Tag Archives: Saddam Hussein

Political Rants

Best forgotten.

The news media has marked the approach of a significant anniversary – that of Iran’s revolution, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who bothers to read this blog that they are leaving a lot out of the story. My main source on this is NPR, and while I don’t set out to single them out (as a news organization, they’re better than some, worse than others), they do have a remarkable capacity, by and large, to hew to the center of political and economic power in the United States. Their perception seems generally representative of that of the current administration at any given time.

History, once over lightlyAnyway, there was the usual stories about boys choirs singing “Death to America!”, the “Down with Israel” chants, etc. (Probably could hear that in Times Square if you listen hard enough.) One report I heard on NPR’s Morning Edition on the 35th anniversary celebration in Teheran made passing mention of the eight-year Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s. Here’s an excerpt:

INSKEEP: Although we should remember this 35th anniversary marks the overthrow of a ruler who was supported by the United States and who was regarded by many as very repressive.

KENYON: That’s right. Again, they see that as an official government policy, not something necessarily being generated by the American people. So they do make that distinction. And this holiday is important across the country partly because of people who want to support the Islamic revolution and also because it was followed by a long and bloody war with Iraq. And many people simply turn out on February 11 to remember the young people who gave their lives in that cause.

Given the context, you’d think it might be worth mentioning our role in that “long and bloody war”. For those who don’t recall, we – the Reagan administration, that is – sided with Saddam Hussein, providing him with substantial economic and logistical assistance, treating him as a top-shelf client, even allowing him to get away with shooting up the U.S.S. Stark during the tanker war phase late in the conflict. If Inskeep and Kenyon think that honoring the dead from the Iran – Iraq war takes people’s minds off of America, they’re smoking crack.

I don’t want to be unfair, but seriously – if reporters don’t know or acknowledge history, we are bound to repeat the bad parts again and again.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

The week that was.

Well, what did we learn this week, girls and boys?

We learned that the Afghan war is more pointless and destructive than many of us had given it credit for, thanks to the wikileaks papers. We also learned that the Iraq war is – very much like its predecessor, the Gulf War – leaving a trail of grave illness and lingering death years after the height of our attack. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent of London reports that cancer and infant mortality rates in Fallujah have reached ridiculously high levels in the wake of the U.S. assault, very likely the result of our use of depleted uranium munitions. The casing materials from these armor-piercing shells caused untold misery in Iraq in the years following the Gulf War, during which time essential medical supplies were being withheld from them by virtue of U.S. /U.K. sanctions. (Cockburn’s colleague Robert Fisk tells the story in his book The Great War for Civilization.)

This is a vastly underreported impact of war and its aftermath, at least in this country. During the twelve years of sanctions against Iraq Americans heard very little from their media or their politicians about what was happening to the general population. During the Gulf War, we attacked Iraq’s infrastructure, not sparing its water treatment and distribution facilities. The sanctions that followed that war disallowed the requisite technology to repair that infrastructure. In a country such as Iraq, this is tantamount to biological warfare. Literally hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, died of preventable water-born diseases because of this, according to the U.N. Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State during much of that time, said the policy was worth the cost. There seems to be a bipartisan consensus there.

As an imperial power, we make these cost-benefit calculations all of the time. Our estimates always seem to devalue the lives of those we invade and occupy, however. It isn’t that life is cheap – it’s more specific than that. Their lives are cheap, not ours. (Though with respect to our military, ours, too.) I’m sure there are many who feel that the human costs of the most recent Iraq war were worth the benefit of removing Saddam Hussein from power. I cannot agree. This war resulted in the deaths of upwards of a million people and generated something like 4 million refugees, 2.5 million of whom landed in squalor in Jordan and Syria. There is no political end that can justify that much suffering, not in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other country we’ve been targeting.

So what did we learn, after all? Not much, it appears. Let’s keep trying.

luv u,

jp