Bill Clinton's Worst Crimes (Bombed Iraq every other day, over one million Iraqis starved)

President Clinton was impeached for the wrong crimes. Unlike most Republicans, I never thought Clinton should have been impeached for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Yes, it was immoral, but as my wife likes to say, Americans elected him to be President, not Pope.

At the beginning of the impeachment drive, I agreed with those who argued, "Nobody died because of Clinton's extramarital affair." Surely, I thought, other Presidents had done much worse actions that had cost people's lives. However, Clinton's later acts to distract Americans from his extramarital affair were truly criminal and impeachable, causing thousands, of deaths. I agree with the essay "The Blood on Bill Clinton's Hands," except for one major shortcoming: OSC left out the most serious, and most blatant, of Clinton's war crimes.

The people of Serbia, Kosovo, the Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are not the only or most obvious victims of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. The day before the House impeachment vote, Clinton bombed Iraq, delaying the impeachment vote. He continued the bombing throughout all the days of the impeachment vote. Only an hour or two after the House impeachment vote ended, Clinton ended the bombing, saying, "We have achieved our objectives." Of course, because the objective was to delay and distract from the impeachment vote! In all other respects, the bombing hurt U.S. and international interests.

Clinton gave several excuses for bombing Iraq on the eve of the impeachment vote, especially the (bogus, but unquestioned) claim that Iraq had stopped cooperating with UNSCOM inspectors. In reality, Iraq's cooperation with UNSCOM inspectors had actually been increasing, despite U.S. attempts to provoke a confrontation. However, knowing the impeachment schedule, Clinton had directed UNSCOM chief Richard Butler to write a report that Iraq was not cooperating. Even Scott Ritter, the former chief UNSCOM weapons inspector who quit because he thought the weapons inspectors were not tough enough, said that the White House had been on the phone with UNSCOM "shaping" the report to make sure it would justify bombing Iraq during the impeachment trial.

Clinton actually used the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as an excuse for the timing of the bombing. This may have fooled the American media, but didn't fool Muslims, as Clinton continued the bombing even after Ramadan had started (but halted the bombing as soon as the impeachment vote ended).

Sure, Clinton said he had unanimous agreement from his national security advisers to bomb Iraq. So what? No matter what day he asked his national security advisers, they would always agree to bomb Iraq, so why ask on that particular day, a day before the impeachment vote?

Fact: the UNSCOM inspectors were not kicked out of Iraq in December 1998 by Saddam -- President Clinton had UNSCOM chief Richard Butler pull out the UN inspectors so he could bomb. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was understandably angry that Clinton ordered out not just the U.S. inspectors, but all United Nations inspectors (which he had no authority to do).

Fact: ever since Bill Clinton ordered the UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq so he could bomb (the day before the impeachment vote), there have been no UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. So when Clinton said (as soon as the impeachment vote ended), "We have achieved our objectives," was one of those objectives to permanently remove weapons inspectors from Iraq.

Fact: days before the UNSCOM report came out, Clinton was in Israel, already telling Prime Minister Netanyahu that he was expecting a negative UNSCOM report, and that he would soon be bombing Iraq. Clinton knew the contents ahead of time because he was "shaping" that report.

Fact: because of Clinton's December 1998 bombing, Iraq began challenging the U.S. and British "no-fly zones," which they had not been doing before. The risk to U.S. pilots is negligible (no U.S. plane has ever been hit), but it has given the U.S. and Britain an excuse for nearly daily bombing of Iraq (not just radar sites, but cities, towns, shepherd's camps, etc.). Since December 1998, this illegal bombing has killed about two hundred Iraqis, including shepherds with their flocks, families in their houses, and small children, and injured many more. It helps to put faces on the victims. I saw a photo of a cute, smiling little girl named Isra, from the Abu-Khasib neighborhood of Basra, who lost her right arm when a U.S. IGM-130 missile hit her neighborhood at 10:10 AM, January 25, 1999 (for a picture of her, see http://www.vitw.org/airwar.html). This ongoing bombing would not be happening except for Clinton?s attempt to distract from the impeachment vote.

Maybe Americans don't care about the hundreds of Iraqis Clinton killed during the impeachment trial bombings of Iraq, and the scores of Iraqi civilians (and sheep) killed during the almost daily bombings of Iraq in the two years since then. Most Americans, incredibly enough, don't even know we're still at war, that we've been bombing Iraq every other day for the last two years!

Okay, for the sake of argument, say we can forgive Clinton for killing a few hundred or thousand Iraqis with bombs.

Bombs are merciful compared to what Clinton has done to the innocent children of Iraq, the most vulnerable of all, by maintaining ten years of the harshest sanctions in the history of mankind, begun on August 6, 1990, and kept in place at the insistence of the United States. On May 12, 1996, television's "Sixty Minutes" interviewed Madeleine Albright (then U.S. ambassador to the UN, now Secretary of State). Leslie Stahl asked Albright, "We have heard half a million children have died [from economic sanctions in Iraq]. That's more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?"

Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price, we think, is worth it."

Yes, even four and a half years ago, 500,000 Iraqi children had already died as a direct result of economic sanctions. Over one million Iraqi civilians have died from the sanctions, mostly children under age five. Those are not Iraqi figures -- those figures come from Unicef, the World Health Organization, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN's Department of Humanitarian Affairs, and other international sources. The "oil-for-food" program is so ineffectual that two consecutive UN directors of that program (Denis Haliday and Hans Von Sponeck) resigned, out of protest that they were presiding over a humanitarian disaster which can only be called genocide. They were UN Assistant Secretaries General, the highest ranking UN personnel ever to resign for reasons of conscience. Now Denis Haliday and Hans Von Sponeck are touring America and other countries, pleading for an end to the sanctions on Iraq.

Embargoes during peacetime are tough enough, but after a devastating war, they are disastrous. During the Gulf War, U.S. forces deliberately targeted Iraqi water treatment plants, dams, and electric generating facilities (in violation of the Geneva Convention), later admitting they did it in order to cause disease (which was biological warfare by the United States). Iraq has not been allowed to rebuild its water treatment plants since then. Chlorine, and water chlorinators, are prohibited under sanctions. Disease is at epidemic levels, especially among babies and children under five. Nobel Peace prize winners have visited Iraq and described the sanctions as genocide. Iraqi children are dying from starvation, malnutrition, tainted water, lack of basic medicines, and diseases that were once rare but now epidemic.

Iraqis are also suffering horrible birth defects and cancers caused by the 350 tons of depleted uranium (DU) fired into Iraq by U.S. forces during the 1991 Gulf War. DU, used for armor-piercing shells, becomes on impact an dust that drifts on the desert winds until inhaled. DU is not only toxic, but has a radioactive half-life in the billions of years.

U.S. sanctions law is so tough that even shipping food or medicine to Iraq is punishable by a one million dollar fine and 12 years in prison. I have personally tried to send baby formula, but the U.S. post office refuses, due to sanctions. Many items are specifically banned (pencils, books including medical textbooks, chlorine, etc.), while all other items are prohibited without a U.S. Treasury Department license that is almost impossible to obtain.

Fifty-five years ago, people asked, "Where were the good Germans? Why didn't they act to prevent the Holocaust?" History will judge America the same way over the current genocide against Iraqi civilians, the genocide by sanctions. My conscience cannot let me keep silent about this. People are people, and children are children. Even if one hates Muslims (which is hardly a Christian attitude), one million Christians also live in Iraq.

Most major religious groups have condemned the sanctions, including Baptists, Catholics, Churches of Christ, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Unitarians, the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, etc. Leaders of 24 Christian denominations, including those mentioned above, signed a September 27, 1999 letter to President Clinton urging him to end the economic sanctions on Iraq.* Conspicuously absent from the list, unfortunately, is the church that OSC and I belong to, the Mormons (my branch president told me the issue is too political -- as if genocide isn't always political).

Contrary to Clinton Administration propaganda, the small amount of food and medicines that are allowed into Iraq under the "oil-for-food" program (UN Res. 986) are distributed extremely efficiently by the Iraqi government. The U.S. constantly places long holds on shipments of food and medicine, or refusing to allow shipment of essential items altogether. Food and medicines spoil because of lack of refrigeration, or rot in warehouses because the forklifts and trucks to transport them are banned by sanctions. An American who visited an Iraqi hospital that lacked basic medicines and equipment due to sanctions said, "I know what this place is now. It's a death row for children." The doctors try their best, but there is little they can do without medicine, equipment, electricity, or even medical textbooks.

Those who agree with sanctions on Iraq act as if only one person lives there, Saddam Hussein. Yes, Saddam is a cruel dictator who does not allow freedom of speech and has executed hundreds of his political opponents, but that number pales compared to the million or more the Clinton administration has killed through sanctions. Admittedly, Saddam is a brutal and cruel dictator (although he was just as brutal and cruel when the U.S. was arming him and supporting him, under Reagan and Bush, while he gassed his people with U.S. support). But if he is as brutal a dictator as everyone agrees, does it make any sense to starve his people to try to influence him? If (as the Clinton Administration says) Saddam does not care about his people, how will our starving them influence him?

When I spoke about Iraq in my church, tears came to my eyes telling of the father who had to hold his young daughter while her leg was sawed off without anesthesia, because of sanctions. Thinking of my own young son, I also cried describing the mother who, unable to sufficiently breastfeed her baby due to her own malnourishment (the meager food ration under sanctions has no fruits, vegetables, meat, or dairy), gave him sugar water, but the water was polluted. The baby developed diarrhea, and for lack of a five dollar medicine, he died. I know my own young son and unborn baby could never survive in Iraq under UN sanctions, which have been kept in place for over ten years at the insistence of the U.S. We are killing an entire generation, body and soul, destroying a civilization.

Saddam is not the only person who lives in Iraq, any more than Clinton is the only person in America! Over one million innocent Iraqis, mostly children under five, have died miserable deaths simply because Clinton and Albright refuse to admit that sanctions are a mistake, especially sanctions applied after a country's infrastructure has been destroyed through the most destructive bombing in history.

"What about weapons of mass destruction?" some may ask. Ex-weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote in the Boston Globe (3/9/00) that, "...from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has in fact been disarmed... The chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range ballistic missile programs that were a real threat in 1991 had, by 1998, been destroyed or rendered harmless." The true weapons of mass destruction are the sanctions themselves. It is ironic that sanctions began on August 6, 1990, the 45th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, because it would be more humane for the U.S. to drop a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb on Iraq every year than to continue the sanctions. In fact, as an article in the May/June 1999 issue of Foreign Affairs shows, the sanctions against Iraq have killed more people than all "weapons of mass destruction" in history, combined! The same UN resolution used to justify sanctions on Iraq also declared the Middle East a nuclear-free zone. Israel is in blatant violation of that same resolution, yet we do not starve the Israeli people to coerce their leader (nor should we).

There is no doubt that sanctions actually strengthen Saddam Hussein politically. Sanctions strengthen Saddam's grip on Iraq and weaken all opposition, as the struggle to survive, to keep one's children alive, supercedes all thought of rebellion. Sanctions also cause anti-Americanism, as the Arab world knows what we are doing to Iraq, killing over a million innocent people to get revenge on their leader.

The United States used international law to justify the 1991 Gulf War. However, the U.S. and British "no-fly zones" and the continuing bombing of Iraq violate international law. The sanctions themselves violate international law as enshrined in the Genocide Convention (Article II, "'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring its physical destruction, in whole or in part"), the Geneva Conventions (Geneva Protocol 1, Article 54 outlaws "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare"), the World Declaration on Nutrition ("food must not be used as a tool for political pressure"), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Unfortunately, the incoming Bush administration plans to continue the Clinton administration's genocidal Iraq policy. Both George W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, have said they think the sanctions should actually be tightened.

I knew I had to speak out against sanctions when I read about Bert Sacks, an American Jew. Sacks was returning from a trip to deliver medicine to Iraqis (in violation of U.S. law), when he took a side trip to visit Auschwitz, a place of special importance to him as a Jew. More than one million Jews died at Auschwitz, comparable to the number of Iraqi civilians killed by sanctions. Sacks calls the sanctions an Auschwitz in progress. Like Sacks, I do not want to emulate the "good Germans," who stayed silent during the Holocaust.

In the name of Jesus Christ, who died for all of us, we must not keep silent about the innocent children suffering in Iraq. Use your voices to save some of the children; become "voices in the wilderness," as the Chicago-based anti-sanctions group is named. In the name of God, speak out, everyone who reads these words. To remain silent in the face of genocide committed by one's own government is tantamount to being complicit, a collaborator. In the U.S., unlike Nazi Germany, we can speak out against our government without fear of death. It is our duty to due so, for if we don't, God have mercy on our souls. We cannot wait, for every day, 150 to 200 more children die from sanctions in Iraq.

*The September 27, 1999 letter to President Clinton urging an end to the Iraqi embargo was signed by the following religious leaders:

The Reverend George H. Anderson, Presiding Bishop, The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

Mathews Mar Barnabas, Metropolitan of the American Diocese of the Malankara Orthodox Church (India)

The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, General Secretary, The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA

Brother Stephen Glodek, SM, President, Catholic Conference of Major Superiors of Men's Institutes

The Most Reverend Frank T. Griswold, Presiding Bishop and Primate, Episcopal Church, USA

Richard L. Hamm, General Minister and President, The Christian Church Disciples of Christ in the U.S. and Canada

Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Metropolitan Philip Saliba, Primate, Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America

Saddam was not justified in invading Kuwait just because it was slant drilling. Someone may be stealing from you but you do not have the right to kill him. An invasion is too great a response to theft. Our mistake was not in being clear before he did so. That was an internal Arab affair. And I do believe he would have listened to a strong US response, just as France and Britain listened to Eisenhower as they were going to take the Suez Canal away from Naser.

"as my wife likes to say, Americans elected him to be President, not Pope."

If your wife's boss insisted she service him orally, and she felt she was denied promotion because she refused [Jones] would she care?

What if other women at her office were promoted ahead of her or given valuable interviews with Revlon and the United Nations because they serviced him?

The investigation of Clinton was about Sexual Discrimination and Sexual Harassment. Unfortunately, when the MSM whipped out their "just about sex" propaganda, people like you and your wife were more than eager to swallow.

Blame American First, not a good thing to do. Look, if he was looking for our permission, we did not give it. Some State Dept bimbo left the wrong impression,

April Gallespie. To be fair, thats how its works in diplomad-speak. He says he's unhappy with Kuwait, we respond that we don't consider Kuwait to be under our sphere of influence/protection. Saddam's fault, but we screwed up too.

Clinton would never have seen that acting decisively, taking political risks in defense of the nation, as potentially generating support for himself. The first bombing of the towers, the attacks on Americans abroad -- after none of these attacks did he act in any meaningful way. Remember that at each election he got less than a majority of votes. To take the nation to war, acknowledging an act of war against us, would have turned his base against him, and he'd never have had the vision to consider that the rest of the nation would support him.

Taking the 'tin-foil-hat' shot is cheap and easy and meaningless.

My opinion on Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) is this: about 95% or greater is hype, and about 5% might be something.

People have been living there for thousands of years and never experienced anything like GWS.

We fought other wars in the region and nothing like GWS occurred.

(One has to wonder, though, about the sanity of those that wandered into Saudi, especially the “Empty Quarter,” and said “Gee, I like the 120 degree weather, sand-storms, no food, no water and everything will either bite you, sting you or stab you. Let’s stay!” But I digress. . .)

So, what is different?

Based upon personal experience, I think a combination of events occurred that caused a rare problem for a small amount of troops deployed in the field.

The combination of events I refer to is this: We took pyridostigmine bromide, an anti-nerve agent pill, used copious amounts of DDT bug spray, and we blew up a few ammo dumps that were found later to have chemical agents in them and then flew through the cloud. Collectively, given most of these factors, I think a cocktail effect took place that affected negatively a small percentage of troops.

Incidentally, I have zero belief that GWS is affecting REMF troops that lived in air conditioned villas and hotels in Riyadh, Bahrain, UAE, etc. They were not exposed to a combination of anything. They may have taken the pills, but that is all they were exposed to.

(As an aside, as a Gulf War I vet with the 101st Airborne, Aviation Brigade, I am registered in the GWS database because my unit is to be tracked for GWS. As an aside, times two, today I experience on a regular basis GWS medical anomalies . . .doc can’t explain it, but it is real and hurts like heck. Thing is, I don’t much care about pointing fingers or affixing blame. I did what I had to under the circumstances and have no anger or blame to hurl about. Heck, I'm not even convinced I have GWS, just a medical condition that is difficult to understand. Nonetheless, I am in the database and being tracked and being counted as possibly having GWS.)

That’s my theory, just one man’s opinion.

Oh, thanks for the civil exchange.

"I just hope the government isn't hiding something."

My deeply held opinion is---they aren't. I worked on the staff of the Sec/AF and you can bet Widnall and the Clinton's wanted very much to find their "Agent Orange" so that they could appear to be hero's in taking care of the troops. All hype for the Clinton's, I know, but they didn't want the negative press another Agent Orange issue may bring to their legacy, and they were sensitive to their negatives when it came to the military (not like they cared, they just didn't want the negative numbers). So the Clinton's saw GWS as a political tool to be used, if proved, as showing they do care and they will take care of the troops. Yeah. Right.

That explanation for GWS sounds pretty reasonable. I also agree with your assessment of trying to avoid another Agent Orange type of scandal, regardless of Clinton's motives. Obviously Clinton cared about his own ambitions first, and would have been very glad to take advantage of such a scandal, but I don't believe he was totally uncaring.

I'm glad you got back OK and wish you the best of health.

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