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Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

Leave Iraq Alone
by Jacob G. Hornberger

Yes, Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator, but despite more than 10 years of sanctions and bombing that have kept Iraqis on the verge of starvation and killed multitudes of them, he still has refrained from employing weapons of mass destruction against the United States. Even the CIA, which the elder Bush once headed, holds that Saddam is not an immediate threat to the United States.

Among the many possible justifications the president has presented for invading Iraq is that Saddam Hussein intends to use weapons of mass destruction on the United States in the immediate future because he hates America for its “freedom and values.” That appears to be the most popularly accepted reason among the American masses and the mainstream press for supporting an invasion of Iraq.

As the mainstream media is now reporting, the Reagan-Bush regime delivered biological and chemical weapons and nuclear components to Saddam during the 1980s, including anthrax.

Ask yourself: Would Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush really have delivered such weapons to a person who hated America for its “freedom and values” and who intended to employ them against the United States? Not very likely.

If the elder Bush had truly believed that there was even a remote possibility that Saddam would utilize the biological and chemical weaponry against the United States that he and Reagan had delivered to him, don’t you think that he would have ordered U.S. troops to march all the way to Baghdad to capture or kill Saddam after ousting Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991? After all, he had the perfect excuse to do so, since the United Nations (and the United States) was already at war against Iraq.

But instead, he left Saddam in power. Is that something a U.S. president would do with someone who intended to bomb American cities with biological, chemical, or nuclear weaponry? How likely is that?

The truth is that despite the fact that all during the Gulf War (and before) Saddam obviously had the biological and chemical weaponry that Reagan and the elder Bush had provided him, he has never employed it against Americans, either against U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf War or here domestically through terrorist agents.

Keep in mind: Assuming that he still has biological and chemical weaponry, as the current President Bush maintains, Saddam has had more than 15 years to get those weapons into the hands of a terrorist agent to deliver to the United States and employ them against the American people. Yet he obviously has not done that. Why not, given the president’s claim that Saddam hates the United States for its “freedom and values” and intends to use his weaponry at any moment? Could President Bush’s current judgment about Saddam be wrong?

That’s not to say that Saddam Hussein and, for that matter, all Iraqis don’t have good reason to hate the United States. They do, but it has nothing to do with America’s “freedom and values.” Instead, it has everything to do with the U.S. government’s bombs, embargoes, and interventions which are distinguishable from the “freedom and values” that most people think about when they think about America.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Gulf War never actually ended. It never ended because the U.S. government never stopped waging war against Iraq and has, in fact, continued waging war against that nation for more than 10 years.

First, there were the UN sanctions against Iraq, which were promulgated, pushed, and enforced at the instigation of the U.S. government. The impact of sanctions has fallen most heavily on the civilian population. While there are disputes over the numbers of Iraqi children who have died because of the sanctions, the estimates range from 500,000 to more than a million. What we do know is that at least three high UN officials resigned their posts because of a crisis of conscience over the large number of deaths resulting from the sanctions.

The truth is that both Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial rule and the sanctions have worked in concert to kill all those Iraqi children. While there wasn’t a formal partnership between the U.S. government and Saddam to kill the children. Both the U.S. government and Saddam Hussein, jointly and separately, bear moral responsibility for the deaths and for the impoverishment of the Iraqi people since the technical end of the Gulf War.

Unfortunately, the American people, by and large, have yet to confront and come to grips with the moral implications of their own government’s furnishing anthrax and other biological and chemical weapons, nuclear components, and cluster bombs to Saddam Hussein for the express purpose of using them to kill others. If it’s evil to use such weapons against others, why isn’t it equally evil to furnish them with the intent that they be used in that manner?

posted by Hal 7:23 AM