Galloway opens door to expose U.S. crimes

British Member of Parliament George Galloway’s stinging anti-war testimony before a U.S. Senate committee in Washington May 17 electrified progressives. Galloway stunned the U.S. media—which are unaccustomed to seeing anyone, and certainly not members of the timid Democratic Party “opposition” to the Bush administration, match the right wing blow for blow.

George Galloway

The Senate committee, chaired by Repub lican ideologue Sen. Norm Cole man of Minnesota, is part of a Bush admini stration campaign targeting British, French and Russian politicians as people to whom Saddam Hussein supposedly “allocated oil” for “political favors.” It is a witch hunt designed to discredit opposition to the war as the United States becomes increasingly embroiled in Iraq and isolated in the world.

Behind the committee’s bogus allegations is the long war U.S. corporate interests have waged in order to seize Iraqi oil. The devastated state of Iraq today is not only due to the aftermath of 2003’s shock-and-awe campaign. It’s the result of decades of U.S. intervention, war and CIA operations against the Iraqi people. It’s long past time for the United States to get out.

Before 2003, more than a million Iraqis had already been killed by U.S.-imposed sanctions. After Washington’s 1991 bombing campaign against Iraq—which wiped out its electrical grid and water-purification system, as well as schools, roads, hospitals and bridges—the United States used the United Nations to prevent Iraq from rebuilding. It accomplished this by preventing it from selling oil, virtually its only commodity, or from buying anything on the world market.

The previously wiped-out diseases typhoid and cholera made a stunning comeback among Iraqi children, because water was contaminated and hospitals were deprived of medicine by sanctions. By 1996, UN agencies reported that over half a million Iraqis had died.

The 2001 declassification of 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency documents showed that the Pentagon’s conscious goal was to cause widespread illness throughout the Iraqi population, through water-borne disease. “Conditions are favorable for communicable disease outbreaks, particularly in major urban areas affected by coalition bombing,” is a chillingly typical quote.

This genocidal campaign, waged to get control of Iraq’s oil resources, is the true crime behind the oil-for-food “scandal” now making headlines.

Washington’s oil grab

In 1996, world outcry against the sanctions—overseen and renewed every three months by the Clinton administration—became so great that the United States set up the “oil-for-food” program. Now instead of an outright embargo, Washing ton arranged for UN officials to monitor the sale of Iraqi oil, specify how much Iraq could sell, and repeatedly use the specter of “weapons of mass destruction” to veto Iraqi attempts to buy equipment on the world market.

It wasn’t a humanitarian program. It was outrageous harassment, an attempt to take over Iraq’s economy. It certainly had nothing to do with helping the Iraqi people, who continued to die at the rate of thousands every month.

Naturally the Iraqi government did everything it could—politically, legally and otherwise—to get around the sanctions.

In the late 1990s, Galloway mounted a campaign called the Mariam Appeal, designed to both publicize the crime of sanctions and raise money for Iraq. He was ousted from Tony Blair’s Labor Party in 2003 for inviting British soldiers to disobey illegal orders. He now represents the anti-war Respect Party.

In 2003, the British Daily Telegraph and the U.S. Christian Science Monitor said documents had been uncovered in Iraq showing that Galloway was being bribed by Saddam Hussein to oppose sanctions by receiving “oil vouchers.” Galloway successfully sued the Telegraph over this story, winning a 150,000-pound award and proving that the “documents” were forgeries.

The Christian Science Monitor attemp ted to avoid the same fate by formally apologizing to Galloway—who sued them anyway and won an undisclosed settlement.

The corporate media coverage of his Senate testimony captured his articulate defiance—but all left out the part of his statement that was most damaging to the frame-up. Almost universally, the bourgeois media wrapped up coverage of Galloway’s testimony by focusing on the fact that he wouldn’t implicate a Jor danian business executive who helped him with the Mariam Appeal.

Demonization of Iraqi leaders

In addition to infiltrating Iraq’s economy, the oil-for-food program was a public-relations ploy. It was designed to make it look like Iraqi people were starving because Saddam Hussein was taking money from the “humanitarian” program.

This line falls apart when you remember that it wasn’t until 1996—six years after sanctions were imposed—that the United States allowed a crack in the UN’s total blockade of commerce in and out of Iraq. That crack, the oil-for-food program, was structured top to bottom by U.S. stra te gists themselves, who would have orga ni zed, overseen and overlooked any skimming of money from oil sales.

Because of the Saddam-is-Hitler campaign, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that Iraq was under sanctions because of tyrant Saddam Hussein.

But sanctions were part of the “Desert Storm” war strategy—the 1991 invasion of Iraq by the United States started supposedly because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Israel invaded Lebanon with U.S. equipment, but President George H.W. Bush declared that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was “naked aggression,” and launched a blistering air war, which crippled Iraq’s electrical grid within 48 hours and lasted another 40 days.

The first President Bush’s first act after the Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was to sign an executive order, dated the same day, freezing Iraq’s assets in the United States. Within two months, he had coerced the UN into imposing an economic blockade on Iraq. By December 1990, babies were already dying in Iraqi hospitals from lack of medicine that had recently been plentiful. (“The Fire This Time,” Ramsey Clark, 1992)

One Pentagon planner quoted in a June 1991 Washington Post article put it bluntly: “People say, 'You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water and sewage.’ Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions—help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on the infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of sanctions.”