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Alan wrote: > And the last thing we need right now is people like you who are > prepared to be apologists for him and those who did his dirty work by > attacking our Foreign Office. You seem to have a great deal of respect for "our" foreign office - earlier you spoke of the civil servants who help "uphold human rights around the world". But aren't the British government taking essentially the same position as the US on sanctions? And so how can this view of our governments as "upholding human rights" be reconciled with Madelaine Albright's assertion that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children was "worth it" to achieve her foreign policy objectives? The questioner, Leslie Stahl, put the question very well I believe - very unusual for a member of the mainstream US media - framing it in such a way as to spotlight the fact that the UN Security Council (ruled by the US, as we all know) made what was to a certain extent a free choice to impose sanctions, and so those who took that decision must bear a very significant responsibility for the tens of thousands of deaths occurring each month. Any argument which tried to show that the US and UK Governments do, on balance, have a positive effect on human rights in the world, would have to produce some pretty collosal evidence to outweigh that. Furthermore, I must recommend Noam Chomsky and John Pilger as two fine authors who both demonstrate how little concern our governments have for human rights in foreign countries, behind the Robin Cook "ethical foreign policy" veneer. Many books by Chomsky can be found at www.worldmedia.com. -- Robin Green -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To be removed/added, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk, NOT the whole list. Archived at http://linux.clare.cam.ac.uk/~saw27/casi/discuss.html