http://orlandosentinel.com/automagic/columnists/2000-01-27/OPEDreese27ART012700.html
Try explaining to an Iraqi mother why her child is dead
By Charley Reese, Columnist, 01/27/2000
An Iraqi mother has a question for us: "Why are you killing
my innocent child?"
Well, what's your answer? Why are we killing her innocent
child and the innocent children of thousands of Iraqi
families? Why are we destroying Iraq?
Before we came, Iraq had one of the highest living
standards in the Arab world, with an extensive health-care
system, clean and abundant drinking water,
sewage-treatment plants, electric power-generation
plants, free education for all, a network of social services
and a thriving intellectual and cultural life. Today the
country is in ruins. We have wreaked more death and
desolation than the Mongol invaders.
Why? Is it because our politicians say Iraq's president,
Saddam Hussein, is a bad person? But how could the
500,000 Iraqi children we've already killed have
overthrown him?
George Bush and the U.S. Army failed to overthrow him.
Two separate rebellions instigated by the Central
Intelligence Agency failed to overthrow him. Innumerable
assassination attempts have not so much as put a scratch
on him. So why do we expect that killing 4,500 Iraqi
children per month is going to overthrow him?
By the bye, those numbers of dead children are United
Nations numbers, not Iraqi. All you liberals so in love
with world government must surely believe the United
Nations. The question posed by the Iraqi mother was posed
to a Canadian member of parliament, Svend Robinson, who
wrote an article about his second trip to Iraq that was
published by the Globe and Mail. This mother had just been
told by an Iraqi doctor that her sick baby was doomed.
They had no medicine.
Robinson points out the absurd and hypocritical restrictions
the United Nations committee places on the money Iraq is
allowed to earn from selling limited amounts of oil. These
restrictions have prevented Iraq from buying the medicines
and other basics it needs. Iraq was told, for example, it
could not import cloth, which it wanted to do to provide jobs
for unemployed seamstresses sewing sheets for hospital
beds. Oh, no, the cloth might be put to military use. Children
have no pencils. After all, graphite is a dual-use
commodity, and so it goes.
The fault is yours and mine. It is our government that insists
on maintaining an economic embargo nine years after the
last Iraqi soldier left Kuwait. We also continue to conduct
an ongoing undeclared and unconstitutional war by
bombing northern and southern Iraq on a weekly basis.
Not only is this policy cruel, vicious, immoral and a war
crime by any rational definition, it is also not in America's
national interests. Even the heads of Arab governments
who don't like Saddam Hussein are finding it increasingly
difficult as their own people grow angrier and angrier about
the unjustified suffering being imposed on innocent Iraqi
civilians.
I attribute the U.S. cruelty toward Iraq to pure malice. I do
so because I know that people in Washington are not so
stupid as to believe that an embargo that has failed for nine
years is suddenly going to work. I know that they are not so
stupid as to fail to realize that the embargo in fact
strengthens Hussein politically and enriches him materially.
He gets rich because his government controls the
smuggling. I know that people in Washington do not believe
that Iraq has any hidden cache of weapons that would
threaten anyone. They know full well that the only country
in the Middle East with a large store of weapons of mass
destruction is Israel.
This insane policy has sewn a harvest of hatred that
innocent Americans will be reaping for the next hundred
years. Unless you are willing to confront that Iraqi mother
and tell her to her face that it's necessary for her child to
die, you ought to take a stand against the embargo.
Published in The Orlando Sentinel on January 27, 2000.
