The following are exerpts from the Third World Traveler. Com, written by Edward S. Herman in December, 1999:
Clinton: Postmodern War Criminality
This brings us to Bill Clinton, who has gone beyond the Bush record of criminality, and has brought to the commission of war crimes a new eclectic reach and postmodern style. A skilled public relations person, he has refined the rhetoric of humanistic and ethical concern and can apologize with seeming great sincerity for our earlier regrettable sponsorship and support of mass murder in Guatemala while carrying out similar or even more vicious policies in Colombia and Iraq at the same moment.
Clinton's military and other aggressive forays abroad have been partly a result of his political weakness, the need to divert attention from his domestic policy failures, and the longstanding need of Democrats to prove their anti-Communist and militaristic credentials. It will be recalled that Truman could not end the Korean War, its termination had to await the arrival of the Republican Eisenhower. Kennedy and Johnson could not get us out of the Vietnam War; it took Nixon, although with a horrendous time lag.
Clinton's crimes range from ad hoc bombings to boycotts and sanctions designed to starve into submission, to support of ethnic cleansing in brutal counterinsurgency warfare, and to aggression and devastation by bombing designed to return rogues to the stone age and keep them there.
On June 26, 1993, Clinton bombed Baghdad in retaliation for an alleged, but unproven Iraqi plot to assassinate former President George Bush. Eight Iraqi civilians, including the distinguished Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar were killed in the raid, and 12 more were wounded. This kind of unilateral action in response to an unproven charge is a violation of international law. The legal excuse given by U.S. officials, which they relied on in justification of the bombing of Libya in 1986, is the right to self defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. But that Article requires that the response be to an immediate threat to the retaliating party, clearly not the case, and therefore a legal fraud. This was a crime, petty by the usual U.S. standard, but still a crime. And it had the further repellent feature that it was done almost surely for purely internal political reasons; to show Clinton's toughness, despite his Vietnam War record, and to countervail right-wing attacks on his lack of militancy.
The same point can be made in regards to his 1998 bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan. Unknown numbers were killed in Afghanistan (and by the missiles that accidentally landed in Pakistan), and the pharmaceutical factory destroyed in Sudan was the major source of medical drugs in that poor country. All evidence points to the fact that the Sudan factory destroyed had no connection whatsoever to chemical weapons or Bin Laden, and was bombed on the basis of insufficient, poorly evaluated data. Following the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, Clinton felt compelled to act for internal political reasons once again, and there are no international constraints or costs to him or his country if he chooses to bomb small and weak countries to score political points at home. This was rogue and criminal behavior.
Clinton has given unstinting support to Turkey in its war against its indigenous Kurds. He has also escalated his aid to Colombia. In both of these countries the civilian casualties from counterinsurgency warfare and death squad operations during the Clinton years has exceeded the pre-NATO bombing deaths in Kosovo by a large factor.
In the Clinton years these recurrent U.S. policies have impacted heavily on Cuba and most dramatically on Iraq. The tightening of the embargo on Cuba under the Toricelli-Helms bill, signed into law and enforced by Clinton, which banned the sale of U.S. food and curtailed access to water treatment chemicals and medicines, took a heavy toll. According to a 1997 report of the American Association of World Health, the food sale ban "has contributed to serious nutritional deficits, particularly among pregnant women, leading to an increase in low birth-weight babies. In addition, food shortages were linked to a devastating outbreak of neuropathy numbering in the tens of thousands. By one estimate, daily caloric intake dropped 33 percent between 1989 and 1993." The decisive offsetting consideration, however, was that Clinton was able to preserve some of his political support from the powerful Cuban lobby in Florida.
Part 2 of this series will be posted next week.
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