10/20/10 – Andrew Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And like I was telling you, history didn't begin on September 11th.
We have heard that half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice.
But the price, we think the price is worth it.
All right, so that's Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, being interviewed on 60 Minutes by Leslie Stahl there.
And our next guest on the show, just take that one, put it under your hat, save it for later.
Next guest is Andrew Coburn.
And he is the co-author with Leslie Coburn of Dangerous Liaison, the inside story of the U.S.
-Israeli covert relationship out of the ashes.
The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, co-written with his brother, Patrick Coburn.
And Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy, which you've got to read.
It's so good.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Andrew?
Hey there, Scott.
Good to be with you.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And so you have this piece.
It's reprinted at LewRockwell.com here.
For one, worth it.
And it's a review of Invisible War, the United States and the Iraq sanctions by Joy Gordon.
And we talked to her on the show, and I read the book myself.
But I guess I'll let you go ahead and give people sort of an overview of what we're talking about here.
The aftermath of the first Gulf War.
Right.
It was really a silent, very vicious war.
Again, not against Iraq, against the Iraqi people.
I mean, not against Saddam Hussein, because it didn't materially affect him very much.
But it was the campaign of sanctions organized and directed by the United States, with the British as a very helpful sidekick to basically choke off food and medicine.
And everything else Iraq or Iraqis needed to survive is in any way a prosperous society.
And it was very effective.
It killed, as that quote you played, indicated something like half a million or more than, well, over half a million children.
And it produced, it really reduced Iraqi society to kind of a pre-industrial state, to a shambles.
And really disintegrated the society in a way that the effects are still being felt today, along with everything that happened since.
Well, you know, it's notable the way she talks about how even after nearly a decade of near total war against Iran, the economy of Iraq still had so far to fall.
And after being smashed, you know, Colin Powell, I guess, had targeted, I guess, I know, had targeted all of their electricity and sewage and waterworks and everything else during Operation Yellow Ribbon there in 1991, that everybody fell for and cheered for.
And then she talks about how Iraq was such a unique economy, in that it was, you know, the land there, since, I guess, Genghis Khan salted the earth or whatever, could not sustain this huge population.
They imported two-thirds of their food from other countries.
It was all based on the oil wealth.
And how, because, you know, unlike the blockade against Cuba, where they could still trade with the Soviets, this blockade, this total UN blockade against Iraq, prevented any country from trading with them at all, other than under the dictates of the United States and the UN Security Council.
And so that two-thirds of the food being imported, it just wasn't imported.
And the food that they could get, they didn't have trucks to drive it anywhere.
They didn't have gasoline to drive it anywhere.
They starved a million people to death.
Well, that's right.
And, you know, everyone kind of supported it.
Everyone said there was an amazing little protest about it.
You know, as Joy Gordon in her book, she has a chapter on the role of Congress.
Well, there was no role.
There was a few brave souls, you know, occasionally raised objections.
But really, no one, you know, stood up and said, this is a monstrous crime against humanity that's being committed here.
And there were, you know, there were some good, you know, some groups here in the United States, like Voices in the Wilderness, that did tremendous work.
They were getting in medical supplies and so forth.
But overall, you know, everyone just went along with it.
As this thing, you know, as the society slowly rotted.
Yeah.
Well, and based on the thinness of premises, right, they had to pretend that Saddam Hussein was Hitler rather than just another American-backed general somewhere.
And they had to pretend he was Hitler in order to justify that first Gulf War.
So then how are they going to tell the people that, oh, yeah, Hitler ain't so dangerous after all, and normalize relations with him?
They had to keep the thing going.
And then really, by the time it seemed like there was even pressure on George W. Bush when he took office to kind of admit that, you know, these sanctions over the long term, this really isn't a long-term strategy and something's going to have to be done.
But, of course, there was no way Bush was going to risk leaving office with Hussein still in power.
They had to go and have a war.
Well, that's right.
But the thing was, it was all an exercise.
I mean, the whole thing, every way, every which way was an exercise.
It was an exercise in hypocrisy because they said, first of all, they said, oh, you know, they'd have the sanctions when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
And they said, sanctions stay until Saddam is out of Kuwait.
Well, you know, by the end of March in 1991, Saddam was out of Kuwait for whatever reason.
But he was, you know, that was a definite fact.
So then they said, oh, sanctions are going to stay while Saddam's in power.
But then that didn't sound so good because there was no U.N. authorization for that or anything.
So then they said, OK, we have U.N. authorization that Saddam has to give up his, you know, his weapons of mass destruction, his chemical and biological weapons and so forth, and sanctions will stay until they're gone.
So then whenever anyone asked, they said, oh, well, you know, Saddam still has his weapons.
But when, as I say in that article you mentioned, which is now on Lou Rockwell, but it's also originally was in the London Review of Books.
I point out that when in 1997, the U.N. weapons inspector, Ralph Icaius, this is what he, you know, I have this information direct from him.
He was ready to say that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction.
They're all gone.
We've cleaned the place out.
It's, you know, it's cool.
Our job is done.
And the Clinton administration panicked.
They thought, oh, my God, if we, you know, if we accept this, if we let him do this, then we'll have no big relief.
The sanctions will be gone.
We'll have to drop sanctions.
And then the Republicans will beat us up for letting Saddam off the hook.
So their solution was to send out Madeleine Albright once again to say, well, it doesn't matter if Saddam has weapons of mass destruction or not.
Sanctions stay while he's there, which had the effect they predict they knew would happen and they wanted, which is Saddam say, well, in that case, you know, if it doesn't matter, if you don't, it doesn't matter whether I have the weapons or not.
I'm not cooperating with the U.N. inspectors anymore.
And, you know, they effectively kicked them out.
And that was the excuse that really, you know, that lit the fuse that ultimately led to the war.
So, you know, that Clinton, that's why, as you mentioned, Clinton bears a huge amount of responsibility for the war, the occupation of Iraq and all the horrible death and destruction and suffering that was caused by it.
Well, you know, I'm not sure if you saw this, but just in the last week, General Shelton from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I forget if he was the chairman for the time of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he says now in his new memoir that Madeleine Albright asked him at breakfast, hey, could we just deliberately fly one of the no-fly zone planes low and slow enough over Baghdad to get it shot down to justify a war?
Well, exactly.
You know, and people, you know, George Bush suggested later on sort of something similar to Tony Blair and all the press said, oh, my God, there's how wicked George Bush was and everything.
But there's Madeleine Albright, you know, still cavorting about.
And, you know, no one holds her, well, not enough people hold her up as a war criminal, which in my view, she definitely was and is.
Well, you know, we just talked with Robert Pape about occupation causing suicide terrorism and how the title of Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against America was titled Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
Well, what are they doing there?
They were enforcing this genocidal blockade against Iraq.
We're going to pick that theme up here on the other side of this break with Andrew Coburn on Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, we're wrapping up Antiwar Radio here.
We got Andrew Coburn on the phone.
He's the author of Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy.
And he's got a piece in the London Review of Books that's lrb.co.uk.
Worth it.
Just to paraphrase the former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.
Now, I have to mention here the important fact that you bring up in this article.
And that is that in 1995, when Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan, he was even interviewed on CNN.
But he was completely debriefed.
And I remember it.
I watched it.
He was completely debriefed by the CIA and the International Atomic Energy Agency and all the different UNSCOM or UNMOVIC or whichever it was called at the time.
And when he went home to Iraq and was executed by Saddam Hussein, Hussein panicked because he didn't know what all the son-in-law had said.
And at that point, according to Scott Ritter, he gave up everything.
He turned over every last thing, which proved that they hadn't produced any weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons or anything else since 1991.
And that it was all accounted for other than, you know, remainders and what's lost in the desert out there and past the shelf life anyway and whatever.
And that was it.
And they knew in 1995 that that was it.
But now, since I got that out of the way, it's mentioned in the article.
Everybody can go back and read it.
If you have to correct me on something, I guess I'll let you.
But otherwise, I want to just be quiet and let you talk about what you know about Iraq because you were reporting from there during this time.
And, you know, I want to just hear 10 minutes of you telling the truth about Iraq during the Clinton years.
Well, you know, it was what you had.
I mean, Iraq.
Yeah, I mean, we shouldn't waste time sort of saying that Saddam was anything other than a really vicious, you know, thuggish and stupid dictator who led his country into three or two disastrous wars.
But I mean, Iraq and I remember in right after in 1991, right after the Gulf, the first Gulf War, actually, they called it the second because the war with Iran, they considered the first Gulf War.
And you had a middle.
It was very interesting to see.
I mean, horrifying to to see a country which had had a stable middle class, an incredibly sort of well-educated middle, you know, you know, it was not a third world country.
And suddenly this was coming apart.
The auction rooms are full of people desperately trying to sell their family, you know, the carpets from their houses.
And gradually, every time I went back in the 1990s, you'd see people who, you know, when in 1991, they'd been getting rid of one, you know, nice carpet that they didn't use much and something by, you know, a few years later, like all the carpets had gone, then all the silverware was gone.
And then, you know, the lamps had gone.
And, you know, society was just stripped bare, stripped bare by sanctions.
And that was one effect.
People reduced to like to despair.
Secondly, of course, it really promoted religious fundamentalism because people turned to Islam in the most extreme way.
I mean, the people in, you know, the insurgencies that the Americans faced, particularly the religious incentives, you know, the al-Qaeda in Iraq that they faced in this decade and during the occupation, that was very much born out of, you know, the sanctions.
That was a generation that had grown up in sanctions with no hope, couldn't get married because you couldn't afford to get married, couldn't finish their education, couldn't even get an education.
It was all the 1990s prepared all that and reduced Iraqi society to what it is today.
And it was a monstrous crime.
And done so sort of casually and brutally.
You know, I remember in 1991 talking to people from the CIA about the sanctions.
And I said, oh, you know, well, you know, you say in public that this, you hope this will lead to, lead to the people getting, you know, rising up in despair and overthrowing Saddam.
And they said, oh, no, that's the least likely alternative.
No, we don't expect that to happen at all.
No, he's got too tight a grip, you know, that won't happen.
So it was completely cynical.
They knew that this wouldn't affect Saddam.
And they didn't care.
They just wanted to keep Iraq ground down and the Iraqi people ground down so that Iraq would never be, you know, a threat to American or Israeli or many friends interests or Saudi Arabia ever again.
And then, you know, present bombing reasons.
Bush went and invaded in 2003.
But the ground had been well prepared, you know, first of all, by his father and then by Clinton.
Well, and isn't it interesting that none of the 9-11 hijackers were Iraqis, no matter how hard Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and those guys and Israeli Mossad, I mean, they quoted them by name in the Sunday Times.
The Mossad says they saw Iraqi intelligence give anthrax to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.
Yeah, in Prague, you know.
But the hijackers were actually all from countries that are occupied by the United States, particularly Saudi Arabia, which was occupied in order to do these sanctions.
So it seems that the suicide terrorism, even under the worst kind of genocidal economic program and no-fly zone bombings on a regular basis, that still won't provoke suicide terrorism.
But basing troops in a country in order to do that to the country next door, that will.
Yeah, that's right.
15 of the hijackers, 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia.
Exactly so.
So, yeah, well, that didn't work out too well, did it?
Or maybe it did, you know, who knows?
Yeah, well, it depends if you want a long war or not.
But, yeah, I mean, it's not, it's a fact for anyone who just goes to the PBS NewsHour website and reads the declarations of war by Osama bin Laden in 1996 and 1998.
Both of them, he spends quite a bit of time talking about what's going on in Iraq, the blockade.
Absolutely.
And, you know, on the eve of the Iraq war, at least supposedly, bin Laden put out a message saying, you know, good luck to the people of Iraq, fight the Americans, and now's your chance to fight that evil socialist Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, that's right.
That was exactly his attitude.
I mean, he was, you know, the idea that there would have been collusion between him and Saddam Hussein was, you know, was a fiction so ludicrous that, well, I don't know, even the New York Times fell for that.
The New Yorker magazine infamously did.
Yeah, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Exactly so.
Which he's never apologized for.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
Geez, I forgot what I was going to say.
It was going to be a great point.
Yeah, I can sense that.
Yes, well, we're agreed then.
Well, again, this article, Worth It, that you have in the London Review of Books is a review of invisible war, the United States and the Iraq war.
It's the sanctions by Joy Gordon.
And she really got the work done here about the effect on the people of Iraq.
And it really is, you know, I don't know.
I can't help but think, Andrew, about, you know, I don't know, 50 years from now, if America doesn't use hydrogen bombs and kill all the people in the world between now and then.
When people look back on this, a program of, you know, hundreds of thousands killed in the Iran-Iraq war that we fought back both sides of, the Anfal campaign under Saddam Hussein when he was our friend, and then the first Gulf War, the sanctions that killed a million, then the war that killed another million.
And what America has done to this helpless little country over the last 30 years is the kind of thing that you could write a religious text about the horrible crisis.
Like you said, people turning to fundamentalism.
Like, I can see how, from other people's point of view, this is like a Holy Crusade religious-level war.
You know, it's madness.
Millions killed.
Yeah, it's horrifying, just horrifying.
And all done, you know, people here don't sort of, you know this, I mean, how often do people talk about Iraq these days, you know?
I mean, I'm very glad we're doing this because people need to know, you know, just what you just said.
What, you know, horrible things have been done in our name.
Tell me again, Andrew, why they wanted to do this to Iraq so bad anyway.
I mean, why have all the helpless little countries in the world, why not just, I don't know, march in tears all day?
I think there was, part of the reason was, I mean, there was a whole host of reasons, a lot of which we probably don't know, but one of them was that Iraq was getting too big for its boots, you know, in their view.
Iraq had been, Iraq was always an awkward country for them because Iraq, you know, they, particularly as far as, you know, had all this oil, and yet Saddam Hussein had actually once Saddam had done it, had successfully nationalized Iraqi oil or completed the nationalization of Iraqi oil.
And, you know, so that was, he was always a bit too independent for people's, you know, for the ruling clique's taste.
And then, you know, especially after the Iran-Iraq war, it was like he was the strongest military power in that part of the Middle East.
And the idea that it could actually possibly threaten not just Kuwait, but Saudi Arabia, that was, you know, that was a bit scary for them.
I think they wanted to take it down a peg or two.
And then beyond that, there was this whole mad neocon plan that you could somehow, you could, if you took over Iraq, you could then use that to take over Syria and you'd have basically, you know, the most important countries in the Middle East or two of the most important countries, basically, you know, subservient to America, i.e.
Israel's desires.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks very much, Andrew.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
Everybody, that's Andrew Coburn, author of Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
The article in the London Review of Books is Worth It, a review of Invisible War, the United States and the Iraq sanctions by Joy Gordon.