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From:International Action Center
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
web page: www.iacenter.org
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H.E. Sir John Weston
Permanent Mission of UK to the UN
885 2nd Avenue
New York, NY 10017
November 11, 1998
Dear Ambassador Weston:
President Clinton has chosen the anniversary of the
armistice ending World War I to further threaten Iraq with
another violent assault. He charges that failure to act
"would permanently damage the credibility of the U.N.
Security Council to act as a force for promoting
international peace." It is a phrase reminiscent of
Plato's unnamed Athenian Stranger who favored "seeking
peace by making war." He taunts the U.N. to act,
asserting "Failure to respond [will] embolden Saddam to
act recklessly." It is a threat by a weakened President
thinking only of his personal political standing. U.S.
contempt for U.N. authority is shown by its defiance of
the recent General Assembly vote of 157 nations versus 2
nations protesting the U.S. criminal blockade of Cuba, its
refusal to pay dues to the U.N. year after year and its
selective defiance, and support for violations by other
nations of General Assembly, Security Council and
International Court of Justice resolutions and decisions.
The Security Council should immediately admonish the U.S.
that it must not again attack Iraq. The Security Council
is already responsible for military attacks on Iraq,
albeit at the insistence of the U.S., including 110,000
aerial sorties unleashing 88,500 tons of bombs across Iraq
by U.S. aircraft in January and February 1991 which
destroyed 80% of Iraq's military capacity according to the
Pentagon. Iraq has been further decimated by the most
severe Security Council sanctions in history since August
6 (Hiroshima Day) 1990. More than a million and a half
people have died in Iraq as a direct result of those
sanctions, as U.N. agencies have reported. The great
majority of the victims were infants, children, elderly
and chronically ill persons. This is unquestionably a
violation of the Genocide Convention.*
U.N. inspection teams over a period of seven years claim
to have destroyed 90% of the remaining Iraqi missile
capacity and designated military material. Iraq is not
capable of a serious threat against anyone.
The notion that Iraq is a threat to the region is a false
fantasy created by the U.S. to justify its vast military
presence in the region, to dominate the oil resources and
to contain Islam. Iraq is no threat to its neighbors as
every Security Council member knows. It is barely able to
survive. Turkey regularly attacks the Kurdish people and
others living on northern Iraqi soil at will with U.S.
support and U.N. acquiescence. There are many nations on
earth that pose far greater threats of minor violence and
to world peace than Iraq. As the recently published
"Israel and the Bomb", Columbia University Press, again
demonstrates, Israel developed and has manufactured some
hundreds of nuclear bombs in violation of Security Council
resolutions and international law.
Random assaults on Iraq at the whim of the United States
since 1991 include scores of Tomahawk cruise missile and
rocket assaults. The U.S. has used the cradle of
civilization as a shooting gallery, striking such
dangerous targets as the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad,
killing two employees, the home of Layla al Attar, the
famous artist and museum director, killing her and others,
and a United Nations helicopter killing all its occupants.
A new U.S. strike will target vital support systems for
the population of Iraq, just as its 1991 assault targeted
the infrastructure; water supply, electric power,
transportation, communications, food storage, processing
and distribution, fertilizer and insecticide manufacture.
It is a crueler form of corporal punishment imposed on the
entire population than public lashings and executions
favored by former colonial powers.
The destruction of the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in
Khartoum, Sudan on August 20, 1998 illustrates the U.S.
strategy. The plant produced 50% of the pharmaceutical
available in the Sudan. The cost of EL Shifa products was
20% of the international market prices. It produced 90%
of the antibiotics used for malaria which is the leading
cause of death there. Major international pharmaceutical
companies do not produce drugs for malaria, or engage in
research to address the spread of new virulent types of
malaria which are reaching epidemic levels in part of
Africa and Asia. A single U.S. missile attack destroyed
the single most important health facility in the Sudan and
will cause thousands of deaths. Everyone in the Sudan,
including the entire diplomatic corps, knew of the El
Shifa plant and its importance to the health of the
people.
U.N. inspections in Iraq over a period of seven years have
been manipulated by unproven U.S. claims time and time
again. Strategically placed agents of the U.S. and British
intelligence agencies in U.N. inspectors' positions have
had the single purpose of continuing the sanctions by
making false claims that Iraq is developing nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons with missiles and can
complete the task in weeks, or months without inspection.
The United States spends more on arms annually, $275
billion presently, than the rest of the Security Council
combined. U.S. arms expenditures are approximately 25
times the gross national product of Iraq. The U.S. has in
its stockpiles more nuclear bombs, chemical and biological
weapons, more aircraft, rockets and delivery systems in
number and sophistication than the rest of the world
combined. Included are twenty commissioned Trident II
nuclear submarines any one of which could destroy Europe.
It is the U.S. that ought to be inspected. The U.S. is
today, far more than when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
observed it in 1967, "the greatest purveyor of violence on
earth."
It is imperative to world peace, the survival of the U.N.
as an organization of independent nations and to simple
justice that the Security Council immediately inform the
U.S. that it must not again attack Iraq, or any other
country.
Sincerely,
Ramsey Clark
* Genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy in whole or in part, 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.
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