Counterpunch reports on Cindy Sheehan in Dublin, Ireland. Here’s what she said Jan. 10 about President Clinton:
“And about Bill Clinton . . . . You know, I really think he should have been impeached, but not for a blow job. His policies are responsible for killing more Iraqis than George Bush.”
Sheehan obviously was referring to more than Clinton’s December 1998 bombing of Iraq. She was talking about the U.N. trade sanctions that Saddam Hussein brought on Iraq because Saddam failed to meet U.N. demands that he end his repression, stop supporting terrorists, return 600 Kuwaiti POWs and cooperate fully with U.N. arms inspectors.
When sanctions don’t work. Because Saddam used the U.N. sanctions as an excuse to cut off food and medicine to Iraqis, some international groups estimated, perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 Iraqis died each month during the sanctions. That’s about 1 million dead. At the same time, Saddam continued feeding his army and building palaces.
Even when the U.N. in 1997 allowed Iraq to sell oil to pay for food and medicine under the Oil-for-Food program, Saddam siphoned so much of the oil money that the benefits were hard to notice. Iraqis ate better and new medicine stopped a cholera epidemic, but former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark reported, in July 2002, “The sanctions continue to this time to cause hundreds of deaths each day.”
So what Sheehan is saying is, the sanctions didn’t work, and worse, Saddam used the sanctions from 1991 to 2003 to let hundreds of thousands of Iraqis die.
Problem solved. In other words, it was a good thing the U.S.-led coalition removed Saddam and ended that suffering.
Frank Warner
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