Galloway opens door to expose U.S. crimes
By
Tony Murphy
Published May 28, 2005 9:14 AM
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.
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.”
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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