December 2002
Admittedly, we Americans may not always be perfect angels of charity, kindness and tolerance but at least we don't knowingly engage in heinous acts against humanity that we often attribute to our enemies. True? Our perspective of history has indelibly marked Germans, Japanese, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Russians, and others with whom we have fought (or threatened) with acts of unimaginable cruelty. After hostilities have ended in defeat, victory or stalemate these countries rarely admit to wrongdoing. In the case of the Holocaust many Germans claimed 'we didn't know'. The more egregious cases of inhumanity range from such crimes as politically motivated treachery against one's presumed allies to wholesale genocide.
The Soviet Union, for example, willfully betrayed a partisan army of Poles defending Warsaw in July and August 1944. After broadcasting an appeal to Polish patriots to arise in arms against the occupying Nazi army, the Soviets halted their armies at the river Vistula. Responding to the Russian call to arms and fully anticipating succor from the presumed ally on the other side of the river, the exposed, poorly armed and outnumbered Poles were massacred by the unrestrained Nazi forces during the next six weeks. The reason: the Warsaw Poles were not the soviets' choice to govern postwar Poland, the so-called Communist Committee of National Liberation.
Does this sound familiar? On February 15, 1991 during the latter stages of the Gulf War, George Bush, the father, called upon "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside". Indeed the persecuted Shias, eager to be free of their tormentor, revolted in the south while an insurrection by Kurdistan swept away Iraqi forces in the north. In a matter of days fourteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces were in rebel hands at the behest of the President of the United States. Unfortunately for the insurgents, their cause did not quite fit in with the Administration's plan for a future Iraq. As in the case of the Warsaw tragedy, US forces, under orders from above, stood by while the temporarily victorious outgunned, outnumbered rebels were systematically massacred, north and south, by unimpeded Iraqi gunships and ground forces. So much for the current fiction that the no-fly zones are there to protect Kurds and Shias.
This plan was also clearly at work when Washington ordered the US commander of coalition forces to halt precisely at the moment his pincer encirclement of the Republican Guard was in position to destroy the remainder of the Iraqi force and, once and for all, eliminate Saddam Hussein. The reason: The Financial Times of London probably had it right in February 2002, "Washington's calculation is that a break-up of Iraq would fundamentally alter the balance of power...Iran could exploit the vacuum." So the US did not want a regime change after all. It apparently preferred an intact Iraqi government, not one born from rebellion, but one subservient to US interests.
Some of the most hideous infamies the world has ever known transpired in living memory as the result of Nazi, Soviet and Cambodian attempts to exterminate entire ethnic populations. No greater tragedy can befall civilization than when one authoritarian system views itself superior to a weaker entity to the extent that it arrogates to itself the power and privilege to annihilate the other. Stalin and Pol Pot did it to their own people; Hitler tried to do it to the rest of Europe. Somehow in the case of Iraq, the notion that US inflicted war and UN authorized punitive sanctions are tantamount to genocide does not seem to register in the minds of most Americans. In a world where civilian suffering and death appear to be both commonplace and everlasting, we Americans are hardly moved by reports coming from human rights organizations that have monitored the living conditions of post Gulf War Iraq. The war itself and twelve years of imposed sanctions have brought incalculable harm to a population of twenty-two million souls. Denis Halliday, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator (resigned in 1998 in protest of sanctions), reports that thousands of deaths occur per month, as many as "one million to 1.5 million [have died] over the last nine years. If that is not genocide then I don't know quite what is."
The main culprit, particularly among children, is contaminated water which causes diarrhea, typhoid, cholera and other diseases. The main reason is that civilian infrastructure, water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, electrical generating plants (needed to operate pumps, etc.) were deliberately targeted by US and UK bombers. At the present time the Iraqi economy is prostrate, its hospitals crippled and nearly nonfunctional, its schools without books, even pencils (a banned commodity), its food supplies inadequate to the extent that many civilian deaths are due to starvation.
Imagine for yourself the catastrophic effect that Gulf War II will have on this already devastated society. This scenario envisions hundreds of cruise missiles, thousands of tons of bombs, followed up by infantry and tanks in Baghdad streets. By any rational definition this is genocide, an unjust war inflicted on a basically defenseless civilian population. How will we ever explain or justify our present behavior to our children, to future Americans, to history?