(see 10 for introduction)
4.5 next
“Progressive” bellwether John Nichols supports the right-to-vote amendment in Tuesday’s Capital Times, that’s 105 columns down, five to go and he’ll have made it through the year without using the word “Israel.” If that isn’t exciting enough, a new story line is developing–he hasn’t used “Iraq” since early November. “Iraq” used to be a staple, appearing in 40% of his columns. It could be that with the election over, he no longer feels the urgency to beat Bush over the head with it. In any case, having a streak within a streak like this is unprecedented in the annals of countdowns.
Young readers might be suprised to learn that some people found the Clinton administration’s Iraq policy–“economic sanctions constituting the most comprehensive state of siege ever imposed in modern history”–as intolerable as they have found Bush’s. Take, for example, Kathy Kelly, who in 1996 co-founded Voices in the Wilderness. Earlier this year, she “can’t help but wonder why the pictures of suffering Iraqi children never raised equivalent concern or indignation” as the Abu Ghraib photos. And last week, with the media obsessing over Kofi Annan and the Oil for Food program, she can’t help but ask “is there no columnist who will remind us that 500,000 children under age five died as the U.S. used the UN to wage economic warfare?”
In 1995, John Nichols named Kathy Kelly “woman of the year,” but now the Capital Times offers her no solace. Of course, Annan is defended, but the sanctions are “UN” and their effect is unmentioned. It’s Said all over again.
Speaking of hounded Secretary-Generals, Madeleine Albright and the Clinton administration waged “a singularly vicious and personal campaign” against Annan’s predecessor. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was the victim of “a wholesale and increasingly brutal assault.” His fate was sealed when he released a report undercutting Israel’s claim that its attack on a UN center in Qana, Lebanon, was an accident.
Wherever the point of departure, the trail always seems to lead back to 1996, the middle of the Clinton years. Half a million dead Iraqi children and the Qana massacre have been linked before, in a fatwa and an interview.
note:
Had Robert Fisk not been on the scene in Qana, there probably wouldn’t have been a UN report.