COLUMN: Desert storms and Iraqi freedom: Bush the father and Bush the son
In 1996, when queried on CBS’s “60 Minutes” as to whether the death of a half million children after the 1991 Gulf War was worth the price, Madeleine Albright’s response was, “That’s a tough question, but yes. We think the price is worth it.”
Clearly the United States administration at that time did not care about the freedom of the Iraqi people. Sanctions imposed on Iraq at that time targeted civilians, and they were an obvious violation of international law.
Medicine was lacking in Iraq because of these sanctions. Medical equipment was not available. Malnutrition was widely spread among the Iraqi children. The result: the death of more than 1.5 million Iraqis.
For 13 years, the U.S. media were not willing to show how the George H.W. Bush administration was so much concerned by international laws and Geneva’s conventions.
At a moment, the new Bush administration wanted to “repent” and free the Iraqi people. When asked what the response of the U.S. government would be if Iraq invaded Kuwait, the secretary of state said the United States is not interested in border conflicts between neighboring Arab nations.
Iraq took this as a green light: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The United States then showed the Saudis some misleading satellite pictures and convinced them that these pictures prove Saddam Hussein had his troops ready to invade Saudi Arabia.
Terrified by the bluff, and not knowingly so, the Saudis agreed for U.S. military support, and its holy land served as a big base for the U.S. military. Troops came into the region, and Kuwait was “liberated.” Kuwaiti investments in the United States at that time were about $20 billion in stocks and bond.
The Bush administration assured the return of the dictatorship, the Sabbah family, to Kuwait. The Desert Storm commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, was then asked to stop at southern Iraq, since there was no interest in changing the Iraqi regime.
“We could have reached Baghdad in 24 hours,” he said.
What was the price? 9/11 was one. The tragedy of the Iraqi people was another. The U.S. Army bombed Iraq with an equivalent of 7.5 Hiroshimas. The attack was mainly on Iraq’s infrastructure: dams, power plants, milk factories and “mistakenly” civilians.
Acting as a huge field of experiment for the high-tech weapons, Iraq suffered more. The Pentagon was trying to decide what it should do with the massive amounts of uranium waste it has. A decision was taken to use these wastes to make ammunition: Uranium-depleted bombs.
This toxic metal settles in kidneys, bones, liver and other places of the body. In years, ovarian and thyroid cancers were found in high rates in 11-year-old Iraqi children.
According to “Gulf War Veterans: Measuring Health” from the Institute of Medicine, the effect of these bombs extended to American troops. Around 650,000 troops participated in the Gulf War. Of those, approximately 191,000 filed for disabilities, and by 2000, around 9,500 soldiers died.
To avoid the health cost as well as moral responsibility, the Pentagon denied the toxicity of uranium waste, and research in the area was not properly funded. The Iraqi regime was allowed to continue, and uprisings by suppressed Iraqi people were fought both by the Iraqi regime and the American policy.
More than 150,000 Iraqis died by the end of the Gulf War, according to the United Nations Program for Iraq. The Gulf War did not end, except in the cameras of the American media. Iraq was bombed nearly every day since 1991, with the excuse of reducing its military capacities and hence reducing the threat it caused on the region, and because the regime did not “fully disarm,” Saddam Hussein’s tyranny then was a friendly one: It served the U.S. strategic interests in the region.
“Operation Iraqi freedom” freed the souls of more than 1,500 civilians from their bodies, not to mention the injured and the thousands of Iraqi troops who are the victims of their insincere leadership. The United States did not free the Iraqi people in 1991. But Donald Rumsfeld was shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s when the latter was using his chemical weapons against the Iranians.
After Saddam destroyed his weapons of mass destruction and after the United States was sure he does not have nuclear weapons, the new Bush decided to free the Iraqi people and change the regime. “We will bring you food, humanitarian aid and freedom.”
Journalists cannot freely broadcast news, which is disturbing for the wealthy and the powerful, because they decide in the United States what the policy will be. Sadly, anything in Iraq that the government does not want reported will not be. Maybe somebody should launch an operation for press freedom.
Hadi Jaafar is a graduate student in irrigation engineering. Comments can be sent to hadij@cc.usu.edu.