The French Press Agency (AFP) and other media sources have issued reports that the recent heavy US/British bombing of Iraq is a prelude to a vast escalation of a new bombing campaign. These media sources report that the US and British governments will attempt to issue new ultimatums to Iraq regarding the acceptance of a new weapons inspection regime to take the place of the thoroughly discredited UNSCOM. These media sources indicate that this campaign will be launched after the mid-September meeting of the UN Security Council.

The United States government has carried out more than 10,000 combat or combat support sorties since the conclusion of the so-called Operation Desert Fox Operation between December 16-19, 1998. The U.S. is also stepping up its CIA-run destabilization campaign coupled, of course, with the ongoing genocidal sanctions against the Iraqi people.

The U.S. goal is to overthrow the Iraqi government (the new official lingo is ‘regime change’) and replace it with a U.S. puppet regime in this oil-rich region. Let us never forget that this was precisely what the U.S./CIA operations accomplished in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953; against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954; and against the Allende government in Chile in 1973. No one should be under any illusion. All historical evidence indicates that when U.S. imperialism targets governments for overthrow it is not to replace them with more humanistic, more democratic regimes. The Shah in Iran, the military dictatorship in Guatemala, and Pinochet in Chile—they all slaughtered hundreds of thousands. But they also returned nationalized oil fields, fruit plantations and copper mines to their former Wall Street overlords. This is what made them invaluable "allies" for successive administrations in the White House.

We demand that the multi-faceted war against the people of Iraq be ended. No bombing! Lift the sanctions that have killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis since their imposition in August 1990.

Self-determination for the Iraqi people! Please join in the international effort to organize emergency actions between Monday, September 27 and Saturday, October 2, 1999.

International Action Center , West Coast Office, 2489 Mission Street #28, San Francisco, CA 94110, (415) 821-6545, Fax: (415) 821-5782, www: http://www.iacenter.org; email: iacenter@actionsf.org

The United Nations, as it now functions, cannot continue to exist as an institution of honor and hope if it fails to act immediately to lift all economic sanctions from Iraq and prohibit the United States from nearly daily murderous aerial assaults on its defenseless people.

The Security Council through nine years of economic sanctions forced on it by the United States, has caused the greatest human disaster in this last decade of a century of self inflicted human disasters. More than 1,500,000 people have been killed; overwhelmingly infants, children, elderly persons, pregnant and nursing women, the chronically ill and emergency medical cases. The whole population of Iraq has been afflicted.

Every UN agency dealing with health, food, and children has confirmed the effect of the sanctions on the people of Iraq and reported to the UN and the world regularly on this human catastrophe since 1990. As of August 1991 UNICEF reported at least 47,500 deaths of children under age 5 as a result of the sanctions. Hundreds of governmental and private organizations and many more individuals from all over the world have documented the horror caused by these sanctions.

Only a person bereft of any concern for truth, without compassion and possessing a character incapable of shame would claim that Saddam Hussein, or any other agent, is responsible for what the Security Council sanctions have wrought.

Even if some intervening causes have contributed to this human tragedy in Iraq, the UN would be criminally responsible for failing to rush needed food and medicine to a dying people its acts placed in harms way.

Anyone who would justify sanctions killing hundreds of people daily over a period of nine years based on a fear that Iraq might develop weapons of mass destruction someday is dangerously murderous and puts the whole world at risk by its cowardice. The U.S. has initiated three-fourths of all economic sanctions and blockades since World War II. It can claim any country is developing and planning to use weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq was proven utterly defenseless in 1991 at its time of maximum military power during the heaviest 42 day aerial bombardment in history — the equivalent of 7 1/2 Hiroshimas, on its own soil. It has been completely defenseless to U.S. air assaults ever since. It never used weapons of mass destruction while it was being destroyed. Any such uses it might have made in the past were few, minor compared to casualties in the war they were engaged in and insignificant compared to the mass destruction of civilian life by other countries, most notably the U.S. The U.S. assumes the power to destroy selected sites, or whole populations by lawlessly arguing it must kill today to avoid some highly improbable injury at some undetermined distant time in the future. The United States itself possesses most, and by far the most powerful, weapons of mass destruction on earth with incomparably superior numbers and delivery systems while continuing to spend more on military might than the rest of the Security Council combined. The U.S. used depleted uranium — 900 tons remains in Iraq’s environment — fuel air explosives, cluster bombs and other prohibited weapons against Iraq and alone in the world has used atomic bombs against defenseless cities. It argues for the reign of brute force and preventive destruction of whole populations.

The enforcement of the Security Council sanctions against Iraq is genocide:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in art, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.

(b) Causing serious bodily, or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Art. II, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Now, in the last year of the millennium, the United Nations has permitted the United States to wage war at its will abandoning its mandate to end the scourge of war and failing to do its duty to prevent war with barely a whimper.

The UN let the U.S.-led NATO into committing criminal aerial and missile assaults on a defenseless Yugoslavia in violation of the UN Charter, the North Atlantic Treaty and international humanitarian law. U.S. pilots and aircraft committed 90% of all the aerial assaults on Yugoslavia. The consequences are thousands of deaths throughout Serbia including Kosovo, and in Montenegro. There were repeated direct attacks on facilities essential to life throughout the region, on civilians, civilian facilities and targets containing dangerous forces and substances, all in violation of the Geneva Conventions. NATO leaders have conceded the obvious — these assaults did not protect a single life in Kosovo. Permitting NATO to let this assault be conducted in its name risks destroying the peace keeping role and capacity of the United Nations and arraigning the former colonial and the neo-colonial powers of West Europe and North America against the rest of the world with no country able to defend itself.

The precedent in Yugoslavia of direct foreign intervention in an internal conflict subjects every nation with internal disputes to intervention from abroad. The U.S. has internal conflicts with its Indigenous peoples, who have been nearly liquidated as separate cultures; with Black, Latino, Arab, and Asian people; many alleged terrorist groups; and others. Owing to its vast military, police and prison power, the U.S. does not presently risk attacks by foreign governments, but its foreign policy creates intense hatred which naturally tends to cause random violence against it.

The failure of the United Nations to prevent NATO aggression and itself act to achieve peace in the region undermines the very purpose for which the UN was created.

Finally, the UN has failed to even admonish the U.S. for its nearly daily aerial attacks on Iraq beginning last December and continuing until now. These attacks have killed hundreds of people. The excuses given for the attacks, as with other issues addressed in this and earlier letters, are both false and pathetic. The U.S. intrudes in the air space of Iraq many times every day to harass, entice a reaction and afflict attrition on Iraq, its defenses and the lives and nerves of its people. It claims its aircraft, which are illegally in Iraqi airspace, have been assaulted whenever it chooses. Whether true or not, it then assaults Iraq with multiple sorties killing someone with nearly every strike. As with its thousands of attacks on Yugoslavia, the U.S. has not suffered a single casualty.

The UN is inviting a world ordered by the diplomacy of cruise missiles and economic strangulation, governance by deadly high tech military assaults which are indefensible, and foreign imposed hunger and pestilence. The Superpower scofflaw responsible for both crimes is the same deadbeat that refuses to pay its UN dues, directs the creation of ad hoc UN criminal tribunals not authorized by UN Charter to pursue its chosen enemies and refuses to participate in an International Criminal Tribunal created by treaty approved by 120 nations for fear that it might be held accountable under the rule of law.

The sanctions that are killing the people of Iraq and U.S. aerial assaults must be prohibited immediately and emergency relief and amends provided to those who have survived.

Sincerely,

Ramsey Clark

International Action Center, 39 West 14th Street, Room 296, New York, NY 10011, 212 633-6646, fax: 212 633-2889, email: iacenter@iacenter.org; www: http://www.iacenter.org

By NOAM CHOMSKY, EDWARD HERMAN, EDWARD SAID, & HOWARD ZINN (Issued before the U.S. bombing of Serbia)

At the end of 1998, the United State once again rained bombs on the people of Iraq. But even when (and if) the bombs stop falling, the U.S. war against the people of Iraq continues through the harsh economic sanctions. This is a call to action to end the war.

This month U.S. policy will kill 4,500 children under the age of five in Iraq, according to UN studies, just as it did last month and the month before that, all the way back to 1991. Since the end of the Gulf War, at least hundreds of thousands—perhaps more than one million—Iraqis have died as a direct result of the UN sanctions on Iraq, which are a direct result of U.S. policy.

This is not foreign policy—it is sanctioned mass-murder, nearing holocaust proportions. If we remain silent, we are condoning a genocide that is being perpetrated in the name of peace in the Middle East, a mass slaughter that is being perpetrated in our name.

The time has come for a call to action to people of conscience. We are past the point where silence is passive consent; when a crime reaches these proportions, silence is complicity.

There are several tasks ahead. First, we must organize and make this issue a priority, just as Americans organized to stop the war in Vietnam and to protest U.S. policies in Central America and South Africa. We need a national campaign to lift the sanctions. This kind of work has already begun, and those efforts need our help. For the past several years, individuals and groups have been delivering medicine and other supplies to Iraq in defiance of the U.S. blockade. Now members of one of these groups, Voices in the Wilderness, in Chicago, have been threatened with massive fines by the federal government for "exportation of donated goods, including medical supplies and toys, to Iraq absent specific prior authorization." Our government is harassing a peace group that takes medicine and toys to dying children; we owe these courageous activists our support.

There has been a virtual embargo on news of the effects of the sanctions in the mainstream media. For the most part, the American people do not know what evil is being carried out in our name. We must continue to apply pressure on journalists to cover the story.

We must realize this could be a long struggle. Preparations should begin for all possible strategies, including civil disobedience once a sufficient number of people are committed. Direct action that forces a moral accounting likely is going to be necessary. Without action by us, the horrors will go on, the children will continue to die. We must appeal to the natural sympathies of the American people, who will respond if they know what is happening. We must therefore bring this in every way we can to national attention. The only way to avoid complicity in this crime is to do everything we can and much more than we have been doing, to end the sanctions on Iraq. This issue must be discussed in every household and every public forum across the country.

By JOHN DEAR

We should not have bombed Iraq. We should not kill Iraqi people in order to send a message to Saddam that he should not kill Iraqi people. There is no logic to such madness.

Indeed, killing people never solves anything. It only increases the hostility, hatred and spirit of vengeance. Armed military terror, initiated by the United States, escalates the spiral of violence in a region already drenched in blood and despair.

The children and people of Iraq are not our enemies. They have suffered too much already. They should not suffer anymore-whether from the Iraqi government or the United States government.

Already, according to the United Nations, more than 1 million Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the economic sanctions. Why do we keep making it worse?

In this season of Hanukkah, Ramadan and Christmas, bombing goes against all our cherished spiritual beliefs. These actions kill innocent human beings. They crush the possibility of constructive peace negotiations. They violate our best hopes for a nonviolent world.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest, oldest interfaith peace organization in the United States, with more than 15,000 national members and supporters and nearly 500,000 international members, unequivocally condemns the renewed bombing of Iraq and calls for nonviolent solutions to the crisis.

We oppose the administration's manipulation of the crisis as a pretext for deflecting attention from President Clinton's possible impeachment. We call for the immediate lifting of the unjust economic sanctions, but not of all sanctions whatsoever. In the spirit of United Nations ideals, we advocate an embargo of arms transfers and sales to Iraq, Israel and all other nations of the Middle East, and we advocate the creation of a region free of all weapons of mass destruction. Further, we continue our ongoing call for the dismantling of U.S. weapons of mass destruction, including our thousands of nuclear weapons.

Creative nonviolence, in the tradition of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and all the great religions, especially during this season of holy days, is the only way to resolve conflict with the Iraqi government, or anyone.

'Tis the season? Peace on Earth? God bless us, every one? It is time to stop bombing people. We should send true season's greetings-not bombs, but the good news of peace.

Rev. John Dear is executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, NY

By RICHARD McDOWELL

'How can you expect me to condemn human rights abuses in Algeria and China ... when the United Nations themselves are responsible for the worst situations - in Iraq.'

-Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

'If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.'

        -US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

In July [1998], sailing by moonlight along Basrah's Shatt Al-Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, I saw the eerie hulks of rusting ships bombed by the US and its allies in 1991. Looking at the floating graveyard, I recalled Ms Albright's description of America's vision.

Today, the 'indispensable nation' stands like a towering bully over 22 million people who have been battered and crippled by a state of siege. After several days of visits to hospitals and internal refugee camps, I was overwhelmed by the waste of an entire generation of Iraqi children and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of human lives.

Earlier in 1998, as the US prepared to unleash another bombardment on Iraqi people, members of a Voices in the Wilderness delegation stood beside a mother and her dying child in a paediatric unit of Baghdad's Al Monsour Hospital. We watched helplessly as Ferial breathed her last breath and the other mothers, cradling their children, joined in an anguished choir of despair. Days earlier, at the Maternity and Paediatrics Hospital in Basrah, I saw a young man writhe in pain while waiting with his father for unavailable painkillers. I turned away only to encounter another man collapsed on the floor, crying for his daughter who was dying for lack of medicine.

Iraq is haemorrhaging under the strain of the most comprehensive sanctions ever imposed in modern history. Denis Halliday, UN assistant secretary general and humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, says that sanctions are 'undermining the moral credibility of the UN' and their continuation is 'in contradiction to the human rights provisions in the UN's own Charter'. Wheat flour now costs 11,667 times more than it did in July 1990, salaries average between $2 and $7 per month and the UN estimates that four million Iraqis - about 20 percent of the population - live in extreme poverty.

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), eight years of economic warfare have resulted in the deaths of more than half a million children. Some 4,500 children under the age of five are dying each month from hunger and disease. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that even with full compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 986 (the provision that allows Iraq to export oil to purchase food) the country's nutritional needs 'will progressively deteriorate with grave consequences to the health and life of the Iraqi people'.

An estimated 25 percent of Iraqi babies are born with low birth weights and the World Health Organisation warns that many of these children will lag in their physical or mental development, leading to long-term health problems. Rations at Iraq's 52,000 food-distribution centers typically last only 20 days, forcing Iraqis to survive by selling personal possessions, household goods and clothes to buy food. Those with nothing left to sell may be forced to beg or enter into prostitution. Widespread shortages of antibiotics, analgesics, anaesthetics and laboratory materials have led to the re-emergence of many diseases, primarily those linked to the damaged water and sanitation systems - cholera, dysentery, malaria and typhoid fever.

Although dissent was not tolerated, oil-rich Iraqis once enjoyed a good standard of living, including free access to the region's best health care, education, social security and social welfare programmes. Today, teachers moonlight as taxi drivers to supplement their $3-a-month salaries as they attempt to cope with a severe lack of books and pencils, deteriorating buildings and malnourished students who find it difficult to concentrate.

The most enduring legacy of the Gulf War may be the more than 315 tons of depleted uranium (DU) released by US tanks and aircraft. A dense, radioactive byproduct of uranium fuel enrichment, DU (with a half-life of 4.5 billion years) was made into armour-piercing shells that exploded and burned, releasing clouds of radioactive dust that were inhaled, ingested and absorbed through open wounds. Although the Pentagon was aware of the health risks of using DU weapons, it failed to alert US and Allied forces or Kuwaiti and Iraqi officials. A leaked UN document has reported a 55 percent increase in cancer in Iraq between 1989 and 1994. A growing number of international scientists are convinced that these increases are the result of DU residues in the soil, air and water.

After seeing the babies of fellow soldiers born with birth deformities, some former soldiers have refused to marry. In January, FAO officials reported that sheep in southern Iraq have been genetically altered. Millions of Iraqis continue to live, work and play in the contaminated areas. Earlier in 1998, a UN official, when asked what gave him hope, replied: 'Today I have no hope.' He stated that conditions in Iraq are worse than they were when he worked in Somalia. He fears that two generations of Iraqis have been lost.

What happens to Iraq's children may seem of little consequence to many Americans, but if we care about the lives of our own children, we must be concerned with the world we are creating - a world where the US remains, in the words of Martin Luther King, 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today'.

While many countries -- including France, China and Russia -- have urged the lifting of sanctions, the US has publicly stated that sanctions will stay in place as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power. Congress has approved millions of dollars to destabilise the government of Iraq, while US administration and congressional leaders have called for covert and overt measures to overthrow President Hussein - all in clear violation of international laws and treaties. The myth persists that sanctions are merely a 'kinder and gentler' way to insure another government's capitulation. But the message Iraqis have asked us to carry back to our country is a simple one: 'Have mercy on us.'

- Third World Network Features (http://www.twnside.org.sg)

Richard McDowell co-coordinates 'Voices in the Wilderness' 1460 W. Carmen Ave., Chicago, IL 60640, (773) 784-8065, www.nonviolence.org/vitw. He has led seven delegations to Iraq. This article first appeared in Earth Island Journal (Fall 1998).

State sponsored terrorism

"The anti-war, anti-sanctions and peace movement has come together to oppose this bombing," said Sara Flounders of the International Action Center. "We know that the U.S. government always creates a pretext, an `incident,' to justify its military aggression or CIA subversion plans. It seeks to demonize the targets of its aggression. In the case of the Middle East, this has meant a large dose of anti-Arab racism. We oppose this racist war and bombing of Iraq. The Pentagon has said that over 10,000 people will be killed by these type of bombings in heavily populated areas. That's state sponsored terrorism."

email: iacenter@iacenter.org

By RAMSEY CLARK

"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing." So observed Abraham Lincoln at, for him, the darkest moment of the American Civil War. He had just received reports of the massacre of 800 Union soldiers, former slaves whose ancestors were brought from Africa in chains. They were the first such unit to be engaged in combat. Caught and overwhelmed at Ft. Pillow, Tennessee on the Mississippi river by a much larger Confederate cavalry force under Nathan Bedford Forrest, every man was killed. Forrest reported the river ran red for hundreds of yards. After the war Forrest was a founder of the Ku Klux Klan and engaged in racist violence for two decades.

Four score and four years after the Ft. Pillow massacre, in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, the U.N. General Assembly found "a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance," and proclaimed its declaration in order to provide "a good definition."

The Universal Declaration was dominated by the experience, concerns, interests and values of a narrow segment of the "people of the United Nations," primarily the governments of the rich nations, primarily the United States, England and France. It emphasized political rights developed over centuries from their histories with little concern for economic, social and cultural rights. Still it was and remains an important contribution in the continuing struggle for justice.

In the fifth paragraph of its preamble the Declaration notes the United Nations has affirmed "... the dignity and worth of the human person and the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom." Article 1 provides "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." Article 5 states, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." Article 25 declares, " Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care..."

The United States government pays lip service to the Declaration, but its courts have consistently refused to enforce its provisions reasoning it is not a legally binding treaty, or contract, but only a declaration. This ignores the fact that international law recognizes the provisions of the Declaration as being incorporated into customary international law which is binding on all nations.

The most fundamental, dangerous and harmful violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on its fifteith birthday is economic sanctions imposed on entire populations. The United States alone blockades eleven million Cubans in the face of the most recent General Assembly resolution approved by 157 nations condemning the blockade, with only the United States and Israel in opposition. The entire population of Cuba and every Cuban has had the "right to a standard of living adequate for health and well being ... including food, clothing, housing and medical care" deliberately violated by the United States blockade.

Security Council sanctions against Iraq, which are forced by the United States, have devastated the entire nation, taking the lives of more than 1,500,000 people, mostly infants, children, chronically ill and elderly, and harming millions more by hunger, sickness and sorrow. The sanctions destroy the "dignity and rights" of the people of Iraq and are the most extreme form of "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment," which is prohibited by the Declaration.

Despite the cruelest destruction of the most basic human rights and liberties of all the people in Iraq, including rights to medicine, safe drinking water and sufficient food, the United States government, with the major mass media in near perfect harmony, proclaims itself the world's champion of liberty and human rights. The problem as Lincoln surely knew is not merely one of definitions. It is a problem of power, will and accountability. The United States intends to have its way and serve its own interests, with Iraq, Cuba, Libya, Iran, the Sudan and many other countries, whatever the consequences to the liberties and rights of those who live there.

The United States control over and its concerted action with the mass media enables it to demonize such countries, its victims, for "terrorism," threats to world peace and human rights violations at the very time it rains Tomahawk cruise missiles on them and motivates and finances armed insurrections and violence against them. At the same time the United States increases its own staggeringly large prison industry, more than a million persons confined, including 40% of all African American males between 17 and 27 years old in the State of California. Simultaneously the U.S. spends more on its military than the ten largest military budgets of other nations combined, sells most of the arms and sophisticated weapons still increasing worldwide while rejecting an international convention to prohibit land mines and an international court of criminal justice. And the U.S. maintains and deploys the great majority of all weapons of mass destruction extant on earth, nuclear, chemical, biological and the most deadly of all -- economic sanctions.

It is imperative that clear definitions of all fundamental rights of people, be inscribed in international law, including economic rights which are most basic to human need and on which all other rights are dependent and rights to freedom from military aggression by a super-power or its surrogates.

But without a passionate commitment by the people of the United States and other major powers to stop their own governments from violating those definitions of human rights, to hold them accountable for their acts and to prevent their own media from seducing them into acceptance or complacency, there will be no protection for the poor and powerless and no correspondence between the words of rich and powerful nations and their deeds.

We can be thankful for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but together the people of the world must do better to define and protect the humanity of the people.