People across the world will
mark the eight-year anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq with
demonstrations and rallies on or around March 19. They will demand a true end
to the war and occupation, which the corporate media and politicians claim is
“over,” now that U.S. troops there have been re-branded as “non-combatants.”
(Never mind the fact that troops still die, and 50,000 remain in Iraq, along
with tens of thousands of armed private mercenaries.)
All progressive people call
for the end to the U.S. occupation and true sovereignty for the nation that has
been devastated by U.S. aggression. It is important to realize, however, that
the Iraqi people are in fact actually just now approaching the 20-year
anniversary of that ongoing war. It is a criminal act that has had three
distinct phases.
On Jan. 17, 1991, the U.S.
military began a massive aerial bombardment of Iraq that was followed by a
ground invasion. Although the attack was ostensibly in response to an Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait, the George H.W. Bush administration, eager for war, blocked
all efforts to peaceably resolve the conflict between those two countries. The
U.S. military onslaught is more accurately described as a massacre than a war.
An estimated 125,00 to 150,00 Iraqi soldiers were killed, with thousands buried
alive in the ground assault, while the U.S. reported only 148 fatalities, 37 of
those in “friendly fire” incidents.
The war was devastating to
the Iraqi civilian population. More than 88,500 tons of explosives were dropped
on the country. The bombs and missiles were not only aimed at military targets;
rather, the U.S. strategy deliberately destroyed the country’s infrastructure.
Targets included electrical plants, factories, hospitals, civilian airports,
grain silos, schools, communication systems, oil refineries, water treatment
facilities, and civilian government offices. Civilians trying to escape the
carnage were massacred on highways.
Iraq and the U.S. agreed to a
ceasefire Feb. 28, 1991, but the larger war was only entering another phase.
The country, with its infrastructure intentionally destroyed, was extremely
vulnerable to the full impact of economic sanctions that were imposed by the
United Nations at the urging of the United States.
Although aerial bombings and missile
attacks continued during the Clinton administration—drawing little corporate
media attention—hundreds of thousands of civilians died. Died not from bombs or
bullets, but because they did not have access to basic medicines such as
penicillin, or because they consumed unclean water—the sanctions regime
prevented Iraq from buying the materials needed to repair water treatment
facilities. This led to gastro-intestinal illnesses that could not be treated
due to the shortage of medicines caused by the sanctions.
Bipartisan unity on war and occupation
Democratic and Republican
administrations can come and go, but both serve to further the goals of the
U.S. Empire, using whatever tools they choose. As George Bush left office, the
Clinton administration brought no relief to the Iraqi people.
This was perhaps most
memorably revealed on a May 12, 1996, episode of 60 Minutes in which Leslie
Stahl questioned Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the
sanctions’ horrific impact: “We have heard that a half million children have
died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is
the price worth it?” Albright’s chilling reply exposes the brutality of the
U.S. Empire: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the
price is worth it.”
Albright did not question the
enormous death toll, which was based on a preliminary estimate in a 1995 United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report that economic sanctions had
caused the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five.
One wonders: Is the grief any
less painful, the urge to resist any less resolute, if a son or daughter dies
as a result of sanctions as opposed to a predator drone attack? The issue of sanctions is often misunderstood
by people who can all too clearly see the horrors of “shock and awe” in a
full-scale military assault and call for “sanctions, not war.” But the
sanctions were a form of quiet genocide against the Iraqi people in the years
before Pres. George W. Bush led the U.S. military into another full-scale
military attack.
As the entire world knows
now, that second war on Iraq, launched in 2003, was based on lies that were broadcast
incessantly by the corporate media. Although media and public attention is now
focused more on the U.S. fiasco in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the war on Iraq,
now entering its 20th year, will not be over until the U.S. truly leaves and
the sovereign people of that country are free to determine their future.
