Impeaching the Commander-in-Chief
With his ill-timed war crime, Clinton confirms the cynicism of a generation.
by Geov Parrish
motherjones.com
December 18, 1998
The United States is, once again, waging war
against Iraq. For the fifth time in eight years, it
has determined to "solve" the problem of Saddam
Hussein once and for all by bombing his
country—once again attacking civilian
infrastructure targets that are essential not to
Hussein, but to the citizens unfortunate enough to
suffer under his regime.
Yet as militarily pointless, staggeringly expensive,
and morally reprehensible as this latest attack is,
the newest casualty is not halfway around the
world. It is our own democracy, and the
willingness of the American public to believe and
trust in our elected political leadership.
On a November day in 1963, many say, the
idealism of a generation died in Dallas. On
December 16, 1998, the cynicism of a generation
was cast in cement. Regardless of how Americans
view the threat (or lack of it) posed by Saddam
Hussein, and the appropriateness of military
strikes in response, there is virtually unanimous
suspicion that the timing of the raids, coming on
the eve of a scheduled House vote on the
impeachment of the Commander-in-Chief, was
not a coincidence.
This insult to the intelligence of Americans comes
in a week in which House Republicans not only
pressed ahead with impeachment proceedings
against the clear sentiments of a majority of
Americans, but claimed they were doing it
because the public was too stupid to truly
understand the situation. The combined effect, of
contempt for the public by Republican and
Democrat alike, leaves a bitter taste—a sense that
what we think absolutely does not matter to our
political leaders. That will be remembered long
after Saddam Hussein is a historical footnote.
Is the timing of these raids a calculated attempt by
Bill Clinton to buy time or rally Congressional
support against his impeachment—at the expense
of Iraqi civilians—or is it a coincidence?
To believe that it is a coincidence, one must
believe that the U.N. report on Iraqi weapons
inspection intransigence is so dire that not only is
military action necessary, but that in order to be
effective, the action must be taken immediately
and bilaterally by the U.S. and Britain.
This is not implausible. The United Nations is the
world's most impartial judge of what constitutes a
threat to international security, and the report
essentially gives up hope that Hussein will ever
cooperate with efforts to keep his country from
developing weapons of mass destruction. If a
punitive raid is to happen, it must happen soon if
it is to keep Saddam from acting to protect
vulnerable targets. If it is to happen soon, it must
happen immediately so as not to fall across
Ramadan, the Islamic holy days, and thus further
inflame our strained relations with Arab allies.
And the United States long ago assumed for itself
the lead role in all military actions against Iraq.
This is the logic that Bill Clinton is trying to sell.
The problem here is the salesman. The whole
country now knows that Bill Clinton is a liar,
about matters large and small, matters of the heart
and of state. Moreover, only last August, Clinton
lied about a military attack. The U.S. was caught
in a flat-footed lie regarding an alleged chemical
weapons plant in the Sudan. That military attack,
like the one this week, came at a key time in the
escalation of impeachment proceedings. The
sense that Clinton is lying, and abusing his power
for personal political advantage, accumulates.
There is truth in both sides. Saddam is a
monster—and Bill Clinton is lying. But there was
nothing to gain militarily by launching Operation
Desert Fox on the day before impeachment rather
than a day or two later—or next week (News
flash: The Islamic world already hates us, they
just respect our guns and money), or next month.
In deciding to launch his attack when he did, Bill
Clinton made a calculated decision that the
enormous cynicism that it would generate toward
not just him but politicians in general was of no
great consequence. The targets the U.S. is
bombing include infrastructure targets (e.g.,
bridges, water treatment plants) that can't be
moved or hidden anyway. The United States
explicitly says it is trying to destroy Iraq's future
potential to make weapons of mass destruction.
Any genuine military targets are—just like in each
past exercise where we've bombed or threatened
to bomb Iraq—well-hidden and virtually
impossible to locate. In essence, the U.S. attacks
are strictly punitive and have little military value;
they are trying to locate a very small needle in a
very large haystack.
But who is America actually punishing? Not
Saddam; he's weathered far worse and stayed in
power, and he's repeatedly demonstrated that
staying in power, even at the expense of his own
citizens' blood, is his main objective. No, the
U.S., once again, is killing Iraqi civilians. It's
working overtime to decimate infrastructure, to
further strengthen the impact of sanctions in
aggravating famine, lack of medical supplies and
safe drinking water, and the like. The poor and
middle classes of Iraq have found themselves for
eight long years at the brutal end of wars being
waged against them by both Saddam Hussein and
by the United States.
We can do little about the war being waged by
Saddam, and it's not appreciably worse than the
wars being waged on citizens by countless Third
World despots who remain warm friends of
Washington. (In all of these cases, as in Iraq,
supporting genuinely democratic movements
rather than violent thugs or counter-thugs would
be a helpful start.) We must do something about
the war being waged by the United States—a war
that, between the 1991 Persian Gulf massacre and
the impact of subsequent U.S.-led sanctions, has
killed perhaps two million Iraqis, almost all of
them civilians and conscripts, and at least half a
million of them children. The U.S. obsession with
Saddam, whose removal has been the political
Holy Grail of two presidents, ranks as one of the
great war crimes of a notably bloody century.
It is no apology for the behavior of Saddam
Hussein to state that the U.S. has no right to
destroy his country; and that those of us who live
here have a special responsibility to oppose the
attack. We need to put an end to it, before it gets
worse. Bill Clinton is being impeached for the
wrong reason. |
