Why do they hate America? (Excellent essay!)

We have seen Pakistanis waving pictures of Osama Bin Laden and wearing T-shirts celebrating the death of 6,000 Americans. We have seen Palestinians dancing in the streets and firing their Kalashnikovs in glee. We have heard Harold Pinter and friends pleading with the West to stop a war we didn't start. A few of us have read a New Statesman editorial coming perilously close to suggesting that bond dealers in the World Trade Center had it coming.

Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal from Beirut. She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets. Then she went into a fashionable cafe. "The cafe's sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked or moved. They were excited, very excited," she writes.

"Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved," she is told. "An exaggeration?" she comments. "Rather an understatement."

It is horrifying but not entirely surprising; we have seen it before. I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage anti-Americanism. In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans. In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud - indeed, my contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as they attempted to storm the American embassy. I saw many of those who now weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes.

How strange, I thought, even then. They wore Levi jeans, drank Coke, watched American television and listened to American music. Something inside them loved America, even as something outside them hated her. They were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam - the whisky, in Samuel Beckett's words, that bore a grudge against the decanter. Like the Beirut elite, they wanted to have their hamburgers and eat them, to bite the Yankee hand that fed them.

But there is something more terrible, more gravely unjust here than 1960s student stupidity, more even than the dancing of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling - we hope - of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered.

Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world.

"People should think," David Halberstam, the writer, says from the blasted city of New York, "what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past 60 years." Probably, I think, a bit like hell.

There is a lot wrong with America and terrible things have been done in her name. But when the chips are down all the most important things are right. On September 11 the chips went down.

The Yankophobes were too villanously stupid to get the message. Barely 48 hours after thousands of Americans are murdered, we see the BBC's Question Time with its hand-picked morons in the audience telling Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, that "the world despises America". The studio seethes with ignorance and loathing. Lader looks broken.

Or we have the metropolitan elite on Newsnight Review sneering at Dubya Bush. "So out of touch," Rosie Boycott, the journalist, hisses, "there was no sense of his feeling for people." Alkarim Jivani, the writer, wades in by trashing Bush's response when asked how he was feeling: "Well, I'm a loving guy; also I've got a job to do." Jivani thinks this isn't good enough, no emotion.

Hang on; I thought the bien- pensant left wanted restraint from Bush. And that "loving guy" quote was the most beautiful thing said since September 11. Poetically compressed, rooted in his native dialect, it evoked duty and stoicism. But these are not big values in Islington.

Or here's George Monbiot in The Guardian: "When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities." I see; so the United States, the victim of this attack, is to be condemned for somehow deviously making money out of it. I'll run it up the flagpole, George, but I suspect only the Question Time audience will salute.

Or here's Suzanne Moore in The Mail on Sunday: "In this darkest hour my heart goes out to America. But my head knows that I have not supported much of what has been done in its name in the past. As hard as it is, there are many who feel like this. Now is not the time to pretend otherwise." So, Suzanne, how many corpses does it take for it to be a good time to pretend otherwise? Do you laugh at the funerals of people with whom you disagreed?

Or here are two more venomous voices, both quoted in The Guardian. Patricia Tricker from Bedale: "Now they know how the Iraqis feel." And Andrew Pritchard from Amsterdam: "If the US's great peacetime defeat results in defeating America's overweening ego as the world's sole remaining superpower, it will be a highly productive achievement." Would that achievement be the dead children, Andrew, or the crushed firemen?

Anti-Americanism has long been the vicious, irrational, global ideology of our time. "It combines," says Sir Michael Howard, the historian, "the nastiest elements of the right and left." It is dangerous and stupid and, in the days after September 11, shockingly distasteful.

In the name of God, more than 6,000 noncombatants are dead, more than 6,000 families bereaved. From what dark wells of malevolence springs this dreadful reflex desire to dance on their graves?

From history, says Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington: "There's an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and ultimately anti-modern theme that always emerges to criticise the dominant power of the day. It was directed at the cities of northern Italy, then in the 17th century at the Netherlands, then at Britain when she picked up the torch of capitalism, and now it's the US."

So at the most basic level America is loathed simply because she's on top. The world leader is always trashed simply for being the leader. The terms of the trashing are remarkably consistent. Nineteenth-century Germans, Lind points out, responded to Britain's dominance by saying, in effect, "they may be rich but we have soul". That is exactly what many Europeans and all anti-Americans are now saying: we're for God or culture or whatever against mammon. This is inaccurate - America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics - but it is the predictably banal rhetoric of envy.

This form of "spiritual" anti-Americanism has close links with anti-semitism. "Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism are closely interwoven historically," says Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University. "Not because there are so many Jews here - there weren't always - but because both are in part about fear of openness, rootlessness, change, the modern anomic world: Jews as a placeless people, America as a history-less land."

As Jon Ronson recently demonstrated in his book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, almost every crazed cult in the world believes there is a global Jewish conspiracy run from Hollywood and Wall Street. Those bien-pensant chatterers are, I'm sure, anti-racists all, but they are swimming in deeper, darker, crazier waters than they imagine.

Judt's word "openness" is important. The fanatic - in Islington or Kabul - hates openness because he finds himself relativised and turns on the very society which permits his freedom of expression.

George Orwell noted in 1941: "In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi." Elsewhere he wrote of the "unadmitted motive" of pacifism as being "hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism".

So bog-standard anti-Americanism in the developed world is a dark, irrational combination of hate-the-father/leader and infantile fantasies of rebellion and control. It is a reflex hatred of home - the place that provides succour or, in this case, Levi's. But of course there are local nuances. The French have, in contrast to the British, been consistently anti-American at governmental and diplomatic levels.

"It is a long-standing resentment born of 1940," says Judt. "A sense that France was once the universal, modern reference or model and is now just a second-class power with a declining international language to match. There is a loose analogy with British complexes about the US - us in decline, them over-mighty - but in France it is complicated by a layer of hyper-revolutionism among the intelligentsia in the years between 1947 and 1973, precisely the time when the US rise to world domination was becoming uncomfortably obvious."

In Britain we did not have the Sartres and the Derridas leading us to political and philosophical extremes. But members of the British left had something simpler: a burning hatred for America for disproving almost everything they ever believed. They so wanted rampantly capitalist America to be wrong that even Stalin hadn't quite turned them off Russia.

There was, admittedly, a pause in this crude British form of anti-Americanism. When Bill Clinton was elected president, the British left suddenly constructed a fantasy America as co-pioneer of the Third Way. The new mandarins - Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie - said that America was where it was all happening. It was a fantasy because Clinton, even to himself, was window-dressing. Capitalist, religious America had merely put on this smiling mask. When Bush was elected the left felt betrayed.

Much of the present wave of anti-Americanism, and especially the awful contempt for Bush, springs from this sense of betrayal. It also springs from an inability to escape from post-cold war attitudes. "The anxiety about American behaviour now," says Hugh Brogan, research professor of history at Essex University, "is a hangover from cold war anxiety about nuclear war."

Fear of the bomb was such that it provoked in some an abiding belief that at any moment we would be fried or irradiated because of the miscalculation of some mad American in a cowboy hat - an image burnt into many brains by Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic film Dr Strangelove.

Somehow the Soviet Union, probably because of ignorance, escaped our disapproval. It was all wrong, if just about understandable, then. Now it has become a pernicious and destructive failure to know a friend when we see one.

With the cold war confrontations gone, the anti-capitalism, anti- globalisation movements abandoned potentially rational, cultural and environmental anxieties in favour of a monstrous random bag of anti-American loathing. And, of course, the Middle East seemed to provide a clear case of the arrogant, bullying superpower persecuting the poor.

The idea of the bully fits neatly with one of the most grotesquely enduring of all anti-American beliefs: that Americans are all dumb Yanks. This is a delusion of the right as much as the left and it began with Harold Macmillan's absurd aspiration, later taken up by Harold Wilson, that somehow Britain should play Athens to America's Rome.

The idea was that America was this big, blundering lummox and we were these terribly refined deep thinkers. Precisely the same attitude inspires the raised eyebrows and condescending tut-tutting of leftish dinner party opinion. They're so naïve, say the chatterers, so innocent - and this, sadly, leads them to do such terrible things.

Well, I've spent some time among the American intelligentsia and I have been awestruck and humbled. They are, without doubt, the best educated, most cultivated and cleverest people in the world. They are also the most humane. There are 30 or more American universities where our best and brightest would be struggling to keep up. Apart from that, how could we be so dumb as to accuse the nation of Updike, Bellow, Roth, DeLillo, Ashbery, Dylan, of Terence Malick, The Simpsons, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of stupidity, let alone innocence?

The roots of this are obvious. We want the bully to be thick for the same reason as we want the beautiful model to be thick. We can't bear the possibility of somebody having strength or beauty as well as brains.

In fairness, the stupidity charge is partly fuelled by one of the odder forms of anti-Americanism: American anti-Americanism. There has always been, within the US, cultivated East and West Coast elites who take the charge of stupidity seriously and feel they have to apologise for the embarrassment of the unsophisticated masses of the Midwest or deep South.

At its best this produces the brilliant satire of Randy Newman, at its worst the mandarin, Europhile posing of Gore Vidal. The masses bite back with their own form of anti-Americanism - a hatred of the elites. The Rev Jerry Falwell has already made common cause with the terrorists by blaming the attack on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians". To Falwell modern America really is the Great Satan.

However, it is Middle Eastern anti-Americanism that is the burning issue of the moment. Again this is deeply misunderstood by the chatterers of the West. For them it is simply a matter of Israel, apparently a clear case of a surrogate bullying on America's behalf, and of oil, a clear case of American greed swamping all other human considerations.

In fact, America has always had more allies in the region than it has had enemies - although, this being the Middle East, allies become enemies and vice versa with bewildering rapidity. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and her allies worked to subvert the secular Arab nationalist power of President Nasser of Egypt by backing Islamicist groups. Good idea, bad tactics. These groups started out pro- American and became anti. The unwelcome result was the more or less total destruction of nationalism and the creation of the powerful religious movement that now haunts Arab politics.

Israel forms a part but not the whole of this picture. Islamicism makes it a larger part because of an ancient enmity that goes back to the story of the prophet's betrayal by Jewish tribes and, more recently, to the defeat and expulsion of the Moors from Christian Europe.

In this context, Arab hardliners see Israel as a further Christian-backed offensive against the Islamic world. Even without Israel, the idea of such an offensive would still be a powerful imaginative force.

People who suggest September 11 would never have happened if America had pulled back from her support for Israel are almost certainly wrong. Israel is not even in the foreground of Bin Laden's murderous imagination. The Palestinians have actually complained that he cares nothing for them. For Bin Laden and for many more moderate Muslims, the turning point was the Gulf war in 1990-91.

"Contrary to popular belief that was the first real build-up of American military force in the region," says Dr Clive Jones at Leeds University. "This was in Saudi Arabia, a country with the holiest sites in Islam at Mecca and Medina. This created a new form of anti-Americanism that cannot in any way be related to Israel."

To these newest and most savage anti-Americans, Israel is secondary. The primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. One widely circulated picture of two women GIs in a Jeep, their shirts unbuttoned to their waists, driving across the Arabian desert, was enough to inflame the sensibilities of thousands of devout Muslims and to fling the most unstable of them into the arms of the extremists. They had a point but not one that justifies murder. Islam, at heart, is as peaceful a creed as Christianity.

The truth about the Gulf war was that the Americans saved an Arab state, Kuwait, from Saddam Hussein, the most savage oppressor in the region. They would have been as surely damned for not doing this as much as they are now damned for doing it. Now they are also damned by the chatterers for keeping the pressure on Saddam. Do the chatterers know what Saddam is still doing? I do and I'm with the Americans.

Of course America has made terrible mistakes in the Middle East. Much resentment would have been and may still be prevented by a humane settlement with the Palestinians. But America was usually trying to do the right thing, always with the collusion of large sections, if not the majority, of the Arab population. As Winston Churchill said, the Americans usually do the right thing once they have tried all the alternatives.

Yet anti-Americanism has become the savage reflex of the entire region. It is the result of cynical manipulation by, mostly, appalling Arab governments and by extremists who wish to relaunch a medieval war of civilisations between Christianity and Islam.

T his is the anti-Americanism that informs the ignorant dinner party guests of the West who, in their comfortable stupidity, pretend to have more in common with fanatical theocrats than they do with the land of The Simpsons and John Updike.

Perhaps worst of all is the deep vacuity of this reflex malevolence. In truth there is little that can be said about the attack on America. Our "thinkers" are trapped in a history they do not understand. They can grasp global conflict only as a series of confrontations between competing humanist ideologies - most obviously capitalism and communism. But this is something different. It is a confrontation between civilisation and an atavistic savagery that has no time for the delicate ways of life we have, at such terrible cost, constructed. Unable to see this, the chatterers must search for something to say.

So they blame the victim. It is a heartbreaking spectacle of delusion turned to savagery. What has America done wrong? In the days since September 11, its president and people have done nothing but demonstrate dignity and restraint. Bush will lash out, the chatterers said. But he hasn't yet. Bush is a bumbling hick, they sneered. But he isn't. Even CNN, that usually incomprehensible tumult of undigested events, has been steady and calm, devoid of all trace of prejudice, xenophobia or empty emotion.

Civilisation? It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins. I just wish it was closer.

I am sick of my generation's whining ingratitude, its wilful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves. But I am heartened by something my 19- year-old daughter said: "America has always been magic to us, we don't understand why you lot hate it so much."

Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be. Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse. But this is not one of them. This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embarrassing - a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked. So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted.

I didn't like Bubba's little Balkan war either, but it isn't a war crime to place a higher value on your country's soldiers than on foreign civilians. Clinton didn't place a higher value on US soldiers than on foreign citizens. The fact is, Clinton didn't give a flying flock about any countries' citizens or our soldiers. Clinton's only concern was his own poll ratings and his own political survivability. All told, though- what was done in the Balkans was incredibly minimal compared to what could easily have been done had we wanted to do so. If it was any other country but the US flying overhead, there would have been no Yugoslavians wearing paper targets and standing on bridges to protect them. I guarantee that.

As for the value of US soldiers and airmen, US personnel are of higher value to the US than foreign civilians in wartime. That's just common sense. The life of the US president is more valuable than mine as well... if I get killed I won't be missed - but if a President gets killed, it could cause a terrible delay and confusion in time of crisis that might get many more Americans killed. An American city or strategic target is more valuable than a planeload of American civilians- in wartime or peacetime. It is just sensible.

I wonder why none of the left-wing "why they hate America" opinion columns even mention Clinton's name?

Like Bill Maher, they were complicit; and they can't admit that they put him in power and fought to keep him in power.
Maher railed against the American "cowards" who sent bombs from across the horizon, and then apologized for implying our military was cowardly. Never once was the name of the man who gave the orders mentioned. The scum support the scum till the bitter end.
We can't do much about having fought from Saudi soil. The Saudis were probably shaking in their boots with Sadaam at their gates, but we who came to help are to be reviled.
Oil, oil, oil. The money that we sent to buy the oil is now used to finance the terrorist attacks against us. And it is not the ignorant who lead the attacks, but the middle classes of the educated like with all revolutions. If they had remained poor and truly ignorant, they never would have had the luxury of learning how to attack us. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
But will the anti-Americans (especially the American anti-Americans) ever concede that if we shouldn't have fought to maintain the WORLD's oil supply in 1990-1, then should we have built nuclear plants all over America like France did or should we have drilled off our coasts and in ANWR? I'm sure their answer is that we should have all put our cars at the dump, taken public transportation and used bicycles, and never have invented the energy sucking internet.
I believe that European socialism has been propped up by the dynamism of our country for a long time.
The Queen of England is perhaps the only one out there who understands that George W. Bush has inherited a world in which he has to answer 911 calls with precious little backup. And if America falls, so will Britain. And this is probably why Her Majesty sang every word of our national anthem last week.
Well, let's hear it for the SAS and M16 and for Tony Blair getting his face rubbed in reality. He really did look awful Thursday at the joint session of Congress, didn't he?

On Sunday, September 23, 2001, C-Span rebroadcast a program recorded on September 19, 2001 including the following statement by John O’Sullivan, Editor in Chief of UPI (United Press International): The belief of the terrorists is “not the religion of Islam. It is a political doctrine called ‘Radical Islamism,’ which is different entirely. Now, Radical Islamism is a compound or the bastard child of two ideologies. It is the bastard child of, on the one hand, certain forms borrowed from Islam, but secondly, Western academic scholarship, which explains the ills of the world as being derived from Western imperialism. This is a doctrine that goes back to the English economist, Hobson, and to Lenin whose work was ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.’ But it has become diluted into a general attitude in radical circles in the third world but also in Western universities and elsewhere, as I say, in which the ills of the world, and particularly the poorer countries, are blamed upon Western imperial and capitalist exploitation. That is a key element in the ideology of the terrorist groups. It comes from us and not from the third world. It is to be examined and critiqued and exploded because it is completely fallacious and no economist or economic historian today takes it remotely seriously. But it is the belief of millions of people who have been indoctrinated with this nonsense which is traced, as I say, in some cases back to certain religious elements of the Muslim tradition but which is also traceable back to the universities in this country and other parts of the Western world.”

What do you make of this?

The United States and Middle East:
Why Do They Hate Us?

The list below presents specific incidents of U.S. policy.
It minimizes the grievances against the U.S. because it excludes
long-standing policies, such as U.S. backing for authoritarian
regimes (arming Saudi Arabia, training the secret police in Iran
under the Shah, providing arms and aid to Turkey as it attacked
Kurdish villages, etc.).
The list also excludes actions of Israel in which the U.S. is
indirectly implicated because Israel has been the leading or second
ranking recipient of U.S. aid for many years and has received U.S.
weapons and benefited from U.S. veto in the Security Council.

1949:
CIA backs military coup deposing elected government of Syria.

1953:
CIA helps overthrow the democratically elected Mossadeq government in
Iran (which had nationalized the British oil company) leading to a
quarter-century of dictatorial rule by the Shah, Mohammed Reza
Pahlevi.

1956:
U.S. cuts off promised funding for Aswan Dam in Egypt after Egypt
receives Eastern bloc arms.

1956:
Israel, Britain, and France invade Egypt.
U.S. does not support invasion, but the involvement of NATO allies
severely diminishes Washington's reputation in the region.

1958:
U.S. troops land in Lebanon to preserve "stability."

1960s (early):
U.S. unsuccessfully attempts assassination of Iraqi leader, Abdul Karim Qassim.

1963:
U.S. reported to give Iraqi Ba'ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam
Hussein) names of communists to murder, which they do with vigor.

1967:
U.S. blocks any effort in the Security Council to enforce SC
Resolution 244, calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories
occupied in the 1967 war.

1970:
Civil war between Jordan and PLO. Israel and U.S. prepare to
intervene on side of Jordan if Syria backs PLO.

1972:
U.S. blocks Sadats efforts to reach a peace agreement with Egypt.

1973:
U.S. military aid enables Israel to turn the tide in war with Syria and Egypt.

1973-75:
U.S. supports Kurdish rebels in Iraq.
When Iran reaches an agreement with Iraq in 1975 and seals the
border, Iraq slaughters Kurds and U.S. denies them refuge.
Kissinger secretly explains that "covert action should not be
confused with missionary work."

1978-79:
Iranians begin demonstrations against the Shah.
U.S. tells Shah it supports him "without reservation" and urges him
to act forcefully.
Until the last minute, U.S. tries to organize military coup to save
the Shah, but to no avail.

1979-88:
U.S. begins covert aid to Mujahideen in Afghanistan six months before
Soviet invasion.
Over the next decade U.S. provides more than $3 billion in arms and aid.

1980-88:
Iran-Iraq war.
When Iraq invades Iran, the U.S. opposes any Security Council action
to condemn the invasion.
U.S. removes Iraq from its list of nations supporting terrorism and
allows U.S. arms to be transferred to Iraq.
U.S. lets Israel provide arms to Iran and in 1985 U.S. provides arms
directly (though secretly) to Iran.
U.S. provides intelligence information to Iraq.
1984:
Iraq uses chemical weapons.
U.S. restores diplomatic relations with Iraq.
1987:
U.S. sends its navy into the Persian Gulf, taking Iraq's side.
1984:
An aggressive U.S. ship shoots down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290.

1981-1986:
U.S. holds military maneuvers off the coast of Libya with the clear
purpose of provoking Qaddafi.
1981:
A Libyan plane fires a missile and two Libyan planes were
subsequently shot down.

1986:
Libya fires missiles that land far from any target and U.S. attacks
Libyan patrol boats, killing 72, and shore installations.
When a bomb goes off in a Berlin nightclub, killing two, the U.S.
charges that Qaddafi was behind it (possibly true) and conducts major
bombing raids in Libya, killing dozens of civilians, including
Qaddafi's adopted daughter. (Give me a break!)

1982:
U.S. gives "green light" to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where more
than 10,000 civilians were killed.
U.S. chooses not to invoke its laws prohibiting Israeli use of U.S.
weapons except in self-defense.

1983:
U.S. troops sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping
force; intervene on one side of a civil war.
Withdraw after suicide bombing of Marine barracks.

1984:
U.S.-backed rebels in Afghanistan fire on civilian airliner.

1988:
Saddam Hussein kills many thousands of his own Kurdish population and
uses chemical weapons against them.
The U.S. increases its economic ties to Iraq.

1990-91:
U.S. rejects diplomatic settlement of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
(Rebuffing any attempt to link the two regional occupations, of
Kuwait and Palestine).
U.S. leads international coalition in war against Iraq.
Civilian infrastructure targeted.
To promote "stability" U.S. refuses to aid uprisings by Shi'ites in
the south and Kurds in the north, denying the rebels access to
captured Iraqi weapons and refusing to prohibit Iraqi helicopter
flights.

1991:
Devastating economic sanctions are imposed on Iraq.
U.S. and Britain block all attempts to lift them.
Hundreds of thousands die.
Though Security Council stated sanctions were to be lifted once
Hussein's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction were ended,
Washington makes it known that the sanctions would remain as long as
Saddam remains in power.
Sanctions strengthen Saddam's position.

1993:
U.S. launches missile attack on Iraq, claiming self defense against
an alleged assassination attempt on former president Bush two months
earlier.

1998:
U.S. and U.K. bomb Iraq over weapons inspections, even though
Security Council is just then meeting to discuss the matter.

1998:
U.S. destroys factory producing half of Sudan's pharmaceutical
supply, claiming retaliation for attacks on U.S. embassies in
Tanzania and Kenya and that factory was involved in chemical warfare.
U.S. later acknowledges there is no evidence for the chemical warfare charge.

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