From: Bodie (mclarkc@essex.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Feb 05 2002 - 07:15:57 MST
On Mon, 4 Feb 2002 joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> Iraq invaded their neighbor Kuwait, and the international community, led
> by the US but including several Muslim countries, cooperated in their
> expulsion from that land. After playing a shell game with their nuclear,
> biological and chemical weapons programs for many years (and getting
> caught at it periodically), Saddam Hussein expelled UN inspectors. Iraq
> has engaged in genocide against its Shiite minority in the south and its
> Kurdish minority in the North, including the use of chemical weapons
> against them, necessitating the establishment of no-fly zones in order to
> protect the peoples indigenous to these areas (preventing some
> Muslims in that country from murdering others en masse).
> Arrangements have long been made for Iraq to sell more than ten billion
> (that's 10,000,000,000) dollars worth of their oil each year in order to
> feed their people, with increases each year; these funds have been
> diverted from their intended use and funnelled into mass-destruction
> weapons programs, the Iraqi military (notably the Republican Guards),
> and the rebuilding of approximately 50 castles that Saddam Hussein
> has established for himself across the country, while his people starve.
> During retired Prez George Bush (41)'s visit to Saudi Arabia, an Iraqi-
> instigated and funded plot was uncovered to assassinate him while he
> was there. Several Saudi nationals were executed as conspirators.
> Our airstrikes in and near the no-fly zones are directed at anti-aircraft
> battyeries and radar installations, that co-ordinate to paint the US and
> British patrols with radar to ascertain their positions and then fire upon
> them.
Yes, Iraq done wrong, but this is over a decade after and still the
sanctions remain in place. There are still severe restrictions which
means that almost all products are prevented from getting into Iraq, for
example, the US refuses to supply Iraq with water purification equipment
that could save thousands of lives because they claim it could be used to
build weapons. I don't know how the US expects Iraq to defeat they're
entire army with clean water - that must've been an interesting cabenet
meeting :) This is just one example amoung lots of others I could've used
to show how stupid these so called 'smart sanctions' are (although with
the inteligence of the president it's not hard to see why they're called
smart sanctions)
The sanctions imposed on Iraq allow for less than $100 per person per
year, and thats if the money is devided equally, as we know it's not,
with the lion share going to build Sadams castles, so the actual figure is
probably far less than half that. How many people here could live on $50
a year?
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