Richard Reid, the person who tried to blow up an
airliner with a shoe bomb, said he wanted to do it
because U.S. sanctions had killed two million Iraqis.
As a result of the World Trade Center attack and the
attempted shoe bombing, both of which can be traced
directly to U.S. sanctions against Iraq, a number of
things have happened:
- Several thousand people died in the World Trade
Center attack.
- New York City suffered billions in economic damage.
- The stock market went in the tank and will probably
stay there for years to come.
- Several airlines have gone bankrupt or are on the
verge of bankruptcy because fewer people want to fly;
tourism is down; consumer purchases are down.
- The (supposed) surplus [4] inherited from the Clinton
administration has disappeared as President Bush
increases spending to fight his war on terrorism.
- The civil liberties of thousands of people were
violated by warrantless break-ins and arrests as the U.S.
Justice Department went crazy trying to find the culprits
of 9/11. [5]
- Every person who tries to get on an airplane in the
United States and in many other countries around the
world is subject to the humiliation of warrantless body
searches.
- The United States has become an aggressor nation,
threatening a first strike against another sovereign
nation for the first time in history.
- Privacy rights are being systematically destroyed.
Telephones are tapped. E-mail messages are monitored.
Libraries are forced to report people who check out
potentially unpatriotic books. The USA PATRIOT Act makes
it a crime to even disclose the fact that the government
is investigating you. [6]
The question that Lesley Stahl asked Madeleine Albright
on 60 Minutes should be asked of every
American: Is it all worth it? I believe not. We should
lift the sanctions against Iraq immediately as a show of
good faith. We should bring our troops home. We have no
business being there in the first place. Launching
preemptive strikes against another nation sets a terrible
precedent. The United States has no moral right to kill
millions of Iraqis, either with sanctions or with bombs. It is
time to end the sanctions and repeal the anti-terrorist
legislation that threatens the rights and liberties of
the American people.
Notes
[1] Ramsey Clark, Challenge to
Genocide: Let Iraq Live (New York: International
Action Center, 1998); Ramsey Clark et al., The
Children Are Dying: The Impact of Sanctions on
Iraq (New York: International Action Center,
1998). Return to text.
[2] Madeleine Albright, ethically challenged,
http://members.aol.com/bblum6/albright.htm. Return to text.
[3] The other two reasons were that
the United States supports Israel and that U.S. troops
are stationed in Saudi Arabia. He didn’t like it
that infidels were stationed in the land of Islam. Return
to text.
[4] It wasn’t really a surplus but
accounting gimmicks made it look like one. Return to
text.
[5] For details, see the Human Rights Watch
website, http://hrw.org/,
especially http://hrw.org/reports/2002/us911/. Return to text.
[6] For details on the freedoms that the USA
PATRIOT Act destroyed, see EFF Analysis of the Provisions
of the USA PATRIOT Act (www.eff.org); Libraries and the
Patriot Legislation (www.ala.org/washoff/patriot.html); Susan Herman, The
USA PATRIOT Act and the US Department of Justice: Losing Our Balances?
(http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forum/forumnew40.htm);
Jennifer Van Bergen, Repeal the USA Patriot Act
(www.truthout.org/docs_02/04.02A.JVB.Patriot.htm).
Return to text.
Dr. McGee is a professor at Barry University in Miami.
