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Politics : Bush-The Mastermind behind 9/11? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LPS5 who wrote (8550)	10/15/2004 8:52:19 PM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20039

LPS5 > Was Clinton lying? Consciously indifferent to the truth of his statements? Or was the Clinton Administration just plain negligent? As you say, excellent questions, all. However, if you expect an answer then I presume one has to go back to the reasons for the UN sanctions, what they achieved, and what the US agenda was at the time they were instituted? Clearly, an enormous subject but, nevertheless, I do believe there are clues that the US had intentions all along to finish what was left unfinished at Desert Storm. In the circumstances, one can view the sanctions as war by other means and an attempt, indeed a very cruel attempt, to "soften up" Iraq in preparation for a subsequent attack. If this is so, then one can assume that Clinton was merely acting in pursuit of a policy which had been formulated even before he came to office, in fact, a long-range plan involving US/UK strategy in the region. Clearly, the WMD were going to be the reason given for any subsequent assault on Iraq. Clinton's speech indicates that as does what Rumsfeld said about the WMD prior to the 2003 invasion -- "Absence of proof does not mean proof of absence". And it was the impossibility that Saddam could prove absence of WMD that the US knew all along would give it the pretext for war -- even if it meant usurping the authority of the UN -- which it, in fact, did. peace.mennolink.org merip.org >>Six years of the most severe Security Council sanctions in history have failed to dislodge the regime of President Saddam Hussein. These sanction, however, have had a devastating impact on the most vulnerable sectors of Iraqi society, especially children. Numerous studies by United Nations agencies and independent groups, including an April-May 1996 survey conducted by the Center for Economic and Social Rights, have documented dramatic increases in malnutrition and disease, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five since 1991. Yet there has been an astonishing lack of public debate over the moral and legal implications of a policy that imposes such enormous costs on a civilian population. The advantages of such relative silence clearly redound to the benefit of sanctioning governments and international institutions, who enjoy wide latitude of action without facing public scrutiny.<< progressive.org >>...documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.<< No-one can say sanctions like this had anything to do with the presence or the finding of WMDs. Clearly they were designed to have the most brutal and demoralizing effect on the Iraqis themselves. Indeed, when Albright was asked about the half million children who had died as result of the sanctions she said it was a price worth paying. globalissues.org >>"When asked on US television if she [Madeline Albright, US Secretary of State] thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children [from sanctions in Iraq] was a price worth paying, Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it."" << As you ask, "Was the Clinton Administration just plain negligent?". Clearly not. The facts showed they waged a ruthless campaign against the Iraqis, particularly the most vulnerable ones.