A 1999 UNICEF Survey of child and maternal mortality determined that roughly 500,000 children under five years old had been killed by the Anglo-American sanctions regime.
As we know, a few years before that Madame Albright -- apparently chanelling Jehovah -- had said of the grisly toll that "...we think the price is worth it."
Now, if one searched far and wide enough, one might (however unlikely) eventually notice in the mainstream some perplexity at Albright's logic. The sanctions did, after all, strenghthen Saddam's hold over the Iraqi populace. Moreover, the project of debilitating his capacity to transmute so-called "dual use" items (e.g. pencils, water purifiers) into weapons of mass destruction -- the "worth" in Albright's equation -- was, if we can believe Ms. Condoleezza Rice, an abysmal failure.
But the principle -- that "we" have been divinely ordained to kill hundreds of thousands of negroid children in the service of demonising a former State Department employee now on our shit list -- is unassailable.
So the mainstream media's orgasmic reaction to the summary executions of Saddam's sons despite the "collateral damage" death of a 14-year-old child should probably come as no surprise.
While Dubya pontificates that "we" "have no quarrel" with the "brave people of Iraq", it is the most vulnerable sectors of this "brave" populace -- women, the infirm, children -- which have suffered the most.
Eqbal Ahmad once lamented, after the United States' attempted assassination of Qaddafi (an act, according to the Slate "Explainer", of self-defense) succeeded in killing not Qaddafi, but his four-year-old daughter, that, "The poor baby hadn’t done anything." Lord knows how many hundreds of thousands of poor Iraqi children who hadn't done anything will be killed before the "indispensable nation" is finished liberating them. But whatever the price, it will have been worth it. Q.E.D..
Lately, there's been a push from the White House to blame Clinton for "security failures" such as 9/11 and Iraq, whatever that's supposed to mean. The sad thing is, it seems to reach the voting public (look at the latest Zogby poll that says even though many people believe Bush lied about WMD in Iraq, they still think the war was a good thing). Instead of repeating what your readers will think after seeing the articles you post, you should try to pre-empt the White House responses to these very convincing stories. Give us extra ammo to throw at our co-workers or friends that disagree with us.
Not only does Bush have a plausible excuse for the mainstream American public about the 9/11 failures (were they even failures?) but he can also blame Clinton for not being tough enough on Iraq and persuade voters to believe that he was actually correcting Clinton's mistakes for the past eight years. Anything anti-Clinton is still popular to swing voters and especially the hardcore right.
This argument that you just posted is cool without mentioning anything that happened pre-Dubya. At least for me, the years of apathy from the Clinton administration towards the Iraq sanctions doesn't make me anymore angry towards Bush... it just reminds me that US foreign policy has been misguided for longer than I would like to believe.
just wanted to thank you for citing eqbal. though i only took one course with him at hampshire, he was boss on my girlfriend's Div III, so i got to know him a bit. simply put, he was one of the nicest human beings ever to grace this planet, and it's truly sad that his work is not as widely known as that of others.
Posted by: fred nelson on July 30, 2003 10:06 PMThe american problems:
- short memory
- too much tv
- believe everthing the jews abd thery supporters says
- unconditional support to israel
- arrogance without motive
- theu don't care about the true