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America's Genocide Against Iraq

SomaliNet Forum (Archive): General Discusions: Archive (Before Mar. 13, 2001): America's Genocide Against Iraq
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Xoogsade

Tuesday, February 27, 2001 - 04:52 pm
What can we do about this continued destruction of our brothers in Iraq? Can we bring American leaders on charges of War Crimes at the Hague court?

Please read on Gentlemen of Somalia. No useless women allowed in here. Man talk..

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As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the present. American leaders have long been used to treating the cracked British vase as a pisspot, but Attlee and Wilson, while dutifully kissing ass in the White House, did , at least, attempt to restrict and restrain the United States, albeit with little success. Blair and Cook and the rest of this dreadful gang seem to be only too delighted with any new opportunity to bark their support for the imperial war-monger in the White House, bombing Baghdad to show his toughness to electors at home and recalcitrants abroad. Blair's argument that the new bombing was necessary to protect the lives of British pilots is incredible.

What the hell are these pilots doing in Iraq in the first place? Why have they been bombing Iraq for the last ten years? Over the last two years alone, the USA and Britain have dropped over 400 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq. Blair has been raining down deadly explosives at a rate twenty times greater than Major. No other country in Europe supports this fire-storm. The bombardment of Iraq has now lasted longer than the US invasion of Vietnam. Blair, Cook and the entire Government are so used to the stench of their own hypocrisy that they can justify anything. No doubt Lord Macdonald will soon be telling viewers that the bombing raids were necessary to defend the democratic rights of the military-industrial complex to maximise profits, without which nothing can work and, therefore, if we want a better system of privatized transport in Britain we must understand the bombs are necessary. The brazen opportunism of New Labour culture appears to be reflected in the Labour Party as a whole and has affected its capacity to think critically.

The orthodox casuistry among loyal columnists and courtiers is to justify inconvenient realities-Israeli possession of nuclear weapons and colonial brutalities inflicted on the Palestinians, Turkish oppression of the Kurds, the clerical dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, etc.-with a breathtaking cynicism. Thus Blair's Personal Assistant for Foreign Affairs, ex-diplomat Robert Cooper writes in his book of The Post-Modern State and the World Order" that: "We need to get used to the idea of double standards." He also informs us casually that "the reasons for fighting the Gulf War were not that Iraq had violate the norms of international behaviour", but the need for the West to keep a tight grip on "vital oil supplies."

Together with the bombing, the sanctions regime kept in place by Clinton and Blair ands now Bush and Blair, has cost the lives of, taking the lowest estimate, 300,000 children. As the jets take off again for yet another bombing raid on the shattered and famished remnants of a Third World Country, why is the Labour Party so silent. A country mobilized for war by shameless demagogy can in a more disillusioned mood become vulnerable to other and more consistent demagogues. Dissent that refuses to be a spectator, but insists on wedging itself into the forbidden zones of modern politics is vital as a physic for any functioning democracy.

Dissent in Britain has become atomized. It reflects a hostility to all traditional politics and is confined to single-issues related to the environmental and animal rights. Most of these deserve support and yet something was missing. I wonder whether those who were extremely upset a few years ago by the cramped living conditions in which calves were shipped to slaughter-houses in France ever spared a thought for the number of children who died in Iraq from malnutrition and lack of medicine as a direct result of the inhuman sanctions policy imposed by Washington and London. Time to wake-up. CP


February 26, 2001

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Somaliqueen

Tuesday, February 27, 2001 - 05:24 pm
Xoogsade, ass-hole, go take care of your own dirty backyard before licking carab dhago-case ass.

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Basra

Tuesday, February 27, 2001 - 05:27 pm
LOLXoogsade ok that means i am allowed.I am not useless but i am a W-O-M-A-N......LOL so get over yourself.

As far as the topic goes.........i am forced to reserve my true comments and say anything to make you hate us more looooool....WE DONT CARE ! ***


We care about the somali in somalia.the women and the children.Girls who will join me looooooooooooooooool

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Anonymous

Tuesday, February 27, 2001 - 05:30 pm
kaalay xoogsade caqli aad iraq wax la yiraahdo inay jirto ku ogaato miyaad leedahay!!! yaab badanaa qofkan hooyadii caano siin jirtay caayaya isla markaana carab u damqanaya.ee dadoow maxaad ka tiraahdeen

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Honesita

Tuesday, February 27, 2001 - 05:40 pm
loooooooooooooooooooool@anonymous......
I dont know what da hell is goin' on today but everything is just funny....

Xoogsade......me no believe my eyes.....u talk about somethin' that makes sense.....how come.....u no 4get to drink caano b4 sleep huh....lol....

adios

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Xoogsade

Wednesday, February 28, 2001 - 02:22 pm
For your consideration Gentlemen of Somalia, another article about the barbaric western outrages against the people of Iraq. Ladies, and most specially Basra, stay out because this is elevated manly discussion here. Man talk in other words. Have not your mothers taught you any manners barging in like that? And you Basra, Ms Basra Austen herself, who was big on manners and decorum acting like a hooligan in that manner! I am
disappointed frankly.


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By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

Bombing the Iraqis should properly be listed as part of the Inaugural ceremonies, a man not being truly President of the United States till he drops high explosive on Baghdad or environs. The new team evidently felt that the Commander in Chief could not be allowed to leave the jurisdiction, even to Mexico, without unleashing planes and bombs against Saddam, for whom the bombardment produced the effect of widespread sympathy across the world for Iraq.

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. Both Clinton and Bush were somewhat reluctant about the sortie.

"Do we have to take this action?" Clinton muttered to his national security team, as the cruise missiles on two carriers in the Persian Gulf were being programmed. Gore advised a demonstrations of national resolve was of paramount importance. Clinton's reservations were amply justified. Eight of the twenty-three missiles homed in with deadly imprecision on a residential suburb in Baghdad, one of them killing Iraq's leading artist, Leila al-Attar.

Feasting on shrimp, cocktail canapés and diet Coke, the White House group watched CNN's Wolf Blitzer announce the strike; the misfortune of the errant missiles and al-Attar's death were never mentioned. Clinton's pollster Stan Greenberg, who did daily surveys on the popular sentiment, reported to the gratified Commander-in-Chief that bombardment of Iraq caused an uptick of eleven points. Since the Clinton Administration was at that time in the process of its first meltdown, this was a welcome ray, and one no doubt remembered by the new Bush team, possibly eager to shift the focus from the headline hogging former president. Bomb your way into favorableheadlines 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, the 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.

There's nothing new about this particular bombing, which the Iraqis say killed some civilians. The US 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 which only 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 US-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 "complementarity 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 US 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, which 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 US 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 II'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 signalling 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 Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens, pressed Chalabi's call for the US 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. CP

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