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A new form of violence
Ramsey Clark
Former U.S. Attorney General

Five years ago today Iraq was being subjected to a new form of violence that hadn't been experienced on this planet.

It couldn't see the enemy, except for vapor trails perhaps. It couldn't reach the enemy, but it was being subjected to devastating bombardment from abroad. One hundred ten thousand aerial sorties in forty-two days by the United States alone. That's one every thirty seconds. In an admission against interest, the Pentagon says U.S. aircraft alone dropped the equivalent of 7.5 Hiroshimas—88,500 tons of explosives.

They say about 7 percent were directed—I'm not high on high tech myself—with great accuracy. Accurate enough to hit pretty darn close. You wouldn't want to be around if they were coming after you. They were intended specifically to destroy the life-support system of a whole country. Have you ever heard of anything like that?

This is an assault you can't resist. If you don't believe it, consider two uncontested facts: Not a single armored vehicle of the U.S. or the other people out there as part of the aggressive force against Iraq was hit by enemy fire. Not one. But the F-111 fighter planes claim to have aerial photography proving that they "klinked" 1,700 Iraqi vehicles—destroyed them by laser-directed rocketry and bombs.

I was once a platoon commander in the Marines. If my men had been in those tanks, I'd say get the hell out of them, stay as far away from them as you can, because it's suicide to be in them. Because you will never see the plane, never hear the plane, just get blown to smithereens.

The United States lost fewer aircraft in 110,000 aerial sorties than it lost in war games for NATO where no live ammunition was used. When you fly that many flights, a few crash, that's all. With all the NATO war games, our casualty rate, without live ammunition, was higher than the assaults on Iraq.

There is not a reservoir, a pumping station, a filtration plant that wasn't deliberately destroyed by U.S. bombing to deprive the people of water. By the time I arrived in Baghdad on Groundhog Day of 1991, February 2, dump trucks were backing into the Tigris, lowering their tail gates, letting the water come in, closing the tail gates and driving out. Seems to me there would be a lot of leakage. They did it to take the water to people, raw water from the Tigris.

The head of the Red Crescent, Dr. Alnuri, told me that week there were 6,000 deaths from dysentery and vomiting. They didn't have simple rehydration tablets costing a penny apiece. The babies simply died. Whoever got that bad water couldn't last long. It's not fun. The only liquid you have for rehydration is more of the dirty water that made you sick in the first place.

We knocked out the power. It doesn't sound like a big deal. You can get along without lights for a little while. But it meant, among other things, that 90 percent of the poultry was lost in a matter of days, because they had had a very sophisticated system of raising chickens—like I've seen driving around the countryside in Texas. They lost over a third of all their livestock—goats, sheep, whatever they had. Another third was driven out of the country to save them. Because you couldn't pump water. They either died or you got them across the border where they could get something to eat and drink. You didn't have food or forage—that was used up during the five months of the blockade already in effect.

We systematically destroyed every aspect of the food system we reasonably could—not a grain silo left standing in the country, not a food distribution center, a food processing center, not even the famous date processors. You can live on dates for a while, but they're too sweet for a regular diet.

Why were we destroying fertilizer plants, fertilizer storage, insecticide storage, insecticide plants? Why were there fires in grain fields? It's a lot of work starting fires in grain fields, unless you use napalm from planes or helicopters. Even then, it takes a lot of napalm. Fields are big places. Yet fires were reported all over. Even strafing cattle—like South Africa used to do in southern Angola. It looked like the Depression in the thirties in the cattle country of the Southwest. Just skeletons of steers lying around. They wanted to destroy the food supplies.

We drove 2,200 miles and even at that time I didn't see a single hospital that wasn't damaged. I didn't see a single hospital in Baghdad that didn't have the windows out. We saw some in the towns and villages that were flattened. Little things like a factory that manufactures hypodermic needles for injections—wiped out.

You can't dissociate the military violence from the sanctions because you can't enforce the sanctions without the military violence. Only the powerful and the rich can enforce sanctions and only the weak and the poor will suffer them. And that's inherent in the nature of the beast.

I saw Dan Rather say that the real cause of poverty was not the sanctions, it was the Iran-Iraq war. Let me tell you, the Iran-Iraq war was awful. It ended almost a decade ago. But any fool who dared to say that is claiming that $20 billion a year in oil sales wouldn't have made a difference in the quality of life of the people in Iraq. That's what Iraq could sell if it weren't for the sanctions. That wouldn't make a difference? You wouldn't have a little food, a little medicine if you could sell your oil? Rubbish! What kinds of fools are we taken for, really?

I mourn for the 148 Americans who died. Rather said, at the end of the show, that "There's one thing we can all agree on"—without saying a thing about the Iraqis who died or are dying—"it's the heroism of the 148 Americans who gave their lives so that freedom could live." He didn't mention that a majority of them died from what we call "friendly fire," which means that we shot them! He didn't mention the African American family who were told their son died a hero's death, virtually in hand-to-hand combat with the Iraqis, when nobody got within 3,000 meters of Iraqi ground troops.

What really happened to their son? He was in a Bradley armored personnel carrier and his legs were cut off by a depleted-uranium rocket, a silver bullet as we call it. It came right through and cut his legs off. His family finally got a letter a month later describing how they tried to pull him out of the turret. He can't stand up, he keeps falling over. What's the matter? He doesn't have any legs. He dies by an American rocket and they tell his family . . . well, they're nauseated. We've lost a son, our hearts are broken, and our government lies to us about how it happened.

It never mentions the tons of depleted uranium that will infect the lives and health of the Iraqi people with a radioactive half-life of 125,000 years.

Why didn't they go to Baghdad? A general on the Rather show said they could have been there in a goddamn 36 hours, there was not one soldier to stand in the way, Republican Guards or anything else. But they needed a demon to bring the country down for five years, they didn't want the Iraqi people mobilizing under new Iraqi leadership.

Never forget Vietnam. Our war against the Vietnamese people was awful. But our twenty years of sanctions after the war were far crueler, far deadlier and never even recognized. That's what brought them down to utter poverty, that's what brought their living standard below that of Mozambique, that's what forced them out into the sea in open boats into settlements in Hong Kong and places like that. They were crushed. A people who during the bombing were so proud they could raise five tons of rice per hectare, working night and day, cut off from everything for twenty years, until finally there is nothing left except an agreement. And the next day Pepsi blimps flying over Ho Chi Minh City. Free at last, thank God almighty, free at last.

One crime against humanity exceeds all others in its magnitude, its cruelty in all the ways that humanity has discovered to be cruel to each other, and most significantly in what it means for the future: sanctions. The sanctions against Iraq are the most dramatic, crushing, unbearable example. And let me tell you that in Cuba today, the food intake, caloric and otherwise, is still less than two-thirds what it ought to be. One of the great human beings of our time is there today with a million dollars worth of medicine for a people who are deprived of medicine: His name is Muhammed Ali. He's got a lot of medicine for Parkinson's disease.

The United States alone imposes that embargo on 11 million people in Cuba. Every man, woman, and child there. And it does it in defiance of all the nations of the world. Over one hundred nations have voted in the UN to condemn the United States for its unilateral blockade against Cuba.

These sanctions are a killer beyond compare. They have killed five or ten people for every person who died from the assault on Iraq. They have injured far more. You've got over 30 percent of the population under ten stunted in their physical and mental development from malnutrition in the early years of their lives, the number of underweight births is five times what it was before. If you are born under two kilos [4.5 pounds], you're going to have a hard time, you won't live a very happy life. You'll have lots of aches and pains, and you probably won't live very long.

We're doing that deliberately and we know it. And systematically— because we want to cripple that country so it won't bother us again and so we can have its oil with impunity. We are now spending $50 billion on military personnel and equipment in the Gulf per year. Do you realize that? It's 20 percent of our total military budget. It exceeds NATO; it exceeds Japan; it exceeds Korea.

It's exactly what we said in Indictment 19 in the War Crimes Tribunal. The United States has by force secured a permanent military presence in the Gulf, for control of its oil resources and geopolitical domination of the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf area. Do you know what our imports from that area are? $15 billion. We're spending $50 billion on the military and we're importing $15 billion in oil. Now tell me how a businessman makes money like that?

Part of it, of course, is that we are ripping off Japan, which gets half its oil from there, and we get the cream, and Europe gets 25 percent of its oil from there, and we get the cream from that. You and I can use some of that money for the homeless here, the people we care about, the hungry, the schools, all the things that are needed.

We have to find the will to tell our government it must end its economic sanctions, because it's our government alone that's doing it. It's not the UN. It's not the Security Council. Of the five permanent members, three have agitated every way they can—the People's Republic of China, France, the Russian Federation—to end the sanctions. It's the United States that wants the sanctions. It's the United States that is benefitting from the sanctions.

If we can't compel our government to end those sanctions, what freedom can we hope to have for the poor here, what health care can we hope to have for the sick here, what schools can we hope to have for the children here who need education? It is our struggle, our responsibility. We have to end those sanctions, we have to recognize that they are the cruelest form of death.

If you have children, or grandchildren, or loved ones, and they have to choose between dying in an explosion or dying by sanctions—hope and pray they go with the bomb. It's over. With sanctions they'll waste away for months, they'll see the rest of the world watching them die slowly and not doing a thing to save them.

In the cradle of civilization—that's what Iraq was called for a millennium or so—the babies and children are dying at the hand of this technologically advanced society. It worships Mammon and doesn't have the will to defy its own government and say, "Stop this now." We must and will stop it. And we depend on you.

Speech to forum organized by International Action Center on the fifth anniversary of war against Iraq, January 20, 1996, New York.

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