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'A new form of violence'

Ramsey Clark
Former U.S. Attorney General

 Five years ago today Iraq was being subjected to a new form of violence that hadn't been experienced on this planet.

It couldn't see the enemy, except for vapor trails perhaps. It couldn't reach the enemy, but it was being subjected to devastating bombardment from abroad. One hundred ten thousand aerial sorties in forty-two days by the United States alone. That's one every thirty seconds. In an admission against interest, the Pentagon says U.S. aircraft alone dropped the equivalent of 7.5 Hiroshimas<88,500 tons of explosives.

They say about 7 percent were directedThis is an assault you can't resist. If you don't believe it, consider two uncontested facts: Not a single armored vehicle of the U.S. or the other people out there as part of the aggressive force against Iraq was hit by enemy fire. Not one. But the F-111 fighter planes claim to have aerial photography proving that they "klinked" 1,700 Iraqi vehiclesI was once a platoon commander in the Marines. If my men had been in those tanks, I'd say get the hell out of them, stay as far away from them as you can, because it's suicide to be in them. Because you will never see the plane, never hear the plane, just get blown to smithereens.

The United States lost fewer aircraft in 110,000 aerial sorties than it lost in war games for NATO where no live ammunition was used. When you fly that many flights, a few crash, that's all. With all the NATO war games, our casualty rate, without live ammunition, was higher than the assaults on Iraq.

There is not a reservoir, a pumping station, a filtration plant that wasn't deliberately destroyed by U.S. bombing to deprive the people of water. By the time I arrived in Baghdad on Groundhog Day of 1991, February 2, dump trucks were backing into the Tigris, lowering

their tail gates, letting the water come in, closing the tail gates and driving out. Seems to me there would be a lot of leakage. They did it to take the water to people, raw water from the Tigris.

The head of the Red Crescent, Dr. Alnuri, told me that week there were 6,000 deaths from dysentery and vomiting. They didn't have simple rehydration tablets costing a penny apiece. The babies simply died. Whoever got that bad water couldn't last long. It's not fun. The only liquid you have for rehydration is more of the dirty water that made you sick in the first place.

We knocked out the power. It doesn't sound like a big deal. You can get along without lights for a little while. But it meant, among other things, that 90 percent of the poultry was lost in a matter of days, because they had had a very sophisticated system of raising chickensWe systematically destroyed every aspect of the food system we reasonably couldWhy were we destroying fertilizer plants, fertilizer storage, insecticide storage, insecticide plants? Why were there fires in grain fields? It's a lot of work starting fires in grain fields, unless you use napalm from planes or helicopters. Even then, it takes a lot of napalm. Fields are big places. Yet fires were reported all over. Even strafing cattleWe drove 2,200 miles and even at that time I didn't see a single hospital that wasn't damaged. I didn't see a single hospital in Baghdad that didn't have the windows out. We saw some in the towns and villages that were flattened. Little things like a factory that manufactures hypodermic needles for injectionsYou can't dissociate the military violence from the sanctions

because you can't enforce the sanctions without the military violence. Only the powerful and the rich can enforce sanctions and only the weak and the poor will suffer them. And that's inherent in the nature of the beast.

I saw Dan Rather say that the real cause of poverty was not the sanctions, it was the Iran-Iraq war. Let me tell you, the Iran-Iraq war was awful. It ended almost a decade ago. But any fool who dared to say that is claiming that $20 billion a year in oil sales wouldn't have made a difference in the quality of life of the people in Iraq. That's what Iraq could sell if it weren't for the sanctions. That wouldn't make a difference? You wouldn't have a little food, a little medicine if you could sell your oil? Rubbish! What kinds of fools are we taken for, really?

I mourn for the 148 Americans who died. Rather said, at the end of the show, that "There's one thing we can all agree on"What really happened to their son? He was in a Bradley armored personnel carrier and his legs were cut off by a depleted-uranium rocket, a silver bullet as we call it. It came right through and cut his legs off. His family finally got a letter a month later describing how they tried to pull him out of the turret. He can't stand up, he keeps falling over. What's the matter? He doesn't have any legs. He dies by an American rocket and they tell his family . . . well, they're nauseated. We've lost a son, our hearts are broken, and our government lies to us about how it happened.

It never mentions the tons of depleted uranium that will infect the lives and health of the Iraqi people with a radioactive half-life of 125,000 years.

Why didn't they go to Baghdad? A general on the Rather show said they could have been there in a goddamn 36 hours, there was not one soldier to stand in the way, Republican Guards or anything else. But they needed a demon to bring the country down for five years, they didn't want the Iraqi people mobilizing under new Iraqi leadership.

Never forget Vietnam. Our war against the Vietnamese people was

awful. But our twenty years of sanctions after the war were far crueler, far deadlier and never even recognized. That's what brought them down to utter poverty, that's what brought their living standard below that of Mozambique, that's what forced them out into the sea in open boats into settlements in Hong Kong and places like that. They were crushed. A people who during the bombing were so proud they could raise five tons of rice per hectare, working night and day, cut off from everything for twenty years, until finally there is nothing left except an agreement. And the next day Pepsi blimps flying over Ho Chi Minh City. Free at last, thank God almighty, free at last.

One crime against humanity exceeds all others in its magnitude, its cruelty in all the ways that humanity has discovered to be cruel to each other, and most significantly in what it means for the future: sanctions. The sanctions against Iraq are the most dramatic, crushing, unbearable example. And let me tell you that in Cuba today, the food intake, caloric and otherwise, is still less than two-thirds what it ought to be. One of the great human beings of our time is there today with a million dollars worth of medicine for a people who are deprived of medicine: His name is Muhammed Ali. He's got a lot of medicine for Parkinson's disease.

The United States alone imposes that embargo on 11 million people in Cuba. Every man, woman, and child there. And it does it in defiance of all the nations of the world. Over one hundred nations have voted in the UN to condemn the United States for its unilateral blockade against Cuba.

These sanctions are a killer beyond compare. They have killed five or ten people for every person who died from the assault on Iraq. They have injured far more. You've got over 30 percent of the population under ten stunted in their physical and mental development from malnutrition in the early years of their lives, the number of underweight births is five times what it was before. If you are born under two kilos [4.5 pounds], you're going to have a hard time, you won't live a very happy life. You'll have lots of aches and pains, and you probably won't live very long.

We're doing that deliberately and we know it. And systematically< because we want to cripple that country so it won't bother us again and so we can have its oil with impunity. We are now spending $50 billion on military personnel and equipment in the Gulf per year. Do you realize that? It's 20 percent of our total military budget. It exceeds NATO; it exceeds Japan; it exceeds Korea.

It's exactly what we said in Indictment 19 in the War Crimes Tribunal. The United States has by force secured a permanent military presence in the Gulf, for control of its oil resources and geopolitical domination of the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf area. Do you know what our imports from that area are? $15 billion. We're spending $50 billion on the military and we're importing $15 billion in oil. Now tell me how a businessman makes money like that?

Part of it, of course, is that we are ripping off Japan, which gets half its oil from there, and we get the cream, and Europe gets 25 percent of its oil from there, and we get the cream from that. You and I can use some of that money for the homeless here, the people we care about, the hungry, the schools, all the things that are needed.

We have to find the will to tell our government it must end its economic sanctions, because it's our government alone that's doing it. It's not the UN. It's not the Security Council. Of the five permanent members, three have agitated every way they canIf we can't compel our government to end those sanctions, what freedom can we hope to have for the poor here, what health care can we hope to have for the sick here, what schools can we hope to have for the children here who need education? It is our struggle, our responsibility. We have to end those sanctions, we have to recognize that they are the cruelest form of death.

If you have children, or grandchildren, or loved ones, and they have to choose between dying in an explosion or dying by sanctionsIn the cradle of civilizationSpeech to forum organized by International Action Center on the fifth anniversary of war against Iraq, January 20, 1996, New York.