing continued I was writing a letter that
became a book. Writing it was a form of therapy, trying
to make sense of and recover from my experiences with
Dennis Lee. I was putting my wife through graduate
school for her doctorate in psychology. Consequently she
believed in the process and began insisting that I see a
psychologist. She found one who specialized in treating
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). His office was
literally down the road from Wright Patterson Air Force
Base, the premier Air Force base in the world. He
specialized in treating soldiers for PTSD. He felt I was
definitely a candidate for his therapy, and I had a few
months of it, and it helped. I finished my letter/book
(a 106-page letter) as part of my therapy. He assured me
I was quite sane but living in an insane world.
As I talked about my traumas in that spring of 1991,
outside of my therapist's window you could see American
flags flying from every light pole and sign. The flags
fluttered, the yellow ribbons abounded, and the parades
marched through American cities. George Bush rocketed to
a public approval rating of 82% as our "turkey shoot" in
Iraq progressed. It had fallen to 56% the previous
autumn, from its high of 80% right after U.S. troops
invaded Panama to arrest Bush's former employee Noriega
(They tried killing him, but Noriega outsmarted them by
strolling into the Vatican embassy.). The public was
nearly delirious in its approval of what we did to Iraq,
with something like 90% of Americans thinking we had
performed a righteous and noble deed. Nothing boosts an
American president's popularity more than sending the
military somewhere, anywhere, to annihilate some
helpless "foe."
My therapist abandoned his therapist's role with me at
times, and confided that he was sickened by events. He
told me one of his clients was a young Navy SEAL, and
one of the first Americans into Iraq for the short-lived
"ground war." The SEAL got to see America's handiwork up
close. He got to see many bodies of women and children,
euphemistically termed "collateral damage" by the
Pentagon and our national press. The young man was
having a difficult time coming to grips with his
experiences, and couldn't find anything honorable about
what we did there. People like that never appear on
Nightline, describing their experiences. "National
security" makes sure that can't happen.
Many of our Gulf War actions qualified as war crimes.
One of them was the infamous bombing of the retreating
Iraqi army on the highway leading from Mutlaa, Kuwait to
Basra. It was a mass exodus from the city, including the
Iraq military that was withdrawing to Iraq on Hussein's
orders, and also civilians and prisoners. What the
United States military did on that highway stands as one
of the greatest and most defenseless mass murders of the
modern era. What the U.S. did was disable the front and
rear vehicles on that highway, trapping the two thousand
vehicles and their occupants into a seven-mile-long
parking lot. Then the planes flew mission after mission
on the helpless vehicles and their occupants,
annihilating and incinerating many thousands of people,
perhaps tens of thousands. That highway became known as
the "Highway of Death."
Pilots who flew the "Highway of Death" mission described
it as "shooting fish in a barrel", and they literally
rushed back and forth from the aircraft carriers
supplying them with bombs. According to the Washington
Post, "Their preferred weapon, the Rockeye cluster bomb
was passed over for others because elevators were too
slow getting them up to the flight deck in time for the
next launch."(28) It was a quick trip to the parking lot
to drop their payloads, then back to the aircraft
carrier to get more bombs. Those activities were in
direct violation of the Geneva Convention of 1949's
common article 3, which outlaws killing soldiers who are
"out of combat."
And that wasn't the only highway so treated by our
valiant armed forces. A sixty-mile stretch of highway
further east was treated similarly. That action was one
of 19 war crimes that ex-Attorney General Ramsey Clark
got George Bush and friends (Dan Quayle, Colin Powell,
Norman Schwarzkopf, James Baker, Richard Cheney, etc.)
prosecuted for. The International War Crimes Tribunal
found them guilty, not that the U.S. citizens heard much
about it over the cheers.(29) Winners never worry about
little things like war crimes trials, only losers do.
Another innovative act by our armed forces was a new
version of trench warfare. During the ground war the
United States deployed vehicles that were basically
tanks with bulldozer blades. The ground war, like the
air war, was not a war in any meaningful sense. It was
another "turkey shoot", with entire armored divisions of
Iraq's army decimated without returning even one
effective shot. The surviving Iraqi soldiers were
generally fleeing, hiding in their bunkers or rushing to
surrender. Thousands of Iraqi conscripts were huddled in
trenches and bunkers, and some were attempting to mount
a pitiful defense to the juggernaut bearing down on
them. The tank-bulldozers performed an unprecedented
act: they approached the trenches and bunkers, and
literally filled them with earth, burying thousands of
Iraqi soldiers alive. It qualified as another war crime.
Not one American was killed in the live entombment of
thousands of Iraqi soldiers.(30)
Once again, what happened in the Gulf War wasn't "war".
It was slaughter. War is what World War II was like,
where both sides were fairly evenly matched, and both
sides endured similar levels of casualty. What the Nazis
did to the Jews wasn't "war." In the "Gulf War" the
casualty ratio was about 1,000-to-1. We likely killed
over 100,000 Iraqi soldiers (some estimates go as high
as 300,000), while fewer than 200 Americans died, and
about half of those by "friendly fire" by our own
troops. But like with Panama, the U.S. government has a
great vested interest in keeping the bloody facts from
the public that cheers and finances the bloodshed. Our
armed forces actively prevented any accurate body count
of the "enemy" in Panama or Iraq. The motto seemed to
be, "Just bury them quickly and hope nobody ever exhumes
those mass graves." If they had incinerators in Iraq
they would have been going night and day.
It would be a mistake to think those American soldiers
were a bunch of innocent lambs, having no idea what was
going on, just following orders. To a degree that is
true, as nations always send out young men with no idea
of their mortality or why they are fighting, but make
able killers (One of my friends punned in 1991, "Support
our dupes."). But for a peek into our boys' mentality
during the Gulf War, the U.S. Air Force's 77th Tactical
Fighter Squadron published a songbook before the bombing
began, describing their plans for Iraq. The only part
that can be reproduced in polite company was this little
ditty:
Phantom fliers in the sky,
Persian-pukes prepare to die,
Rolling in with snake and nape,
Allah creates but we cremate.
The rest of songbook is, in the words of David Stannard,
a "melange of sadism and obscenity, most of them
employing personifications of entire Arabic and Islamic
peoples as racially inferior, maggot-infested women
whose mass destruction by the Americans is equated with
brutal, violent sex." One of the honors our soldiers
got, which is a time-honored ritual, was writing
messages on the bombs about to be launched. The bombs
had quaint messages like "Mrs. Saddam's sex toy" and a
"suppository for Saddam" on them as they dropped, and
again, those are the messages I can print in public.(31)
One post-war study found that over half of the American
women in the Gulf felt they were sexually harassed
verbally by their fellow male soldiers, and eight
percent of the women reported attempted or completed
sexual assaults by American soldiers (about 3,000
instances).(32)
Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf publicly admitted his
disappointment with being unable to finish his job in
Iraq. Schwarzkopf said, "We could have completely closed
the door and made it a battle of annihilation...(it was)
literally about to become the battle of Cannae, a battle
of annihilation." To his disappointment Schwarzkopf was
prevented from exterminating the Iraqi army.(33)
In the aftermath, as was publicly wished for by George
Bush and our media hacks, some of the Iraqi population
revolted against Iraq's government, in an action
fomented by the CIA.(34) And the world watched as
Hussein's Republican Guard mopped up the Kurds, with the
surreal situation of the U.S. military standing by,
watching it, and even refusing the let the Kurds have
captured Iraqi arms to fight with. We did it in the name
of "stability." The hypocrisy was awe-inspiring to
witness. Democratic revolutions in foreign lands are the
worst nightmares our corporate/government planners can
imagine. We prefer dictators, obedient ones.
The American media was extremely complicit with the
warmongering. Project Censored has been tracking the
censorship in our "free press" for over twenty years. In
1991 their top censored story was CBS and NBC refusing
to air footage from Iraq that was initially commissioned
by NBC and shot by Emmy-award-winning producers. The
footage showed civilian devastation of Iraq that
contradicted the propaganda being purveyed by the
government and media, giving the impression that the
Gulf War was a "clean" one with minimal "collateral
damage." NBC Nightly News Executive Producer Steven
Friedman and anchor Tom Brokaw were enthusiastic about
the film that was produced, and wanted it aired. But NBC
President Michael Gartner killed the story. The
producers then took the video to CBS. CBS Evening News
Executive Director Tom Bettag told a producer that he
would appear with Dan Rather the next evening. That same
evening Bettag was fired and the story was killed. And
the cheering continued.
Project Censored's number two story for 1991 was the
heavy censorship that attended Gulf War reporting, where
stories about Iraqi civilian casualties, air-fuel bombs,
Highway of Death footage and the like were all
suppressed, and U.S. battlefield casualties were
disguised as training accidents. The media served as a
propaganda organ of the government, contradicting any
notion of a "free press" in the United States.
Project Censored's number six story for 1991 exposed one
of the many lies and inventions George Bush told as he
prepared the public for war. On September 11, 1990, Bush
surprisingly announced that the main reason we had our
troops massed in the Gulf was because Iraq was
threatening to invade Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon
said Iraq had 250,000 troops and 1,500 tanks in Kuwait,
based on satellite images. The public never saw those
images, but Russian satellite images showed that no such
military buildup existed. That was one of many lies told
to the American public, getting them riled up to support
the war.(35)
Project Censored's number one story of 1990 was how
stupid the U.S. press was in believing the government's
propaganda regarding Iraq while it was whipping up
support for the Gulf War, when hindsight regarding
Vietnam, Panama and Grenada revealed how shamelessly the
government lied to the press and public. It was as if
the press would be lied to 99 times in a row, and
eventually realize they were being lied to, but would
eagerly believe the 100th lie they were told.
The purpose of our bombing campaign was officially
stated as driving Iraq from Kuwait. We were "liberating"
Kuwait. Again, when the imperial powers pulled out of
the Middle East in the 1920s, the governments left
behind were dictatorships that could be controlled, and
would also control the public in those nations. Kuwait
was and is a bloody and brutal dictatorship. Saudi
Arabia, the other nation we were theoretically
defending, has one of the most brutal and oppressive
regimes on earth. The Saudis are notorious for executing
political prisoners, keeping their women in virtual
slavery, flogging children, kangaroo courts and the
like. Saudi Arabia's method of public execution is using
a sword to decapitate their prisoners, sometimes taking
a few whacks to get the job done.
We immediately reinstalled a dictatorship in Kuwait. In
Kuwait and Iraq were many activists for democratic
reform, representing various oppressed groups. The
United States never considered giving them any voice or
influence. The dictatorship we reinstalled in Kuwait
immediately began throwing people into prison, torturing
prisoners to death, and ruthlessly stomping out any
notion the populace might have harbored regarding
freedom.(36)
Our government said we were driving Iraq from Kuwait. In
a logical war that would mean doing just that: invading
Kuwait to beat the Iraqi army back into Iraq. That did
not happen. Instead we unleashed the most intense
bombing campaign in history onto Iraq. We specifically
targeted the infrastructure of Iraq, including their
transportation system, electric system, sewer system and
water supply. What we did was a form of biological
warfare, akin to starving out the enemy.
Going back to the end of World War II when we dropped
nuclear weapons on Japan, in a move historians now
conclude had little to do with saving American lives and
everything to do with a demonstration of power to the
world, and to impress the Soviet Union in particular,
the United States has excelled at fighting the coward's
war.(37) Our high-tech wars, where we drop devastating
weaponry on helpless populations, never seeing the
"enemy" face-to-face, and using the powers of state to
ensure the cheering people at home never know the truth,
guarantees that such disasters continue. We did it to
Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, and most recently to Iraq.
Something happened after Vietnam though. The war
planners realized that the American people would no
longer stand to have their young men killed in foreign
wars of dubious benefit. So a new strategy was crafted,
which is obvious if you follow the events of the past
generation. People like Noam Chomsky have written
extensively on the phenomenon. The new strategy is this:
we will only wage war against weak enemies. The strategy
is to pick on enemies that can't fight back, have our
propaganda machine (the "free press" and government,
working hand in hand) turn them into malevolent demons
of tremendous stature, and then we resoundingly defeat
them in mere weeks, enduring few or no casualties
amongst our armed forces. Then the public will be
delighted that we overcame such an invincible adversary
so easily, at little cost to ourselves. It makes us a
proud people, destroying such evil monsters with
righteous ease.
The Gulf War was a textbook example of that strategy. If
you follow the rhetoric of Norman Schwarzkopf, George
Bush and the American media during the buildup to the
Gulf War, with Saddam Hussein being compared to Hitler,
and Schwarzkopf talking about how outnumbered his forces
were by Iraq, the strategy is clear. Amazingly, the new
"Hitler" was our ally until the day he invaded Kuwait,
and he even told American ambassador April Glaspie that
he was planning on invading Kuwait a week before his
troops did, and she basically said the United States had
"no position" in Arab border disputes.(38) Iraq may have
been lured into invading Kuwait by America, which is not
a pleasant thought to consider.
The Continuing War
As the dust was settling in Iraq, the real suffering was
about to begin. A public health team from Harvard went
into Iraq soon after the bombs stopped dropping. They
issued a report based on their findings. They estimated
that 170,000 children under the age of five would die in
the succeeding year due to the destruction of Iraq's
infrastructure by the U.S. bombing.(39) That news was
barely reported in the U.S. mainstream media in 1991. I
think about the only national mainstream American
journalist who mentioned the tremendous death toll that
the Iraqi children were about to endure was Mike Royko.
Other than his voice in the mainstream American media
wilderness, the American people were blissfully
insulated from the looming children's holocaust they
were responsible for. And to add murderous insult to
injury, we led an economic embargo of Iraq, a nation
that bought 70% of its food from abroad. That embargo is
standard American foreign policy, something we did to
Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua - basically what we do to
any weak nation that stands up to our gangsterism.
I have been watching the Iraqi children's death toll
mount through the years. In 1995 the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) issued a report on
the Iraqi food supply and health. They stated the Iraq
health minister stated that over 500,000 children had
died (in excess of normal rates before the Gulf War) in
the previous four years due to starvation and disease.
The report said they couldn't confirm that number, but
it also didn't seem unreasonable. The report discussed
the current children's death rate in Iraq (several
thousand a month), and their observation of starvation
conditions among the children like marasmus and
kwashiorkor. Iraqi citizens had higher life expectancies
than American citizens did before the Gulf War.(40)
Ramsey Clark's "genocide" description of what we are
doing to Iraq is close to the mark, and as we continue
to turn down the screws on Iraq as I write this, we may
see a genuine genocide come to pass in Iraq, courtesy of
the United States. I don't know anything about the Gulf
War and its continuing aftermath that should cause any
American to be proud. I suppose we can cheer that we
still get cheap oil from the Middle East and our
gangsterism there hasn't cost many American lives as of
yet.
Over the past several years I wrote a book or two,
corresponded with authors and others quite a bit, and
for several months had up a six hundred page web site
that discussed the Iraqi situation, among many other
topics. But I wasn't writing to newspapers, partly
because Iraq was a kind of non-story in America, and
they don't run letters on non-stories. Over the years
Americans have often accused me of being a great admirer
of Saddam Hussein. Nothing could be further from the
truth. The man is a tyrant, the same as when he was our
favored ally, obligingly killing hundreds of thousands
of Iranians in the 1980s, sending hundreds of thousands
of Iraqi men to death in senseless battles, and using
chemical weapons on his Kurds. And he bought nearly all
the material for his chemical and biological weapons
from the "civilized" world, like United States and
German firms. Hussein's crime was not being a dictator,
it was stepping on the wrong toes. Our government
obviously could not care less about the Iraqi people's
welfare, which is standard imperial behavior.
In the wake of the 1995 UNFAO report, and the activism
of a relative handful of Americans, the United States
government was shamed enough to begin an oil-for-food
program with Iraq through the U.N. Life there is
slightly better than it was in 1996, with the emphasis
on slightly. Iraq was an industrialized nation before
the Gulf War. Allowing Iraq to buy food with its oil is
like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping sword wound. Not
only do the poorest lose out, like in most nations, as a
dictator like Hussein is more interested in holding onto
power than his people's welfare, the Iraqi people need
far more than food. As I write this, more than a third
of Iraq's water supply is unfit to drink. That is
because our embargo has strangled Iraq so thoroughly
that they cannot purify all the water they need, and
they have not completely rebuilt their water supply
infrastructure, as we have turned down the screws. It is
well known that a contaminated water supply is today's
single greatest cause of death in small children
worldwide. The Iraqi hospitals have long since run out
of things we take for granted like painkiller,
antibiotics and other medicines, as the U.N. sanctions
(ruthlessly over-enforced by the United States)
strangles them. If a child has to go to an Iraqi
hospital today, it is taken for granted the child will
die there. As America is incredibly moving to tighten
the embargo in the wake of our recent bombing, the Iraqi
infrastructure may indeed fully collapse, and we will
have true genocide in Iraq, the greatest death toll
happening to the children.
A little over a year ago the United States began beating
the war drums again over the still never discovered
"weapons of mass destruction" that Saddam Hussein
supposedly was still harboring. I deal with the awesome
hypocrisy of that situation later in this piece. The
U.S. government was clearly mobilizing the brainwashed
American masses once again to cheer another bombing of
Iraq. In November of 1997 I was moved for a second time
to write a letter to the editor, this time to The
Seattle Times, as I was back home in Washington. They
ran my letter on November 30th, 1997. Here it is.
I have been watching Seattle's mainstream media while
all the saber rattling has been going on over Iraq
lately. The Seattle Times article of November 14 is the
first-time I have seen a substantive reference to the
harm United States has inflicted on the Iraqi people
over the past seven years ("Iraqi Sanctions Split
U.S.-Arab Coalition").
It is not surprising that the first reference I have
seen is not due to some "bleeding heart" American
mainstream journalist digging up the facts, but was in
response to our "Arab allies" refusing to fall into line
and get behind a U.S. military action against Iraq.
The article, authored by Barbara Demick of Knight Ridder
Newspapers, at least said that there is apparently a lot
of suffering going on an Iraq. But her characterization
of those "more virulent commentators" and the comparison
to the atomic bomb attacks on Japan was highly
misleading. So far, the United States' economic attack
on Iraq has killed far more people than our atomic
attacks on Japan. Two of the most prominent commentators
have been former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
investigators.
Two years ago, it was estimated that the death toll in
Iraq, because of the U.N. embargo, was approaching one
million people, including over a half-million children.
Today the death toll is more than one million people,
five percent of their population.
The children's death toll because of the embargo is
about 700,000 as of today, and starvation conditions
like kwashiorkor and marasmus are now common. That the
American mainstream media fail to mention the horrendous
human toll our economic attack has extracted from Iraq
is a crime.
Oh yes, we can say the United Nations is doing this, but
we are the ones making the sanctions happen, just like
we fabricated the "coalition" in 1990. The mainstream
media in America are accomplices in this great crime
against humanity, and there is a lot of blood on their
hands. Making letters like mine public would help turn
things around. The choice is yours.
A few months later the war drums and propaganda were
reaching a fevered pitch. We were on the brink of
bombing Iraq, and I was compelled once again to write a
letter to The Seattle Times. That one was a little more
forceful. For that letter The Seattle Times called me at
home before running it, I suppose so if I got lynched
they could say they confirmed it was Wade Frazier who
wrote it. It was written on February 2, 1998 and run in
the February 8th edition of The Seattle Times. Here it
is.
Once again in America the drum beat has begun. It looks
like we are going to unleash more death and destruction
onto the people of Iraq. Once again, the pertinent
questions are not being asked. One pertinent question
would be, "What has Iraq ever done to us?" The answer
is, "Nothing, except resist our attacks."
It is indeed ironic that the only nation to ever unleash
weapons of mass destruction on another is the United
States. It is also very illuminating to see that there
are but two nations getting ready to bomb Iraq: the
former and current masters of the world.
In another irony, during the seven-year saga between the
United States and Iraq (allies until the day Iraq
invaded Kuwait), the only mass destruction that has
taken place has been to the nation and people of Iraq.
The United States, through economic warfare following on
the heels of an unprecedented bombardment, has killed
over one million Iraqi citizens, most of them children
under the age of five (800,000 and counting). That
situation, which should assail the conscience of every
American, still is barely being mentioned in the
nation's media, amidst all the saber-rattling.
One of the greatest ironies of all is that back in April
of 1990, when Saddam Hussein was still our ally, he made
an offer to the United States that he would destroy his
chemical and non-conventional weapons if Israel would
also destroy theirs. And in another surreal twist, much
if not most of the material that Iraq has for making
"weapons of mass destruction" were purchased from the
United States and Europe. Hussein's offer and the United
States' response was reported in the Boston Globe on
April 14, 1990 and by other publications around the
world. The reaction of United States government was
interesting. We said that we would not be willing to
enter into negotiations on that issue. Our politicians
cleverly avoided mentioning Israel's nuclear arsenal as
they rejected Hussein's offer. The Israeli arsenal
(hundreds of nuclear bombs) is not that controversial an
issue, as far as its existence goes, as Israel kidnapped
and imprisoned one of their citizens for divulging its
existence (The celebrated Vanunu case, and he is still
in prison after a decade.). But the United States cannot
officially acknowledge Israel's nuclear arsenal, because
to acknowledge that Israel has secretly built a nuclear
arsenal would make all of our aid to Israel (billions of
dollars a year) illegal, according to our own Foreign
Aid Act.
The hypocrisy of the situation is evident to anybody who
knows what is going on. The United States will go to the
lengths of killing millions of people to prevent an
ex-ally from being able to use what we sold him. But, if
a nation finds itself in the fortunate position of being
one of our allies, we will go out of our way to ignore
their weapons of mass destruction.
Amazingly, the American people are generally ignorant of
the points I have made in this letter. People who live
outside of this country are not so disinformed. What
this country has done to the children of Iraq over the
past seven years is terrifying and hard to forgive. The
current global Imperial menace is engendering a lot of
fear and hatred, particularly in the Arab countries. The
ex-Soviet Union apparently cannot account for about 100
suitcase nuclear bombs. If one of those goes off one
sunny day in Washington D.C., for instance, it will be
no great surprise.
What Bill Clinton may have done with a woman who worked
in the White House is an incredibly minor situation.
But, unfortunately, the American media and people find
what Bill Clinton may have done in a closet far more
fascinating than the blood which is on the hands of all
Americans today, the blood of children whose crime it
was to be born in Iraq.
I was three-for-three in getting my letters published. I
was shocked that they ran that one, if for no other
reason than at over 600 words it was over twice as long
as their recommended 300-word limit. The paper actually
called me the day after they ran it, giving me the phone
number of a man who wanted to talk to me. I called him.
He was almost 80 years old, and called to congratulate
me for writing like I did, and said he was
"flabbergasted" the paper would run a letter like mine,
and that he had written letters for many years to the
paper and never had one published. The Seattle Times won
some points in my book. Forty years ago I might have
been beaten up (at the least) for publishing a letter
like that. Ten years ago I doubt that any mainstream
American paper would have published that letter. The
social awakening that began to the 1960s has made this
country a better one in many ways. But the struggle is
far from over. I sent that letter to ex-CIA operative
Ralph McGehee, who gets coverage elsewhere on this web
site. Ralph said he was "amazed" that any American
mainstream newspaper would run a letter like that. He
said a letter like mine would never see print in
newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington
Post. Ralph would know.
Thankfully there are enough people in America these days
not enslaved to our indoctrination systems, and are
beginning to feel something very awry with our foreign
policy, particularly regarding Iraq. In February 1998
the federal government staged a "town meeting" at Ohio
State University to air their rationale for their
proposed bombing of Iraq. The public was invited, though
the meeting was more for show, to fabricate a fig leaf
of public consent for the bombing. Our government
reckoned incorrectly. Students protested noisily, and
even the "mature and responsible" citizens who were
allowed to approach the microphone were anything but
enthusiastic about bombing Iraq again. Their questions,
even more then the rabble-rouser's protests, took the
politicians by surprise. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright was practically stuttering in the face of the
tough questions her team was being asked. The staged
meeting became a public relations disaster for the
United States government. At the 11th hour we backed
down from bombing Iraq.
I was cautiously optimistic, but I doubted our
government officials became good boys and girls
overnight. Iraqi children were still dying by the
thousands, our government would look for another
opportunity to bomb Iraq, and they had learned their
lesson. The next time they moved to bomb Iraq, even the
appearance of a democratic consensus being achieved with
the public would not be risked. Our government will
likely stage no more "town meetings" before they bomb
somebody. The December 1998 bombing of Iraq validated my
opinion. That one had no warning or propaganda buildup.
This past fall the propaganda machine revved up once
again. For the fourth time I wrote a letter to the
editor regarding Iraq. That one broke my streak and they
didn't publish it. Getting published the first three
times I tried to was encouraging regarding getting my
book published. At least my work was apparently
interesting enough to read. But I admit I was weary of
writing in hopes of helping to avert the violence.
The motivation for writing letters to the editor should
not necessarily be to get published, but to let the
newspaper know how many people out there feel that way,
and perhaps they will run one of those letters. If the
people truly stand up, I think they will be counted. But
the system is rigged against people participating in it,
which is a subject for my book. Noam Chomsky has written
about how the system works for many years in many books.
In nearly every society there are an elite few at the
top of the hierarchy, and they generally view those
below them as beings to be used for their own selfish
ends. And the West immediately attacks any nation that
attempts to form an egalitarian society, as we think we
own the world. Ralph McGehee stated it quite clearly in
the conclusion of his Deadly Deceits.(41) Egalitarianism
is incompatible with elitism, and United States leads
the field in destroying egalitarian movements worldwide.
That attitude is what led William Blum to title his book
about our foreign military and CIA adventures Killing
Hope.
The fourth letter I wrote about Iraq is below, written
on November 12, 1998. You can tell my patience was
wearing thin, and I was getting more strident. It is a
far cry from my "love the enemy" letter of 1991. They
predictably did not run that one. I was going just a
little too far.
Apparently the U.S. government won't be denied its
fervent desire to bomb Iraq again. What the U.S. has
done to Iraq's children over the past several years will
become one of history's great evil acts. Watching the
deadly spectacle of starving out an enemy over several
years has made me ashamed to be an American. With all
the false rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction,
maybe it is about time to let a little honesty slip into
the discussion.
We are the world's masters of mass destruction, with the
world's largest store of devastating weapons by far, and
we are the only nation to use them on another. Our great
ally Israel has about 100 nuclear missiles aimed at the
biggest Arab cities, and has done so for many years. Our
government won't even mention that situation because not
only would it make our aid to Israel illegal, it would
make us look like the world's biggest hypocrites.
Our bludgeoning of Iraq has nothing to do with freedom,
making the world safer, or any of those noble ideals. It
has everything to do with our hegemony in the region,
assuring ourselves of a steady and cheap supply of oil,
with nobody over there changing the rules of our game.
It is a might-makes-right world, and always has been. We
are merely the latest winners of the game, and our vast
wealth and power allows us to rain more death and
destruction onto a devastated nation. In every instance
I know of, our foreign military adventures have
primarily served our interests. That's why we do it. We
aren't the guys in the white hats. Our diplomats must
study Machiavelli's The Prince each night.
So let's sneak in a little honesty here: we are about to
bomb Iraq once again because we have the power to, and
the world had better not forget it. As the world watches
with horror at how greatly we can make a disobedient
ex-ally suffer, with a death toll rising into the
millions, they had better pray they never get on our
black list.
At least the paper ran letters like mine, if not so
forceful. I have noticed that the coverage of the latest
bombing attacks is a far different affair than it was in
1991, or even the saber rattling in the winter of
1997-1998. But what happened in December literally made
me sick. They impeached Clinton for the wrong crime. And
that time nearly the entire world was against us.
Clinton, with a straight face, told the American people
that the bombs we were dropping in Iraq as he spoke were
dropped to protect Iraq's neighbors. That would be a
wonderful joke if it weren't such a tragic lie. Not one
of Iraq's "threatened" neighbors voiced approval of the
bombing. They all said to stop bombing Iraq. Even
nations that supposedly hated Saddam Hussein, like Syria
and Iran, protested what the United States and Great
Britain were doing. They know that a devastated nation
of starving people poses no threat to them, and the
writing on the wall is obvious: if they displeased the
United States they could end up just like Iraq. We
couldn't even get Israel to support our bombing of Iraq.
And for anybody who has eyes and a brain, our hypocrisy
regarding the United Nations is laid bare. If we can
manipulate the United Nations to vote our way, we
present their vote as the authorization for our actions,
speaking fair words about the need to obey international
law and the voice of United Nations. When the U.N.
doesn't vote the way we like, we give them the finger,
doing as we please. The fact that we outraged two of the
five members of the U.N. Security Council, China and
Russia, while France looked for a place to hide, is
nearly incontestable proof of what kind of country we
are. The whole world sees that our actions in Iraq
benefited nobody but us. But we are the masters of the
world, and nobody will dare stand up to us. These days
some activists are saying that dropping a nuclear bomb
once a year on Iraq would be more humane than the slow
starvation and strangulation of its population. Their
arguments are not easily dismissed.
The night of our surprise bombing of Iraq on December
16th was not a happy one for me. I decided against
writing another letter to the editor, and wrote the
piece below. I was up until about 3:00 AM writing it. I
titled it "In the Service of Empire." Here it is.
This evening I watched the reactions of average
Americans to our latest bombing campaign in Iraq. The
news shows I watched interviewed people in bars and on
the street, and the only reactions aired were Americans
nearly shaking their fists into the air with approval,
saying that the United States should have bombed Iraq
long ago. But it wasn't Iraq that they talked about, it
was Saddam Hussein. Even Bill Clinton's speech to the
nation today spoke in terms of Saddam more than Iraq. We
aren't bombing Hussein, but the citizens of Iraq. In the
last eight years over a million people have died due to
the American bombing of Iraq, our subsequent economic
warfare, and Saddam Hussein's callous disregard for the
welfare of his people. I would say the blood is on our
hands roughly equally, but nobody would have died if it
weren't for our actions
Our media and government present the situation as if it
is our unalienable right to bomb another nation. There
is speculation by Republican legislators that the timing
of this bombing has to do with deflecting the nation's
attention from the looming impeachment vote on Bill
Clinton. But nobody in power is questioning our
righteousness in bombing Iraq, except for some of our
allies. France, China and Russia, on the United Nations
Security Council, are voicing their protest, making this
action unilateral on the behalf of the U.S. and Great
Britain.
What is most disturbing, as this saga has been unfolding
over the last eight years, is how justified Americans
feel in invading and bombing any nation they wish. In
recent months we bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. We
invaded Panama in 1989 without a shred of legal standing
to justify our invasion. We respect no nation's
sovereignty but our own. We carried on a proxy war
against Nicaragua for years to overthrow a popular
revolution, and our undertaking was condemned by the
World Court. We propped up the terror state of El
Salvador for many years as they slaughtered their
population. We have been carrying on economic warfare
against Cuba for almost forty years. It is painfully
clear that any nation not populated by white people is
fair game. What is nearly incredible to me is that most
Americans apparently feel justified in all these
invasions and bombings. The only rationale for these
behaviors is the philosophy that might makes right. We
invade and bomb other nations at will because we are the
world's most powerful nation, and nobody will stand up
to us.
The rhetoric our politicians and media always serve up
is that there is some honorable cause behind our violent
actions. I have yet to see one instance of that clearly
being the case, going back to the founding of our
nation. Arguments can be made for the World Wars, as the
white people fought over who would control the world,
yet we came out on top. I do not know of one instance in
the last fifty years where our mass murders have been
justified by any notion of noble intention. We have
invaded or overthrown or manipulated about fifty nations
since World War II. And every single time it was really
being done in the name of empire and greed. There has
never been a global gangster like the United States. The
United States has always been more of an empire than a
nation.
Greedy, murderous people, sometimes called our Founding
Fathers, carved out the borders of our nation. George
Washington, the richest man in America when he became
president, getting rich by stealing land from the
natives, presented a plan in 1782 to swindle the natives
out of their land by forcing them to sign treaties the
United States would never honor. Washington proposed a
plan of deception and low-intensity violence as the
cheapest way of wresting the land from the natives. The
U.S. government swiftly adopted Washington's plan, and
the natives of what is now the United States were robbed
of nearly all their land.(42) Relocation, extermination
and concentration camps (euphemistically called
reservations) accompanied the hundreds of fraudulent
treaties that were forced on the natives. The other epic
Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, author of the
Declaration of Independence and a slave owner like
Washington, had a philosophy almost identical to
Washington's greedy ambition. Jefferson wrote to a
future president, William Henry Harrison (who based his
political career on fighting the natives), that removing
the Indians from their land should be done using
business methods. Jefferson wrote that the best way to
do it would be to run the Indians into debt at the
trading posts and settle the bill by having them cede
their lands.(43) Jefferson wrote that any native who
resisted the United States' imperial ambitions for their
land should be met with "the hatchet", and their choice
was to be "extirpate(d) from the earth" or get out of
the way. Hitler couldn't have said it any better. The
machinations of Jefferson and Washington came after
nearly two centuries of genocide of the natives where
the thirteen colonies were.
Natives or other European nations having claims to the
land would not thwart the imperial ambitions of America.
After "buying" the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon (too
bad the natives who lived in those lands were not
consulted), Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on a
reconnoitering mission across the continent in 1803, to
see what rich lands might be further exploited, and to
further sketch the ultimate reach of empire. Following
in the wake of Lewis and Clark was the vanguard of
invasion, like trappers and traders. When gold was
eventually found in the Western lands, waves of
Americans looking for free land and gold swarmed
westward. The natives west of the Mississippi were
annihilated in about fifty years, as the empire grew.
American immigrants seized Texas from Mexico in 1836,
adding it to the American Empire in 1846. Also in 1846
President James K. Polk sent General Zachary Taylor and
his army into Mexico to provoke Mexico into fighting
them, and the U.S. quickly started a war in 1846 that
stole the American Southwest from Mexico in one
prodigious land grab. Those imperial ambitions were
given a quaint name, Manifest Destiny, as if God was
sanctioning the bloody and greedy expansion of the
American Empire. Taylor, whose military career was built
by killing natives in battle, was so successful at
stealing half of today's Western United States that he
became president in 1848.
When the slave-owning states tried breaking away from
the empire, they were forcibly brought back into the
fold by the Civil War.(44) American imperial ambition
knew no bounds, and extended to manufacturing a war with
Spain to seize Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in
1898. The U.S. made grand speeches that their seizure of
Cuba had no imperial ambition behind it, a sentiment
anybody can judge by looking at our posture toward a
truly independent Cuba today: our politicians can barely
restrain themselves from calling for an invasion of
Cuba, and we have been waging economic warfare against
them for almost forty years. And their speeches
regarding Cuba were further belied by the fact that the
United States stole Hawaii from the Hawaiians in 1893.
There is nothing in U.S. history that suggests that the
U.S. was doing anything other than expanding a new kind
of empire. With the official boundaries of the empire
complete by 1900, the next fifty years saw two World
Wars as the powers that came late to the empire game,
namely Germany and Japan, wanted their own empire, but
the other European powers and the U.S. already "owned"
the whole world. After World War II the U.S. found
itself in the position of being the only truly global
power in the history of the world, unseating its parent
and rival, Great Britain. With half of the world's
wealth and two-thirds of its industrial capacity, the
U.S. was in an unprecedented position of global
hegemony.
Declassified internal federal documents of the post-war
years have given us a look into the intentions of the
men who ran the U.S. government. The post-war U.S.
planners were quite frank while discussing secretly
among themselves how to guide foreign policy. Documents
like National Security Council Memorandum 68, written in
1950 by Paul Nitze (who would later be a member of the
Reagan Administration), were quite open about U.S.
foreign policy. NSC-68 was a right wing document,
written for the Secretary of State, which was candid
about turning America into a police state in order to
marshal the forces to overthrow the Soviet Union. Those
were the same years the United States was hiring the
Nazis to act as our spies, funding Nazi-related armies
to foment discord in the Soviet Union, and the wonder
years of the McCarthy Hearings and the executions of the
Rosenbergs for a crime they likely did not commit.(45)
The famous diplomat George Kennan authored Planning
Policy Study 23 in 1948 for the State Department, where
he admitted that we were the world's richest country by
far, and our foreign policy goal should be to maintain
that position of disparity with the world. Kennan wrote
that the way to do that would be to dispense with the
unrealistic goals of "human rights, the raising of
living standards and democratization. The day is not far
off when we're going to have to deal in straight power
concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic
slogans, the better." I have seen nothing that has
happened in the last fifty years to hint that the U.S.
foreign policy has ever been guided by any other
principles.
Once in awhile even American soldiers figure out what
they are really fighting for, and it's virtually never
for freedom. One of America's most respected military
leaders, Major-General Smedley Butler, after running the
U.S. Marines for generation, finally figured it out. In
an interview with Money magazine, published in December
1951, Smedley assessed his career.
"There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the
military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger men' to
point out enemies, its 'muscle men' to destroy enemies,
its 'brain guys' to plan war preparations, and a 'Big
Boss,' Supra-nationalistic Capitalism.
"It may seem odd for me a military man, to adopt such a
comparison. Truthfulness compels me to do so. I spent
thirty-five years and four months in active service as a
member of our country's most agile military force, the
Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks, from
second lieutenant to Major General. During that period I
spent most of my life being a high class muscle man for
big business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In
short I was a racketeer - a gangster for Capitalism.
"I suspected I was just part of the racket at the time.
Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military
profession I never had an original thought until I left
the Service. My mental faculties remained in suspended
animation, while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups.
This is typical with everyone in the military.
"Thus I helped to make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe
for American oil interests in 1914. I helped to make
Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank
boys to collect revenue. I helped in the raping of half
a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of
Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I
helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking
House of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests
in 1916. In China in 1927 I helped Standard Oil.
"During those years I had, as the boys in the back room
would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors,
medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I
might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he
could do was operate in three city districts. I operated
on three continents."
Butler eventually wrote a book titled War is a Racket.
Butler was one of the most decorated soldiers in U.S.
history. His military career ended in the 1930's, long
before we began justifying our international
depredations as a reaction to the Soviet Union's
ambitions. Since World War II America's military
gangsterism has only gotten worse, as we have few
rivals. We are truly a global power. Also the United
States is far more sophisticated than it used to be.
After World War II the United States formed spy agencies
like the CIA and National Security Agency to use cloak
and dagger strategies to stay number one. Instead of
boldly marching in the soldiers and overthrowing
governments like Butler regularly did when he ran the
Marines, organizations like the CIA have specialized in
trying to hide the hand of the United States.
One way to hide our hand is by hiring proxies to do the
dirty work, attempting to create the appearance of a
legitimate revolution in the nations our government
plunders. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was one of
numerous instances of American proxy armies acting on
our behalf. The Contras in Nicaragua were another band
of mercenaries that we hired, and Ronald Reagan had the
gall to call them "freedom fighters." The list of
democratically supported/elected governments
overthrown/destabilized by the United States since 1945
is quite long, beginning as the dust was still settling
in Europe after World War II, like what we did in Italy
and Greece. The U.S. even used Japanese troops in China
in 1945 to try suppressing the Communist revolution just
getting underway. The list of legitimate governments we
overthrew in order to install bloody dictators since
1945 is long and grim, and a few of the countries we
raped that way were: Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954,
Indonesia, 1965; Vietnam, 1950s and 1960s; Brazil, 1964;
Ghana, 1966; Chile, 1973, and the list goes on and
on.(46) Once again, sending in the Marines is usually
the tactic of last resort, when the more clandestine
methods fail to produce the desired result. We boldly
invaded Vietnam in the 1960s, Grenada in 1984, Panama in
1989, and we bombed the smithereens out of Iraq in 1991.
We conducted a secret war in Cambodia, a very
questionable war in Korea, and have even destabilized
governments in nations like Australia when their leaders
didn't prove servile enough. All in all, the United
States has in one way or another bludgeoned about fifty
nations since World War II, as it makes sure global
capitalism and American supremacy stays unchallenged.
No longer is it outright colonialism, where the Queen of
England would officially rule over far-flung realms.
Today it is corporate colonialism, where the people
still don't get to eat the food they grow, but the food,
oil and other resources go to the industrialized world,
and the people of the subjugated nations suffer greatly.
The last time I looked, of the poorest forty nations in
the world, thirty-six exported food to the United
States.(47) The mechanisms of oppression differ from the
good old colonial days. Today institutions like the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund keep the
game rigged against the working people of the world,
particularly in what we used to call the "Third World."
Structural Adjustment Programs and other policies make
sure the people can barely eat as they make shoes for
Americans in Indonesia, or toys for American children in
Southeast Asia. International treaties like NAFTA and
GATT (and the failing MAI) are designed to make the
world safe for corporate profits at the expense of the
workers and environment. Their dire state is the result
of centuries of exploitation by Europe and its political
descendents like the United States.
What is going on in Iraq as I write this is merely more
of the same. It is no accident that the United States
had its Persian Gulf "war" soon after the Soviet Empire
collapsed. The only power that could stay our hand in
the Middle East was gone, and we were able to march a
tremendous army into the Middle East and engage in the
biggest bombing of all time, using Iraq as a testing
ground for new weapons. We specifically targeted the
infrastructure of Iraq when we bombed them. We targeted
their electric, transportation, water and sewer systems.
What we did to Iraq had no rationale related to
"expelling" them from Kuwait. Even the British press
said that our bombing amounted to "biological warfare."
During our turkey shoot in Iraq in 1991, our troops
committed many acts that by the standards of Nuremberg
and the Geneva Convention qualified as war crimes. By
the Nuremberg standards that we imposed on the Nazi
hierarchy in 1945, George Bush should have gone to the
gallows instead of an all-time public approval rating.
Ex-Attorney General Ramsey Clark has been futilely
trying to get the United States prosecuted for war
crimes for several years now because of what they did to
Iraq.(48) Winners never have to face war crimes trials:
only losers do.
In the wake of the unprecedented bombing of Iraq in
1991, the United States has engaged in economical
warfare against Iraq, this time using the United Nations
as its proxy. Without the United States bending arms and
exerting great pressure, there would be no economic
embargo against Iraq today. But the embargo is standard
American foreign policy. We have always done it to any
nation that has dared to stand up to us. We have
economically embargoed Cuba for almost forty years.
After our failed invasion of Vietnam our government
embargoed the area for a generation, even going to the
extreme of trying to prevent international aid groups
like Oxfam and Mennonites from helping those countries.
Our diplomats could have taught Machiavelli and the
Marquis de Sade a thing or two.
The economic embargo against Iraq, though, has been
unprecedented in its severity. Iraq was an
industrialized nation before 1991. The life expectancy
of an Iraqi citizen was literally higher than that of a
United States citizen in 1990 (according to UN data).
The destruction of Iraq's infrastructure, and the
continuing economical warfare that the United States is
practicing against Iraq, is one of the greatest crimes
against humanity perpetrated in this half of the
century. Over one million Iraqi citizens have died as
the result of the situation, and most of them have been
children under the age of five. In 1995 the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a
report on the state of Iraq's health and food supply.
The report is grim reading. Starvation conditions like
kwashiorkor and marasmus, once the province of desperate
places like Ethiopia and Sudan, are now common in Iraq.
The United States has been turning Iraq into one large
death camp. Iraq used to purchase 70% of its food from
abroad. The sanctions stopped that. In the wake of
enough Americans and others making noise about this
inhumane behavior on the part of the United States, an
oil-for-food program was initiated. It has helped, but
not nearly enough. The Iraqi hospitals are full of
suffering people, and items we take for granted in the
West, like antibiotics, painkiller and other medicines,
have been denied the people of Iraq. And of course our
national media, performing its brainwashing and
propaganda duties, has generally kept this information
from the American people.
This situation of Americans having little idea about
what is going on is not a new phenomenon. During the
1970s, when one of our favorite dictators, Suharto of
Indonesia, invaded East Timor using American arms, the
American media was totally silent on what our ally was
doing. The invasion of East Timor and subsequent
occupation (which had no legal justification whatsoever
- it was naked aggression at its finest) killed off
between 28% and 44% of its population. It is perhaps the
greatest proportional genocide in this century, greater
than even what the Jews experienced in World War II. And
few Americans have ever even heard of East Timor.(49)
That is a horrifying example of your tax dollars at
work. And as the dust settled and the screams faded to
silence in East Timor, the Western oil companies moved
in to find more cheap oil reserves in the Timor Gap,
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