Over the weekend of August 12-13, 2000, as the delegates to the Democratic National Convention gathered in Los Angeles, the US and the UK conducted two airstrikes against the southern Iraq town of Samawa. Two people were killed and 19 injured in the first, in which several homes and a warehouse used to store supplies purchased under the U.N. oil-for-food program were hit, according to Iraq. In the second, a train station and several homes were damaged and several people were injured.
On Thursday, August 17, the day Gore accepted the nomination, US jets bombed air defense sites in northern Iraq, according to the US military.
Making convention week a perfect recapitulation of the Clinton administration’s eight-year aggression was the release on Tuesday, the 15th, of a U.N.-commissioned report titled The Adverse Consequences of Economic Sanctions on the Enjoyment of Human Rights (“The Bossuyt Report”). Regarding Iraq, it found that the 10 years of U.N. sanctions driven by the U.S. and U.K. “ have produced a humanitarian disaster comparable to the worst catastrophes of the past decades…
“The sanctions regime against Iraq is unequivocally illegal under existing international humanitarian law and human rights law. Some would go as far as making a charge of genocide,” as it has “as its clear purpose the deliberate infliction on the Iraqi people of conditions of life (lack of adequate food, medicines, etc.) calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
A month earlier, Danny Muller of Voices in the Wilderness had provided some amusement for Gore when he asked him about the sanctions at a campaign stop.
John Nichols, assisstant editor of Madison’s Capital Times and Washington correspondent for The Nation, is such an antiwar, antiBush stalwart that almost half of the 200 columns he’s written for the CT since January 1, 2003 have contained the word “Iraq.” Nichols wrote three columns about the 2000 convention, each of them gushing over Senator Russ Feingold (aka “Diogenes”) for “taking a hard line on soft money.” No “Iraq” to be found during recapitulation week.
Like Nichols, the brunt of the antiwar movement loathes Bush for first “stealing” the election and then cynically manipulating the 9/11 attacks in order to invade Iraq. Never mind how laughable the idea that Gore deserved to be president, never mind that 9/11 might not have been there to exploit if Clinton/Gore Middle East policy had evinced a bit of decency.
Yes, what the Bush administration is doing is intolerable, but every once in a while the antiwar movement should take a break from its loathing and ask itself how, for the most part, it tolerated what the Clinton administration did.