US Policy Tactics in Iraq: Some
Confessions
Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney General
in the Lyndon B Johnson administration (1966), is an eminent New York lawyer. This is his
Nov. ‘97 exclusive talk to the magazine impact INTERNATIONAL, in which he gave
a candid analysis of the US policy towards Iraq. In his statements, Ramsey Clark
highlighted areas of particular concern to Muslims, people in the developing countries and
those with an interest in the developing countries. Following is what he said in response
to questions posed to him.
UN Inspectors’ Issue?
Question: Shed
some light on the background to the ‘conflict’ between the US and Iraq over the
issue of UN inspectors?
For more than six years now, the
United States has systematically raised issues against Iraq claiming non-compliance with
Security Council's determinations against that country. Some have been reactions to
statements or position that Iraq has taken. The latest conflict arises from Iraq's
determination to expel and its actual expulsion of American members of UNSCOM (UN Special
Commission) inspection teams in Iraq. The issue had been deferred for many years because
Iraq wanted to avoid conflict and hoped it could work out an end to the sanctions without
having to raise the question of American personnel being part of the UN inspection team.
Apparently they finally came to the
conclusion that as long as US inspectors dominated the inspection teams, the hope for a
conclusion of the process was vain; it wouldn't happen, because they would keep making one
excuse after another. So they requested other UN inspectors to remain and continue their
work, and asked, in fact ordered, the American members of the team to leave.
The US then went into high dudgeon,
you might say, claiming that the Americans are essential to the process. I happened to be
in the [United Arab] Emirates at the time, and [Retired] General 'Joseph P.] Hoar, former
assistant security of state [Richard] Murphy, and assistant secretary of state for Near
Eastern Affairs [Martin] Indyk were all there. They gave three reasons why US inspectors
should be on the team.
The first one being that our
interests were involved, which is almost precisely why US personnel shouldn't be involved.
How can you fairly judge when your interests are involved in the matter that you are
judging? Actually, just the appearance of fairness would require that there be no American
inspectors because it was the US that bombed the country. It was the US that imposed the
sanctions. It was the US that accused Iraq time and time again of avoiding UN mandates.
It is unreasonable to think that
American inspectors would be fair or that they could appear to be fair under the
circumstances, because they have a long history of raising false issues. You know, when
you are hunting for something that you have not found, you can hunt forever. You can just
say there's a needle in that haystack, and we've looked all through it, but we're going to
look again, because we think maybe it is over there, or over here, or we just overlooked
it or something.
The tragedy is that the United
States so far has succeeded in linking this inspection process to the sanctions. The
sanctions have now killed over a million and a half people. The great majority are
infants, children, elderly people, chronically ill people, people that every decent
society strives hardest to protect. And they are killing people at the rate of about ten
thousand a month, which is a lot of people to die. And you cannot do that.
The Wholesale Destruction
Question: Is not bombing Iraq
and then imposing sanctions ‘genocide’?
It’s genocide in the specific
terms of the Genocide Convention which speaks of ‘acts committed with the intent to
destroy in whole or in part a national or religious group as such’ by
‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ That’s exactly what the sanctions
are doing.
Therefore the question of whether to
continue the sanctions cannot be related to the inspection issue. The sanctions have to be
ended because they’re genocide. You don’t justify genocide on the grounds of
some search for something that is probably meaningless anyway. It’s hard to see how
it could be otherwise.
We saw how powerful Iraq was at the
time of the assault on it in 1991. It was unable to protect any aspect of its own society
and unable to inflict any injury of any significance on anybody else. While we killed more
than 100,000 people directly with bombing, our casualties were less than 250, and more
than half of them were from our own fire, ‘friendly fire.’
Anyway, the first thing that has to
be done –– and it has to be done immediately –– is the end of the
sanctions. And then there has to be a major effort to rehabilitate the medical services,
the capacity of the hospitals and health clinics, medical supplies, everything in the
health care system of Iraq, and nutrition and food. God willing, in ten, 20 years, except
for residual and genetic effects of depleted uranium and things like that, Iraq will be
back where it was before our assault on it.
Terrorizing into Submission
Question: Given the advanced
capabilities of the US satellites today, are the U2 flights over Iraq a necessity or
deliberate provocation?
It is certainly absurd-sounding on
the face of it. It doesn’t mean a lot because our planes have been flying over Iraq
whenever they want to anyway. We’ve had planes flying over the so-called no flight
zone, which comes within 30 miles of Baghdad on the south and includes all the Kurdish
areas of the north, whenever we wanted to.
You can’t shoot a satellite
down. You can shoot a U2 down, as the Soviet Union showed in 1960. When it did, we ought
to remember, at first President Eisenhower said it wasn’t true, that we didn’t
fly over the Soviet Union taking pictures, that no plane was shot down. And after
Khruschev appeared with Gary Powers on television, and with the wreckage of the plane, it
became a little hard to explain, and he said: "I guess we did." But we
didn’t threaten the Soviet Union as we threaten Iraq.
If you watch TV –– I
watched it first in the Emirates and then in Amman, Jordan, and didn't get to see any of
it in Iraq because I was traveling the whole time I was there last week –– the
sabers-rattling was just unbelievable.
It was like we were re-enacting the
Gulf War, our one moment of fame, when we devastated a defenseless country, killing men,
women and children. We hit every type of civilian facility in the country from schools and
hospitals and public markets, homes, and apartment houses, all the way to mosques and
churches and synagogues.
It was just relentless bombing of
the whole country –– 110,000 aerial sorties, 88,500 tons of bombs, seven and a
half times Hiroshima s equivalency. And 94% were unguided bombs that were less accurate
than in World War II for a number of reasons.
First, you were dropping them from
twice the usual bombing altitude, which means air currents can cause greater variation.
You are flying at greater speeds and have desert winds that make accuracy extremely
difficult. But there was no effort to be accurate. What we were doing was terrorizing and
drubbing the country into what we thought would be submission.
So we now put these U2s up, and,
initially, the Iraqis said they would shoot them down if they flew over. And President
Clinton went on the air and said if they murder one of our U2 pilots that would be the end
for them, which is big talk.
But we're murdering hundreds of
Iraqis every day. Every one of those leaders ought to have to go through those hospitals
and watch those infants and children and elderly people. I was there last week. I've been
there every year since I990 except one. And the health condition is the worst it's been.
Obviously, it builds on the past, and as your nutrition continues to be inadequate, the
inherent physical strength of the people deteriorates.
Now, every time you get somebody in
a hospital you find they have got multiple problems because they've aggregated over a
period of years the effect of bad water which is prevalent, the effect of a lack of
sanitation where we have destroyed sewage disposal systems and they can't repair them, and
can't buy necessary equipment; they can't even buy pumps to pump the sewage out, or pump
parts to replace broken pumps. We are just condemning them to a slow and very cruel death.
And so far, as I've said, we've killed more than a million and a half.
The U2s are useful in their way to
the United States strategy because it made Iraq seem violent, like they might shoot down a
plane as the Soviet Union did 37 years ago. But it ignores the fact that every day
hundreds of Iraqis die because of US dictated sanctions.
Moral Emptiness
Question: How have the sanctions
impacted on the lives of the common Iraqi people?
Well, we have seen a little bit [of
the suffering in Iraq]. We saw [nationally-broadcast television program] 'Sixty Minutes'
where Leslie Stahl went over and walked through the hospitals. Some of the same doctors
that we see on every trip were in the picture, and she talked about 500,000 children that
died. This was over a year ago – actually I think the program came on in early
February, but it was over a year ago that she made the trip.
At the end of the program, or
towards the end, she [Stahl] had an interview with Madeleine Albright. Madeleine Albright
was asked whether she thought the political results were worth the price of 500,000 dead
children. Madeleine Albright’s answer was: that's a difficult question, but yes, we
think it's worth the price. Which shows our moral values and character, I guess. How could
anything be worth the price of 500,000 children, or even one child?
Power of Plutocracy
Question: Why are the American
people supporting the White House polity on Iraq given that it is causing misery on a
massive scale?
The people are good. I don't think
the American people are bad. I am an optimist. I think that they are no better and no
worse than anybody else. I think, though, that we have permitted a set of values to
permeate our culture that are pretty unfortunate and cruel. And they include a
glorification of violence. We absolutely love violence. I don't think there has ever been
a culture that glorified violence the way that we do.
And the other is our materialism. We
just love things. We are so covetous of property and accumulation of what Mark Twain
called 'unnecessary necessities' that it has numbed us to the human condition. So we can
get pretty mean-spirited. I've never seen [us] more mean spirited towards aliens and
immigrants than we are now. In the 1960s, when we had an immigration reform act, we still
saw ourselves as we are, as overwhelmingly a nation of immigrants. Now, as Mr. [Thomas]
Dewey [presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948] said: 'We don't want any more, we got here
first. Keep them out.' You don't even let them have medical care or education or anything
else if they get in here. And that shows your values. If you won't care for immigrants and
aliens while they are here, will you care for their poor when they're overseas?
You can almost see a systematic
effort of triage for poor countries around the world. If the American people clearly saw,
understood, and were constantly reminded of the effects of their policies, I think they
would change them. And I think they would be very angry at those who have caused these
policies to take effect. But if you look at where the American mind is, and where its
spirit is, it is more concerned with artificially pumping up the stock market and buying
new VCRs than it is with feeding a starving child.
The media [in the US] is owned and
controlled by the same handful of powerful economic concentrations that own and control
not only the military-industrial complex, but the corporate power of the country, and that
elect all the significant elected officials in the United States, with rare exceptions.
What we have is a plutocracy. We
talk about a free press, but it is just free for the powerful. And the rest are voiceless,
which is a far cry from what we have proclaimed ourselves to be – just like the state
of our democracy. We are no more a democracy than the most authoritarian society because
votes are controlled by money – absolutely – and the government by money. But
the media is quite adroit not only at creating the desire of the public, but feeding it.
And it's the same with our public
education, if you look at it. We have gotten away from education to build character, to
build a strong citizenry of independent and free people, towards, we put it in terms of
gainful employment or economic success, but it is really serving the machine, you might
say, like a bunch of drones. So I think those things have to be factored in, because it is
hard to seal off the truth. The truth will come out.
There are not many Americans that
haven't had the chance to see and know – to take the issue of Iraq – that
children are dying there, that the children are starving there. We don't want to hear it.
We don't want to know it. If you put on a program that just showed what was happening in
Iraq, everybody would just turn to Seinfeld [television comedy], I think.
That's because we've conditioned
people to where it's a part of the value system. So it is a big struggle. That doesn't
mean that it can't be turned around. I think it can be turned around. But right now, it is
certainly in the driver's seat And it's crushing.
Just take organized labor and free
trade. Free trade is basically a means of further empowering American corporations, that's
all. It wipes out labor, exploits foreign women and children overwhelmingly, but some
others, too. So all those things have to be looked at together. Meanwhile we not only
maintain, we improve our nuclear superiority, our monopoly, near-monopoly, and we continue
research on weaponry, and then we beat up on Iraq with false claims that it is about to
develop a nuclear weapon.
Inventing an Enemy
Question: With the end of the
cold war, is Islam now a substitute for communism to fill the "enemy gap'?
Islam has probably a billion and a
half adherents today. It exists. And it is probably the most compelling spiritual and
moral force on earth today. People hate to hear that.
I've spent a lot of time with
Americans in our prisons. What you see there is a lot of kids coming out of bedlam into
prison, no family structure, no education, drugs and corruption all their lives, totally
disoriented, so that their values are power, violence. Even more than corporate
executives, they want money. It's hard to believe they could want it more. But that's how
you get to be somebody. There's no other way to be anybody in this country. And there's no
discipline. They can't even concentrate.
And then you see Islam offered to
prisoners, and suddenly there is something else in their life. And they are praying five
times a day. And their mental and physical self-discipline becomes of an extremely high
order, so that if there is a prison riot, they are the ones that save lives. They are the
ones that people turn to for leadership.
It is not just that we need an
enemy. It is that we really fear them. I happened to be in Algiers on the third of March,
I think, right after the bombing in 1991, to see a couple of plane loads of workers and
medical supplies flying towards Iraq. And I met with the leadership there, from several
north African Islamic nations. One of the presidents said, the way he put it was: 'Now
NATO will turn its face from the east and turn south.' What he really meant was that Islam
would be the new enemy.
At Shaikh Omar Abdul
Rahman’s trial, what we saw in both FBI and CIA files, and this is their phrase, 'the
greatest threat to the international and domestic security of the United States is Islamic
fundamentalism'. But actually, 'Islamic fundamentalism' to them is redundant. So they have
to convict a blind Islamic scholar of terrorism to show that Islam is, at it highest
levels of learning and attainment, nothing but a terrorist concept.
How could a blind man be a
terrorist, what could he do? They claimed that he was the leader of the conspiracy that
set off the bomb in the World Trade Center. They have now had two trials and two
convictions of the defendants in the World Trade Center cases, and Shaikh Omar Abdel
Rabman’s name wasn't even mentioned at either trial. He had nothing to do with it,
but we have this war against Islam going on.
We need to know the people. We need
to respect their religion. We need to love them. We need to live together on this planet,
and we can't do that the way we are going about it right now. They are overwhelmingly
poor. From Nigeria to Indonesia, the great masses of the people in Muslim countries are
poor, and probably the best thing in their lives, the only saving thing, is their
religion.
Rich-Poor Divide
Question: What do you see as the
turning issue of the next century?
I think the question of the 21st
century will be poverty. And the rich in the 'first world,' a handful of people
comparatively, and a number of major corporations, and staggering amounts of wealth, will
– as they have been doing for some time – be systematically attacking the poor,
the poor within rich countries, who are numerous, but more importantly the poor in the
poor countries, who have got 30% of the labor force unemployed now.
Therefore we have to have techniques
of controlling and containing these surging populations. The ways are many. If you watch
what's been happening in, just take Zaire, we watched at least a quarter of a million,
perhaps half a million Hutus exterminated while we were essentially supporting Kabila as
he did it. We've watched what has happened in Rwanda and Burundi.
One of our greatest accomplishments,
we think, was the Iran-Iraq war. When that began, Henry Kissinger said: 'I hope they kill
each other.' And he really meant it. What could be better, you know? It was like the
effort to ‘yellowise', as we called it, the Vietnam War. How wonderful just to let
them kill each other, to solve all of our problems. If you look at violence and hunger in
third world countries, you see it is not only enormous but growing.
The way I think it [the west's
demographic policies towards resource-rich developing nations] works is that we want their
wealth but we don't want them. It's not a matter of keeping them from getting rich: it's
much worse than that. It's a matter of taking their wealth and getting rid of them. That's
hardly new. We've been doing it forever.
However if you look at the case of
Iraq, you will see that the sanctions are the new weapon of choice. They are like the
neutron bomb, which is the most inspired of all weapons because it kills the people and
preserves the property, the wealth. So you get the wealth and you don't have the baggage
of the hungry, clamoring poor. It think that's what we are about.
We are willing to let a handful of
people in any poor country become a part of the international plutocracy as a part of the
cost of controlling and reducing their numbers, and securing and obtaining their wealth.
But when you look at the billions to come and the billion or so now who live in dire
poverty and constant hunger and malnutrition and short lives filled with ignorance and
violence, you see that. we have a long way to go to take care of all these poor.
The only way we've been willing to
address it is by triage – elimination of some percentage of them – and then
controlling their sustenance. We want to control their food supply, and their water,
because that's the first requirements of life. And they will be subservient because, if
they can't produce their own food and protect their own water, and we impose sanctions,
they don't last very long.
