"Saddam Hussein took Kuwait and that was wrong and then Bush helped Kuwait and said it was because it was a very little country, but that was wrong because he was interested in controlling the oil and then he took Kuwait back and attacked Iraq and that was wrong also, but this is a secret."
- Iraqi schoolchildren's "secret version" of the reasons for the Gulf War, as recorded in a psychological study of the war's impact on the child population (1)
To argue a position with which even children (at least in Iraq) would readily agree -- that US policy towards Iraq, including the plan of the current administration to attack the country yet again, ostensibly in order to depose its leader, has been grossly and shamelessly immoral -- it is necessary to view the present conflict within the context of the twenty-year disaster of greed and bloodshed which has been our relationship towards that tragic land.
"Businesslike Relations": Prelude to the Gulf War
During 1988, the last full year of Ronald Reagan's presidency, the government of Iraq, led by one of America's staunchest friends and allies in the region, Saddam Hussein -- a government which for eight years had waged war against our main enemy in the region, Iran -- twice launched vicious and unprecedented attacks with weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds of Northern Iraq, in retaliation for allegedly aiding Iran. In mid-March, his forces attacked the northern town of Halabja with a poison gas similar to the Nazi's Zyklon B, resulting in the loss of 5,000 Kurdish lives and permanent injury to another 7,000. In August, shortly after the cease-fire between the two countries, Saddam again attacked Kurds, killing 200 and injuring more than a thousand. (2)
In the autumn of that year, both houses of Congress attempted to pass legislation imposing sanctions, but the Reagan Administration killed both bills. One of Secretary of State George Shultz' deputies blandly asserted that the U.S. needed "solid, businesslike relations" [italics mine] with Hussein's government. An administration memo unambiguously stated that "there should be no radical policy change now regarding Iraq." (3) In the following year, President George H. Bush vetoed the Chemical and Biological Control Act because it included tough sanctions against Iraq. Later that same year, Bush signed National Security Directive 26, a top secret document calling for closer ties to Iraq. Literally up to the eve of Saddam's August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the first Bush Administration worked tirelessly to support Hussein and to oppose critics in Congress and the media who advocated a tougher policy toward the dictator. (4)
In numerous public statements since being appointed President in December 2000, George W. Bush has made his desire to oust Hussein by any means necessary a key objective of his foreign policy. The younger Bush has justified this goal not by appealing to any legal authority (which, as we will later show, does not exist), but on moral grounds, most especially relating to Saddam's criminal use of chemical weapons against his own people. However, never once has this President Bush mentioned the inhuman indifference to the Kurd's suffering demonstrated by his father, both when the elder Bush was Vice President and after he became Chief Executive, right up to the invasion of Kuwait. Nor does he mention the reason behind Reagan and Bush Senior's tolerance for Hussein's murderous policies: i.e., those "businesslike relations" to which that State Department deputy so candidly alluded -- corporate profits, the guiding motivation of the US's Mideast policy to this day.
In February, 1982, the Reagan Administration officially removed Iraq from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, ostensibly because of "Iraq's improved record." (5) This action allowed for an easing of economic relations between the two countries. It should be noted that Iraq until 1987 had virtually no internal defense industry, yet it possessed one of the mightiest military machines in the Mideast. Its entire "defense" capacity was created with the full cooperation of the industrialized nations of the West (most of whom later joined the coalition against Saddam), financed by Iraq's oil wealth. (6) The following demonstrates how US corporations, from 1982 until the invasion of Kuwait, benefited (or attempted to benefit) from this opportunity:
- A month after declaring that Saddam Hussein was no longer a terrorist, President Reagan himself announced plans to sell Iraq up to a dozen Lockheed LL-100 transports and five Boeing jets. (7)
- In December, 1982, Hughes Aircraft shipped sixty 500-MD Defender helicopters it had sold to Iraq.
- In 1984, Vice President George H. Bush personally intervened with his Yale classmate, William Draper, the head of the Export-Import Bank (Eximbank), in favor of a request for export financing to Iraq, which had been denied by Eximbank as a bad financial risk. At issue was an Iraqi plan (later aborted) to construct an oil pipeline to Jordan. The company that would have constructed this pipeline was a British subsidiary of the US corporation, Bechtel. In a memo, Bush wrote that, "Early and favorable action on applications for Exim financing for these pipeline projects would be clear and very welcome evidence of U.S. commitment." (8) In addition, numerous administration officials (as later reported by Democratic Congressperson Henry Gonzales) contacted Eximbank to persuade it to approve the Bechtel deal, including Ed Meese, Lawrence Eagleburger, Robert McFarland and Bill Casey.
- Pentagon contractor International Signals Corp. in 1984 sold cluster bomb fuses to a Chilean network that was in the business of marketing cluster bomb technology to the Iraqi government; the network then forwarded the fuses from the US to Baghdad.
- The US Commerce Department, beginning in March 1985, approved export licenses authorizing the sale of up-to-date computers and other high-tech technology to Iraq; these were in turn sent to the Project SAAD 16 complex outside the city of Mosul, where they were used to plot missile trajectories.
- In 1987, many US high-tech companies, including Tektronics, Hewlett Packard and Digital Equipment Corp., supplied computers for Iraq's $400 million Project 395, enabling Hussein to build missiles within Iraq itself.
- In July, 1987, four months after Kurds had been attacked with chemical weapons by Saddam, the British subsidiary of US corporation Bechtel (see above) signed a contract with Iraq to build a $2.5 billion petrochemical plant; the plant enabled the Iraqis to produce mustard gas.
- In one of the greatest scandals relating to the Gulf War, the US government agreed (beginning in 1982) to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees to finance the sale of food to Iraq. Later, evidence surfaced that Saddam's government was using the loan guarantees to purchase nuclear technology, but many Administration officials, including Secretary of State James Baker, intervened to maintain the guarantees.
In this context, it is clear that any official condemnation of (and sanctions against) Saddam's brutality against the Kurds would have put the Reagan - Bush government -- and the corporations it championed -- in an untenable position. On July 31, 1990, even while Saddam was massing troops along the Kuwait border, President Bush still publicly opposed the imposition of sanctions against Iraq. Two days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait. It could reasonably be argued that, until that day, George H. Bush was the best friend Saddam Hussein ever had.
The "Good War": The Truth about the Persian Gulf Fiasco
The "official" version of the Gulf War to this day is that the conflict was a virtually bloodless victory, in which Good (the allied coalition, led by the US government) triumphed effortlessly over Evil (Saddam), through the wisdom and skill of our political and military leaders, and through the wonders of technology, with a minimal loss to civilian life. The "secret" version -- which is not really so secret, given the extensive documentation supporting it -- is that Operation Desert Storm an was extraordinary ugly and brutal operation, with long-term consequences that are still causing the Iraqi people enormous suffering. Yet, the current President Bush is proposing a war that promises to be far more bloody and prolonged, with far more devastating impact on both the society and environment of Iraq.
One set of figures for the 43-day period of Operation Desert Storm claims that approximately 3,500 civilian deaths and 56,000 military deaths took place, for a total of 59,500 deaths. (9) (Note that the civilian death toll is comparable to the reported death toll for the World Trade Center attacks.) The military death toll figure includes between 17,000 - 23,000 killed in the actual ground war (including one incident in which soldiers were buried alive), though that phase of the war only lasted five days -- meaning that somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 Iraqi soldiers, mostly conscripts, were killed per day during this action.
As we will show, the death toll during Desert Storm represent only a small percentage of the deaths endured by Iraq after the war, but, considering the extreme brevity of the conflict, these figures alone certainly contradict the coalition's claim that every precaution was taken to prevent unnecessary loss of life. Even more disturbing, however, were the means by which such a high body count was attained.
The following are some of the practices that led to needless civilian deaths, according to Middle East Watch: (10)
Daytime bombing - During the air war, despite claims by the Pentagon that it was engaging in nighttime bombing to prevent civilian deaths -- and despite the fact that air superiority by the coalition, which allowed allied forces to "pick and choose" their targets, was achieved almost immediately after the beginning of the war -- many heavily-populated bridges and market areas were targeted during the daytime hours, resulting in substantial loss of life. (11) These incidents including the following: a mid-afternoon bombing of a bridge in Nasiriyya in southern Iraq (100 dead); the bombing of a marketplace in Falluja in Western Iraq (about 200 dead) -- an event at first denied, then admitted, by the allies; the attack on a footbridge in Samawa in southern Iraq (over 100 dead); four bombings of a crowded market area in the city of Basra in January and February (total casualties unknown); the bombing of an area east of the southern city of Hilla, where civilians were lined up to purchase cooking gas (about 200 killed or injured). In many of these instances, there was no known military purpose that the destruction of such targets (or any nearby locations) could have served.
"Dumb" bombs - During their brilliant PR campaign during the war, the Pentagon and the Administration heavily promoted its use of precision-guided bombs (known as smart bombs) on targets within Iraq. They strongly implied that the military was employing these types of weapons exclusively or almost exclusively. It was also suggested that smart bombs were particularly useful for minimizing casualties within heavily-populated areas. As these weapons have an accuracy level of about 80 percent, this would indeed have been true -- if all or even most of the ordnance dropped on Iraq had indeed been smart bombs. However, it was revealed after the war that these types of bomb comprised only 8.8 percent of the more than 84,000 tons dropped during Desert Storm; the rest were dumb (unguided) bombs. Furthermore, some smart bombs were actually used on military targets located far from civilian centers, negating their ostensibly humanitarian function. The estimated accuracy rate of dumb bombs has been estimated to be as high as 50% and as low as 25%. Moreover, because many coalition planes flew at a high altitude to avoid Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, the accuracy rate may well have been even lower than 25%.
Targeting Shelters: The Al-Ameriyya Bombing - By far the single most heavily-publicized attack on civilians during the Gulf War -- and a major public relations nightmare for the Bush Administration -- was the bombing of the civil defense shelter in the Al-Ameriyya neighborhood of Baghdad in the early morning hours of February 13th, 1991. Between 200 and 300 people, including many children, from that middle-class area were killed. The scene of the slaughter was captured on videotape (though heavily censored by the US media), and journalist Laurie Garrett, viewing the unedited tape, reported: "Nearly all the bodies were charred into blackness... among the corpses were those of at least six babies and ten children, most of them so severely burned that their gender could not be determined." (12)
The US government admitted that the shelter had been built by the Iraqi government strictly for civil defense purposes during Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s. However, it also claimed that the building had somehow recently been upgraded to a "command and control" center. How such a change could have been achieved on such short notice, in the midst of a bombarded city, was not explained, nor was any evidence of this claim, such as intercepted transmissions or satellite photographs, ever released by the Pentagon or the White House. Many local residents claim that the building was never used as anything but a civilian shelter.
However, as Middle East Watch points out, even if the highly unlikely US claims were true, the fact that the US knew that the place had once been used as a shelter protected the building and its inhabitants, making it a violation, under the laws of war, to attack it without prior warning. An alternative (and contradictory) theory claimed by some sources was that the building was thought by the US to serve as a "VIP" shelter for top government leaders and their families -- though, of course, since in that case women and children would have been present in the building, the laws of war alluded to above would still have applied.
In his statement to the press concerning this event, spokesperson Marlin Fitzwater expressed compassion for the victims, but blamed Saddam for the loss of life in what he insisted on calling "the bunker." "The bunker that was attacked... was a military target... We don't know why civilians were at this location, but we do know that Saddam Hussein does not share our value in the sanctity of life [sic!]." However callous this may sound, it might have been even worse: according to U.S. News and World Report, in its book about the war, Bush, on the advice of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, commanded Fitzwater to issue a terse factual statement with no expression of compassion for the dead and injured. Fitzwater reportedly put his job on the line to insist that there be a full press conference to announce the tragedy and that some express of compassion be included in the announcement, and Bush (presumably for reasons of PR) reluctantly agreed. (13)
The result of all this brutality was a windfall for the arm merchants of all countries, particularly the US. After a March, 1991 meeting of advocates for defense contractors, one happy lobbyist stated, "The next big push in the defense industry will be to exploit the Middle East. This is not arms control. This is arm opportunity." An aerospace executive echoed this opinion: "Foreign military sales are the only game in town right now. (14)
The above facts are relevant to the present situation because the "good war" ideology about Desert Storm, promulgated (largely successfully) by the previous Bush Administration through the American media, has made the idea of a second and supposedly more conclusive war against Iraq palatable and even desirable to many Americans. (Nobody today thinks of Vietnam as "the good war": imagine the uproar if Bush Junior had included Vietnam among his "axis of evil" nations and had proposed that we start attacking Hanoi again!) It is to be assumed, if the present President Bush launches his planned attack against Iraq, that equally disingenuous claims of "compassionate bombing" will be presented as fact to the media and the public.
"The Price Is Worth It": The War Against the Children
The cruelest and most depressing aspect of the Persian Gulf conflict is not the international greed and corruption that made it possible for Saddam to become a power in the region and invade Kuwait, nor what actually happened during the 43-day war, but what has transpired throughout the following decade -- and is still happening today. What has been perpetrated upon the people of Iraq by the US government and the United Nations Security Council is nothing less than "genocide by sanction."
What should be understood is that Iraq, before the 1980 war with Iran, had not been a "developing country." Due to its oil wealth, it had been one of the richest nations in the Mideast. Even during the Iran-Iraq conflict (which lasted until 1988), the standard of living for the average citizen had remained relatively high. It was the Gulf War and its aftermath that turned Iraq into a destitute Third World country.
From the very earliest days of Desert Storm, the allies deliberately sought to cripple the country's infrastructure. The official rationale was that, by doing so, they were preventing the Iraqi government from waging war effectively, thus hastening the end of the conflict and perhaps loosening Saddam's grip on power. This strategy did indeed make it impossible for Hussein to fight back, though he survived politically.
Unfortunately, the coalition also destroyed the living conditions of an entire population. The Commission of Inquiry to the International War Crimes Tribunal, initiated by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, heard testimony in 1991 regarding the damage sustained by Iraq during Desert Storm. The Commission's findings, recording in Clark's book, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf, detail, among many other atrocities, the following: (15)
"- eight dams repeatedly hit, and heavily damaged;
- four of Iraq's seven water pumping stations destroyed;
- 31 municipal water and sewage facilities hit, causing the sewage system to collapse in Basra and water purification plants to be incapacitated nationwide;
- 139 automobile and railway bridges damaged or destroyed;
- agricultural and food-processing, storage and distribution systems attacked directly and systematically;
- all of the irrigation systems -- storage dams, barrages, pumping stations and drainage projects -- attacked;
- food warehouses destroyed;
- grain silos hit methodically, and hundreds of farms and farm buildings attacked;
- grain and wheat fields hit with incendiary bombs;
- 28 civilian hospitals and 52 community health centers bombed;
- 675 schools, 56 mosques, the 900-year-old church of St. Thomas in Mosul, and the Mutansiriya School, one of the oldest Islamic schools in Iraq, damaged..."
The brief summary above makes mincemeat of the coalition's claims of humanitarian restraint. Particularly disturbing are the many food-related targets damaged or destroyed. However, all this destruction would not have had such a devastating impact if Iraq had been allowed to rebuild its infrastructure, with international help, after the cease-fire, but sanctions made this impossible.
The first sanctions, after the invasion of Kuwait, were authorized by UN Resolution 661 for the sole and explicit purpose of compelling the Iraqi government to withdraw its forces from Kuwait. UN resolution 687 revised this, making the repeal of sanctions contingent upon Iraq agreeing to disarmament and to inspections of its weapons sites.
It should be noted that the US was well aware from the beginning of the possibility of devastating long-term health consequences from sanctions. A Department of Defense document, dated January 22, 1991 (that is, while the air war was still going on) noted Iraq’s reliance on imports for replacement parts for water treatment facilities and that obtaining these parts under sanctions would be difficult, if not impossible. This document goes on to say that without these parts, the country could face “increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.” (16)
In June, 1991, the first UNSCOM weapons inspectors arrived in Baghdad, beginning a long, ludicrous and futile power struggle between Saddam and the West... while the children of Iraq were forced to drink untreated water and scramble for any food they could get. In 1993, UNICEF reported that there has been a upsurge in easily preventable diseases in Iraq, including polio, diphtheria, and measles. The humanitarian crisis was so great that the UN Security Council was forced to initiate the Oil for Food (OFF) program in April, 1995, allowing the Baghdad regime to sell some of its oil to obtain food for its people. The US and its allies frequently claim that, if the children of Iraq are suffering, that is Saddam's own fault, yet the OFF program was approved more than four years after the end of Desert Storm. By the date of the cease-fire, as has already been demonstrated, the US knew perfectly well that a human rights disaster was in the making.
In 1996, the first year in which the OFF program was implemented, a UNICEF report stated that there were an astounding 4,500 “excess deaths” every month (i.e., in excess of normal prewar mortality rates) among Iraqi children under the age of 5, primarily attributable to the sanctions. By 1998, the World Health Organization raised this figure to between 5,000 and 6,000 deaths per month. In September 1998, Denis Haliday, the first Director of the OFF program, terminated his 34-year career with the UN in protest against the utter inadequacy of the program in meeting the nutritional needs of Iraqis. In February 2000, the second Director of the program, Hans von Sponeck, who had also served the UN for over 30 years, resigned for the same reason. Both strenuously deny the US's claim that Saddam's government is deliberately impeding the distribution of food and medicine within Iraq and blame the sanctions for this problem.
A major factor exacerbating the crisis has been the practice of placing holds on contracts for equipment desperately needed to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, so that such contracts have to wait for months for Security Council approval. Representative Tony Hall of Ohio complained, in a 2000 memo to Secretary of State Madeline Albright, that these contracts, which were for "purification chemicals, chlorinators, chemical dosing pumps, water tankers, and other [necessary] equipment," were being needlessly and cruelly held up by the US government, since of the eighteen holds placed, seventeen had been made at the request of the US. Hall spoke darkly of the "disease and death that are the unavoidable result of not having safe drinking water and minimum levels of sanitation."
As for the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the US claim that Hussein still possesses an extensive stockpile of WMDs has been widely dismissed as ludicrous. Scott Ritter, an ex-Marine, former UN weapons inspector and Republican conservative, has stated categorically that, "Iraq today possesses no meaningful weapons of mass destruction capability." This is a crucial point, because the present Bush administration, searching desperately for some appearance of justification for perpetrating the war it has already decided to wage, is using the weapons issue as its own PR "weapon." But the claim of Hussein as a lethal danger to his neighbors is doubly absurd, because it is an open secret that Israel -- presumably the chief target of any such Iraqi weapon -- possesses its own stockpile of nuclear weapons and could easily retaliate against anyone foolish enough to attack it with WMDs.
In her infamous "60 Minutes" interview with Leslie Stahl from 1996, Madeline Albright was asked if maintaining sanctions was worth the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, and she replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it." In a sense, though, it was not a hard choice for her at all. To be thus conflicted would signify a willingness to weigh the value of human life against the value of power and profit, and very few people in the Bush I, Clinton, or Bush II administrations would appear to be morally capable of doing this.
The Unholy War of George W. Bush
The first and most important point to be noted about President Bush's stated intention to attack Iraq is that there is no legal justification whatsoever for such an invasion. This should be perfectly obvious to the American people on the face of it, but, sadly, the combination of the government's propaganda and the media "anti-terrorist" jingoism has made it very difficult for rational voices to be heard. The facts are these:
- Saddam Hussein does not pose the remotest threat to the territorial United States;
- He has executed no military action since his retreat from Kuwait that would justify an attack (Bush cannot cite UN Security Council Resolution 678, passed on 11/29/90, which authorized the use of force only to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and which automatically expired when that goal was achieved in early March 1991 (17) );
- The UN Charter expressly forbids members nations from unilaterally invading one another;
- Contrary to published reports, there exists no definite verifiable link between Saddam and al-Qaeda and none between Saddam and the anthrax incidents of last autumn;
- The fact that Iraq has expelled the UNSCOM weapons inspectors does not justify an invasion (Security Council resolution 1154, passed on 3/2/98, promised "severest consequences" if Iraq continued to prevent access by UNSCOM's inspectors, but the members emphasized that "severest consequences" definitely did not mean that a member nation had the right to attack Iraq unilaterally (18));
- The much-vaunted threat from Iraqi WMDs (which seems to be the Administration's current argument of choice) has been demonstrated to be virtually nonexistent (see "The Price Is Worth It" above);
- If the government does go through with an invasion of Iraq, the threat to Americans at home and abroad from terrorism will become exponentially greater, particularly since Osama bin Laden has cited the suffering of the Iraqis under the US-supported sanctions as part of the justification for his jihad against America.
The second, and more crucial, point is that the Bush Administration's foreign policy in general, and particularly on this issue, is moving away from containment and deterrence to open confrontation, and from the concept of leading a coalition of allies (like Bush Senior) to unilateralism (with the U.K., of course, as a "junior partner"). This shift sets an amazing and incredibly dangerous precedent for America, far beyond even the arrogance that led us into Vietnam. One of the most troubling developments of recent months has been the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), submitted to Congress on the last day of 2001. According to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, in an article published in The Nation, the NPR, "1. assumes that the United States has the right to launch a preemptive nuclear strike; 2. equates nuclear weapons with conventional weapons; 3. attempts to minimize the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons; 4. promotes nuclear response to a chemical or biological attack." (19)
Our recommendations for dealing with the Iraq "crisis" include the following:
- the complete abandonment of any plans to attack Iraq, now or in the foreseeable future;
- the immediate elimination, for humanitarian reasons, of all economic sanctions;
- the retention of all military sanctions, including prohibiting the use of revenues from oil-related sales for the purchase of military-related supplies and equipment;
- the immediate provision of massive quantities of food and medicine to the people of Iraq, administered through non-governmental organizations, and funded by the governments that participated in the 1991 coalition that attacked Iraq, with a possible provision for additional matching funds from private charitable organizations and donors;
- the immediate construction, at US government expense, of water-treatment facilities throughout the country to provide clean and safe drinking water for the population as soon as possible;
- the hosting of a summit meeting of nations throughout the Middle East to help resolve, rather than to impose a resolution for, the two most persistent problems of the region - a) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and b) the status of Iraq in relation to its neighbors in the region.
(1) This child's "secret version" of the Gulf War, (as opposed to the "official version," that is, Saddam's view), arose from interviews with Iraqi children that took place in August and September, 1991. The team (from the Center for Crisis Psychology in Bergen, Norway) which performed the study, apparently did not solicit "secret" interpretations from their young subjects: "Although this part of the study was not systematically chosen, detailed discussions with the interviewed children generally arrived at the above description of events." (Hidden Casualties: Environmental, Health and Political Consequences of the Persian Gulf War, eds. Saul Bloom, et. al. (1994), pp. 198-202.)
(2) From a chronology, "Doing Business: the Arming of Iraq, 1974-1993," compiled by Daniel Robicheau and Saul Bloom. Ibid, pp. 334-335.
(3) Quoted in Jentleson, Bruce W., With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982-1990, (1994), p. 69.
(4) From "Doing Business: the Arming of Iraq, 1974-1993," op. cit., pp. 336-342.
(5) Jentleson, op. cit., p. 33.
(6) "The Arms Trade: Interview with Lora Lumpe" (Bloom, et. al., p. 294)
(7) The information in the following bullet points is taken from "Doing Business: the Arming of Iraq, 1974-1993," (op. cit., pp. 326-342), except where noted.
(8) Quoted in Jentleson, op. cit., pp. 43-44.
(9) This estimate, prepared by Beth Osborne Daponte and William Arkin for Greenpeace U.S., appears in Bloom, et. al., p. 186.
(10) The data in the following paragraphs (except where noted) appears in Middle East Watch's publication, Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War (1991), pp. 95-147.
(11) Because state-generated electricity was lost in Iraq from almost the beginning of Desert Storm, virtually all citizens stayed indoors at night; therefore, public places, including bridges and marketplaces, would usually be deserted after dark. Conversely, these areas would be more crowded during the day than they were before the war, because civilians would have to obtain all the needs of daily living during the daylight hours in order to get home before nightfall.
(12) When an NBC photographer supplied the network with graphic, unsanitized footage similar to the kind seen by Ms. Garrett, the network "not only didn't run the tape, it fired the photographer." Yant, Martin, Desert Mirage: The True Story of the Gulf War (1991), p.222.
(13) Triumph Without Victory: the Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War, pp. 272 - 274.
(14) Yant, Martin, op. cit. pp. 213-214.
(15) pp. 64-65, quoted in Bloom, et. al., pp. 146-147.
(16) The information in this and the paragraphs immediately following was taken from two Internet sources: Lindemyer, Jeff, Iraqi Sanctions: Myth and Fact (http://zmag.org/ZMag/Articles/nov01lindemyer.htm) and Iraq Peacebuilding Programs: Iraq Timelines (http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/timeline.shtm.).
(17) The information relating to the UN resolutions cited -- and the limitations thereof -- is available at Phyllis Bennis' Talking Points webpage - http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Iraq/bennisiraq.htm.
(18) Ibid.
(19) Kucinich, Rep. Dennis, "Peace And Nuclear Disarmament: A Call To Action," March 18, 2002. Available online at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=kucinich20020401.
