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Re: [casi] To Many Arabs, the U.S. and U.N. Are One Entity




Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and
syndicated columnist.  In his article <Horrors in Iraq are
nothing new. When will Americans notice?
>
(http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15494),
he quotes:


Eman Ahmed Khammas, co-director of the Occupation Watch
Center in Iraq, said last week, "The U.N. is not very
reputable here. Many people consider the U.N. responsible
for the suffering of the last 13 years, the sanctions and
the deaths of hundreds of thousands."

Plus, "before the invasion, the U.N. was paralyzed and did
not stop the U.S. attack. Some people think of it as a
department of the U.S. government. Security Council
Resolution 1483 basically gave legal cover for the
occupation and to legitimize the attack on Iraq," Khammas
points out.

Former Oil-For-Food head honcho, Denis Halliday says of the
U.N. attack, "We all think of the U.N. as this benign
entity, but in Iraq it's held responsible for a great deal
of suffering of the Iraqi people. The U.N. has been
particularly corrupted by the Security Council. (Not to
mention) resolutions on Israel go unenforced."

In his sanctions article, Rieff makes the important
observation that during the sanctions debate of 1990s it was
hard to know what the Iraqi people really thought. "This is
no longer true," he writes. "And yet what I found was an
almost universal opposition to sanctions -- a stern,
unshakable conviction that the 1990s were a human and
economic catastrophe for the Iraqi people and that sanctions
were at the heart of the disaster."

An Iraqi physics student told Rieff: "Saddam was a criminal,
the biggest. But sanctions were also criminal. There is a
huge amount of victims due to illness. You see, sanctions
really killed our dreams -- not my personal dreams only, but
those of my Iraqi people, all of us."



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