Iraq is due to be rolled on next. It's been almost ten years since all-out war there. Bombings are still going on there now (<iq>...in 1999/2000, according to the Pentagon, the US flew 24,000 "combat missions" over Iraq</iq>). What have the sanctions been like there? <a href="http://www.johnpilger.com">John Pilger</a> published <a href="http://pilger.carlton.com/print/100275">this article</a> on March 21st, 2002 about the state of Iraq today, after over a decade of sanctions. He discusses the supreme irony of the U.S. and Britain, two powers with plenty of blood on their hands, imposing sanctions on Iraq for crimes against humanity. How is this done with a straight face? More importantly, how do the sanctions and the impending attack, garner such strong support and little protest from the media? <bq>These "debates" are framed in such a way that Iraq is neither a country nor a community of 22 million human beings, but one man, Saddam Hussein. A picture of the fiendish tyrant almost always dominates the page. ("Should we go to war against this man?" asked last Sunday's Observer).</bq> What will the attack accomplish? Perhaps it will remove Saddam Hussein from power. Right now, this is not in the best interests of the Iraqi people or the Kurds, who are undergoing perhaps the most prosperous era of their entire existence. No surveillance has uncovered any evidence that weapons of mass destruction being made. The Iraqi people need food and medical supplies, which they cannot get under the current embargo. It's hard to see how renewed rounds of carpet bombing will alleviate their situation. <bq>Any attack on Iraq will be executed, we can rest assured, in the American way, with saturation cluster bombing and depleted uranium, and the victims will be the young, the old, the vulnerable, like the 5,000 civilians who are now reliably estimated to have been bombed to death in Afghanistan. As for the murderous Saddam Hussein, former friend of Bush Sr and Thatcher, his escape route is almost certainly assured.</bq> Pilger mentions Denis Halliday as a pre-eminent authority on Iraq today. He used to work for the UN humanitarian program there. He has since resigned in disgust. <a href="http://www.salon.com">Salon.com</a> has an interview with <a href="http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2002/03/20/halliday/">Denis Halliday</a> from March 20, 2002. When asked what was missing in the media coverage of Iraq's situation, he replied: <bq>... The U.S. somehow doesn't believe that international law applies to this great democracy, to this great empire. ... That's a failure on the part of Washington to understand that the U.S. is in fact subordinate to the charter, to the declaration of human rights, to the Geneva Conventions and protocols --- all of which would protect Iraq, a sovereign state and member of the United Nations --- from further harassment, attacks and killings by the United States. ... [What's missing is] respect for international law and an awareness that this is not an empire --- that "might" is no longer "right" in the year 2002, and that Mr. Bush does not have any God-given right to attack Iraq or its people without consultation with the Security Council. There is no legitimate way for the U.S. to wage war again on the people of Iraq. ...</bq> I think many, especially in this administration, would scoff at these remarks and call them terribly naive. They're naive only because they assume the U.S. cares at all what other countries think and that the U.S. <i>must</i> care what other countries think. On the other hand, he also attributes Iraq's situation to the uneducated state of the average American about U.S. foreign policy. If Americans knew what was being done in their name, they would demand a stop to it. That again assumes two things. The first is that Americans will at some point become educated about foreign policy, when having a blind spot about it is what allows them to benefit from it without guilt. The second is that the media is at all willing to help force this education on unwilling subjects. The media is just as unwilling because they, and their parent corporations, benefit from the policy as well. Near the end of the interview, he answers whether the U.S. can claim a moral higher ground because Saddam Hussein is a <iq>ruthless despot</iq>. <bq>We have no justification to punish the innocent civilians of any country simply because we don't like, in this case, a man who was [once] a friend and ally to the United States.</bq> As for solutions, he says the embargo must be lifted and arms sales must decrease. <bq>We need to control arms and arms sales. And that means, in a sense, sanctioning ourselves, because we are the great problem: The five permanent members of the Security Council produce and sell something like 85 percent of the military weaponry in the world today. And they're the very countries that supposedly are in charge of international peace and security. That's quite a ludicrous situation we've got here. ... The Americans are way out in front in terms of arms sales ...</bq> Bill Christensen, a former CIA National Intelligence Officer would also find some of Halliday's opinions naive because he believes that the U.S. foreign agenda is quite clearly one of world domination. In <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/christison2.html" title="Oil and The Middle East: Why U.S. Foreign Policy Has To Change">Oil and The Middle East...</a> on <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org">CounterPunch</a>, he writes: <bq>But what the extremists see themselves as trying to do is to stop the United States from continuing its drive for global hegemony, including hegemony over the Islamic world. I think it's important to understand this, because if people in the United States believe that some enemy is trying to "destroy" the U.S. and actually has some possibility of doing so then waging an all-out war against that enemy can be more easily justified. But what if the U.S. is not trying to prevent its own destruction, but instead is trying to preserve and extend its global hegemony? In that case, I think we should all step back and start demanding of our government a serious public debate over future U.S. foreign policies. We should be strenuously debating the degree to which the people in this country, given all of our own domestic problems, want the U.S. government to continue foreign policies intended to strengthen U.S. hegemony over and domination of the rest of the world in the political, economic, and militarily areas.</bq> He also mentions that the U.S. has no problem reconciling its own actions since World War II with the current War on Terror. Since the U.S. alone dictates what is acceptable and not, it becomes quite simple to have a policy of "do what I say, not what I do" and expand it with "and if I do something I said not to do, then it's for the right reasons, which I am neither at liberty nor obligated to share with you." <bq>The U.S. government, from September 11 right up to the present, has made it clearer than ever to the world at large that it will unilaterally decide what actions around the world constitute "terrorism," and what actions do not.</bq> He has also published an earlier paper on the same issue on <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org">CounterPunch</a>, called <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/christison1.html">Why the "War on Terror" Won't Work</a>.