Casualties of War
Casualties of War Think about it: Saddam's threat to the region ended, the price of oil stabilized, Arabs kissing Americans in the streets of Kuwait City. Three hundred twenty-three American...
...We hope they will take the same inerest in acting upon other reports from Amnesty...
...2) "Wasn't war necessary to wipe out Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological, and nuclear threat...
...But Iraq was not such a country...
...The methods of orture sound highly Iraqi: In Egypt, the head of )sychiatry at Cairo’s Palestinian Red Crescent Hos)ita1 was subjected to “persistent and savage torure,” including “suspension, beating, and electric hocks...
...It does, however, add a wagmatic edge to the moral argument against miliary force as the means for protecting human ights...
...It took the Vietnamese invasion on Christmas Day, 1978, to stop the killing...
...The same logic applies to the argument that we had to use force to wipe out Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction...
...chose to iunt down Manuel Noriega, other, more banal exmples of evil went ignored: in El Salvador, hatemala, South Africa, Liberia, Sri Lanka...
...If there was ever a case to be made for a world policeman, the Khmer Rouge made it in Cambodia...
...to intervene at all in the Middle East, we consider it a wonder and a delight to hear an arch-realpolitician like George Bush forcefully invoke human rights in the conduct of foreign policy...
...How many “Save Mozambique” ralies did you attend, or even see on the news...
...Don't bet on it...
...Contrary to the Bush administration line, sanctions were working against Iraq, as evidenced by Saddam’s urgent demand that they be lifted as part of Gorbachev’s peace package...
...In Syria, thousands of political prisoners, including hunlreds of prisoners of conscience, continued to be letained under state-of-emergency legislation in orce since 1963...
...George Bush is a hero for stomping a fourth-rate power, while Jimmy Carter is still reviled for slapping a grain embargo on the Soviets after their invasion of Afghanistan...
...Economic sanctions would never have restrained Pol Pot, whose chief goal was to drive his country backward in time to his proclaimed "Year Zero...
...If, as Bush repeatedly said, "Our quarrel is not with the Iraqi people," we sure had a strange way of showing it...
...Tragically, the litany hasn't ended with the Americans' arrival, since the Iraqi crimes have set in motion the familiar cycle of atrocity, with Kuwaitis carrying out reprisals against collaborators-and against agitators for democracy...
...But there are two arguments against our opposition in principle that we find compelling: 1) "While the coalition patiently waited for sanctions to work, wouldn't Iraqi troops have continued to torture Kuwaitis...
...Over the course of he eighties, 400,000 people died in fighting in Aozambique...
...But we did nothing...
...Between 16 and 28 nations have chemical weapons...
...at least 10 developing nations already have or are trying to produce biological ones, and, according to U.S...
...Brazil...
...Sentences of amputation and flogging ontinued to be imposed and carried out...
...the U.S...
...But we also can’t look the other way...
...A peaceful means for securing the new world order was the first casualty on January 16...
...Were his atrocities really less horrifying when he committed them against his "legitimate" subjects...
...military, for moral and practical reasons, just isn’t right for the job...
...after all, the Vietnamese intalled an illegitimate government...
...For anyone who remembers the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, or the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the notion that the U.S...
...But dropping fuel-air explosives and cluster bombs on starving conscripts is a miserable way to alleviate human suffering...
...Do we at the Monthly regret counseling patience, diplomacy, and sanctions rather than war in the Persian Gulf...
...The Ugandan amy nurdered up to 200,000 civilians in 1984 alone, ccording to estimates by the State Department...
...We continue to believe that this war was wrong both in principle and in practice: in principle, because war should be the last and not the first resort...
...in practice, because when the United States does go to war, all Americans should be in some way involved, but in this conflict most of us had to bear no burden and pay no price...
...has some moral obligation to defend by force of arms any "legitimate government" against foreign aggression is too silly to merit consideration...
...During the Capitol Hill debate on the war, rowar congressmen frequently quoted an Amnesty nternational Report, also cited by Bush, on atrociies in Kuwait...
...Bush had eight years as vice president, one and a half years as president, and plenty of evidence to deduce that Saddam Hussein was a killer who had to be contained, not coddled...
...Along the way, his forces butchered more than a million in a truly Hitlerian bloodbath...
...The nost notorious incident on Bush’s watch was the nurder of dissident students by the Chinese govrnment two years ago...
...But while the U.S...
...In Saudi Arabia, according to imnesty’s 1990 report, “Torture was reportedly ommon...
...But economic means are slow and politically risky...
...Unlike isolationists of the right and the left who maintain it was wrong for the U.S...
...India...
...To control the spread of unconventional weapons and the behavior of renegade states, we have to come up with and then stick to reusable international punishments...
...Yearly, every time some tinpot dictator strings up a dissident, we can’t send in the Marines...
...The fact that Saddam never used such weapons during the conflict-despite confident predictions from assorted military analysts that he would-undermines the credibility of the unconventional threat he posed to his neighbors, but, again, let’s assume it was for real...
...Casualties of War Think about it: Saddam's threat to the region ended, the price of oil stabilized, Arabs kissing Americans in the streets of Kuwait City...
...Whatever the precise figure, "there were," as General Schwarzkopf put it, "a very, very large 1 number of dead in these units, a very, very large number of dead...
...The litany of horror coming out of Kuwait certainly does make the blood boil...
...grumbled and did nothing...
...We can’t hope to use the Air Force to stop them all...
...Don't get us wrong...
...Certainly, there will be countries that pose such an immediate, lethal threat that prompt military action is the only means to head it off...
...Nevertheless, in the past, we have seen that economic weapons, example, and diplomacy can more humanely accomplish our goals, if given the time to work: ,They did so in the cases of Nicaragua and Rhodesia-and in the liberation of Eastern Europe...
...The past decade is replete with cases in which he U.S...
...That others commit atrocities by no means miti:ates the Iraqis’ crimes...
...But we also can’t look the other way...
...America during the Cold War tended to be less than zealous in its efforts to protect human rights abroad, as our prewar relations with Iraq amply demonstrate...
...hey might turn, for example, to the evaluations of ome of our allies...
...intelligence estimates, 15 will have ballistic missiles by the year 2000...
...Still, Saddam looks like a mere neighborhood bully compared to some of the monsters we've left alone...
...But consider the other side of the ledger...
...The Gulf war model, like the Panama model, is dangerous not only because it played up the efficacy and even glamor of military remedies for foreign policy headaches but because it denigrated the effectiveness of nonviolent means...
...Securing a new world order will require first md foremost consistency: consistent moral leaderhip and consistent application of international law...
...looked the other way...
...He was also threatened that he would be died if he ever spoke out about his torture...
...Should we bomb Pakistan...
...We can find some indiation in the fact that his administration is now aidng Khmer Rouge rebels, still apparently comlanded by Pol Pot...
...Torture of prisoners was said o be widespread and routine...
...Three hundred twenty-three American troops dead-a tragedy, certainly, but in relative terms a miracle...
...The Kuwaitis were horribly mistreated...
...Many of these soldiers were draftees, often ignorant and illiterate and-judging from the mass surrenders to any Americans they could find, including journalists-generally unwilling to fight...
...the J.S...
...Burma...
...Estimates of the number of dead Iraqi soldiers-not counting civilians-range from between 25,000 and 50,000 (The New York Times) to 150,000 (NBC, drawing on Pentagon sources...
...Time and Newsweek put the number at around 100,000...
...Would Bush have done something...
Vol. 23 • April 1991 • No. 4
