W's Ritual Bombing of Iraq

by Alexander Cockburn

Bill Clinton delayed this portion of his inaugural ceremonies to June 27, 1993, when he was urged by Vice President Al Gore to order a salvo of cruise missiles, supposedly in retaliation for an alleged Iraqi plot to kill George Bush Sr., when he visited Kuwait in April of 1993. Eight of the 23 missiles homed in with deadly imprecision on a residential suburb in Baghdad, one of them killing Iraq's leading artist, Leila al-Attar.

Clinton's pollster Stan Greenberg, who did daily surveys on the popular sentiment, reported to the Commander-in-Chief that bombardment of Iraq caused an uptick of 11 points. Bomb your way into favorable headlines has been the policy of every president since the Second World War.

Of course these bombardments all violate international law. There is no UN provision for such assaults. UN Resolution 688, sometimes referred to as a document legitimizing the no-fly zone bombardment, makes no reference to a right to take over Iraqi airspace.

There was nothing new about the declared motive for last week's bombing raids, described as "protective retaliation." Just over a year ago, after similar raids, British Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon invoked the sorties as being "in pursuit of legitimate self defense," a phrase hard to read without laughing out loud.

Nor is there anything new about this particular bombing, which the Iraqis say killed some civilians. The United States and Britain have been routinely bombing Iraq for much of the past decade, with no discernible effect beyond the slaughter of about 500 Iraqis overall, a death count that looks scrawny in comparison to the million or so, mostly children, who have died as a consequence of sanctions since they were imposed a decade ago.

Secretary of State Colin Powell had barely settled into his new office before he was affirming this murderous sanctions policy, whereby a U.S.-dominated UN committee in New York routinely plays God in decreeing what can and cannot be shipped to Iraq.

UN officials working in Baghdad have long agreed that the root cause of child mortality and other health problems is not simply lack of food and medicine but the lack of clean water (freely available in all parts of the country prior to the Gulf War) and of electrical power, now running at 30 percent of its pre-bombing level, with consequences for hospitals and water-pumping systems that can be all too readily imagined.

Of the 21.9 percent of contracts vetoed as of mid-1999 by the UN's sanctions committee, a high proportion were integral to the efforts to repair the water and sewage systems. The Iraqis submitted contracts worth $236 million in this area, of which $54 million worth -- roughly one-quarter of the total value -- have been disapproved. "Basically, anything with chemicals or even pumps is liable to get thrown out," one UN official revealed. The same trend has been apparent in the power supply sector.

The proportion of approved/disapproved contracts does not tell the full story. UN officials refer to the "complementary issue," meaning that items approved for purchase may be useless without other items that have been disapproved. For example, the Iraqi Ministry of Health once ordered $25 million worth of dentist chairs, said order being approved by the sanctions committee -- except for the compressors, without which the chairs are useless and consequently gathering dust in a Baghdad warehouse.

In February of 2000, the United States moved to prevent Iraq from importing fifteen bulls from France. The excuse was that the animals, ordered with the blessing of the UN's humanitarian office in Baghdad to try to restock the Iraqi beef industry, would require certain vaccines, which, who knows, might be diverted into a program to make biological weapons of mass destruction. For sheer bloody-mindedness, however, the interdiction of the bulls pales beside an initiative of the British government that banned the export of vaccines for tetanus, diphtheria and yellow fever on the grounds that they, too, might find their way into the hands of Saddam's biological weaponeers.

It has been the self-exculpatory mantra of U.S. and British officials that "food and medicine are exempt from sanctions." This, like so many other Western policy pronouncements on Iraq, has turned out to be a lie.

So now the wheel turns full circle. Back in 1991, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and top uniformed Pentagon man Colin Powell urged bombardment, and President Bush I approved. In 2001, Powell and Cheney are at Bush I's elbow as he approves his administration's first military adventure. Is there a strategy, beyond Inaugural chest-thumping? Well, it changes the subject from what the Bush administration proposes to do about a man who would probably fare as ill in a UN Tribunal on War Crimes as Saddam, viz., Ariel Sharon, Israel's new prime minister.

Beyond this "signal" to the world about priorities in Bush time, there could be the outlines of a new Iraq policy, whereby the new government is signaling its readiness to embark on a far tougher stance towards Iraq, beefing up aid to the main opposition group in exile, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmad Chalabi. In the late 1990s, Chalabi's cause was pressed by Republicans in Congress, most notably Jesse Helms and Trent Lott. A bizarre alliance, stretching from Helms to The New Republic to The Nation's Christopher Hitchens, pressed Chalabi's call for the United States to guarantee "military exclusion zones" in northern Iraq and in the south near Basra and the oil fields, to be administered by the Iraqi National Congress. Such guarantees could set the stage for a new military assault on Saddam.

Against the continuation of sanctions and bombing sorties this is an unlikely prospect, but George W. Bush could at least be toying with the thought that at last the Clinton-Gore campaign's slurs against his father for not finishing off Saddam will be avenged.