excerpts from the book
Behind the War on Terror
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
New Society Publishers, 2003,
paperback
p5
Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first postcolonial president.
Neo-colonialism is ... the worst form
of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without
responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation
without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the
imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the
actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the
ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against
any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither
is the case.
p7
Council on Foreign Relations documents, from mid-1941
If war aims are stated, which seem to
be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will
offer little to people in the rest of the world ... Such aims
would also strengthen the most reactionary elements in the United
States and the British Empire. The interests of other peoples
should be stressed, not only those of Europe, but also of Asia,
Africa and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda
effect.
p8
The real motivation behind US military interventions during the
cold war was not Soviet deterrence but the crushing of popular,
indigenous nationalist movements for independence, and the establishment
of US control over strategic regions.
p10
author William Blum observes that between 1945 and 1999 the US
had conducted extremely serious military interventions against
over 70 nations:
* making the world safe for American corporations
*enhancing the financial statements of
defence contractors at home who have contributed generously to
members of Congress;
* preventing the rise of any society that
might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist
model;
* extending political and economic hegemony
over as wide an area as possible, as befits a 'great power'.
p12
Leon T. Hadar, Cato Institute - 1990s
Now that the cold war is becoming a memory,
America's foreign policy establishment has begun searching for
new enemies. Possible new villains include "instability"
in Europe ... the "vanishing" ozone layer, nuclear proliferation,
and narco-terrorism. Topping the list of potential new global
bogeymen, however, are the Yellow Peril, the alleged threat to
American economic security emanating from East Asia, and the so-called
Green Peril (green is the color of Islam).
p17
VP Dick Cheney - lecture at West Point, June 2002
The Plan is for the United States to rule
the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately
a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain
its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising
up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over
friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States
must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely
powerful.
p107
Article 54 of the Geneva Convention
It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove,
or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the
civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking
water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the
specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to
the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the
motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them
to move away, or for any other motive.
p108
Professor Thomas Nagy
The [Iraq] sanctions, imposed for a decade
largely at the insistence of the United States, constitute a violation
of the Geneva Convention... For more than ten years the United
States has deliberately pursued a policy of / destroying the water
treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi
lives.
p112
By 1999, UN figures projected that more than 1.7 million ) Iraqi
civilians had died as a result of the sanctions, between 500,000
and 600,000 of whom were children.
p113
Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist at Colombia University in
New York, concluded that ... the death rate of children in Iraq
... was unique since there is almost no documented case of rising
mortality for children under five years in the modern world
p113
UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), September 1995
Famine threatens four million people in
sanctions-hit Iraq - one fifth of the population... The human
situation is deteriorating. Living conditions are precarious and
are at pre-famine level for at least four million people ... The
deterioration in nutritional status of children is reflected in
the significant increase of child mortality, which has risen nearly
fivefold since 1990.
p143
Abdullah Mutawi, head of the Middle East Program at the New York-based
Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR)
The sanctions policy against Iraq has
proven to be the single largest violation of the International
Covenant on Economic and Social Rights, a violation committed
by the Security Council itself... Collective punishment is prohibited
by the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
p145
charges issued by the International Court On Crimes Against Humanity
Committed by the UN Security Council, Madrid, November 1996
* The United States and its officials
aided and abetted by others engaged in a continuing pattern of
conduct from August 6, 1990 / until this date to impose, maintain
and enforce extreme economic sanctions and a strict military blockade
on the people of Iraq for the purpose of injuring the entire population,
killing its weakest members, infants, children, the elderly and
the chronically ill, by depriving them of medicines, drinking
water, food, and other essentials in order to maintain a large
US military presence in the region, and dominion and control over
its people and resources including oil.
* The United States, its President Bill
Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its [former]
Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed a
crime against humanity as defined in the Nuremberg Charter against
the population of Iraq.
* The United States, its President Bill
Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime
Minister John Major and other officials have committed genocide
as defined in the Convention against Genocide against the population
of Iraq including genocide by starvation and sickness through
use of sanctions.
p148
That the policy of genocide in Iraq was initiated and legitimized
through the United Nations is an instructive indication of the
extent to which the UN has become a tool of Western, and particularly
Anglo-American power.
p148
Erskine Childers, former adviser to the UN Secretary General,
describes in detail how the UN has become an instrument of Western
policy.
Whenever the [Western] powers are determined
to get a given vote through either the Security Council ... governments
are warned. If they do not 'behave' they will not get debt relief,
World Bank capital projects, easier IMF 'adjustment conditionalities'
or urgently needed hard currency IMF credit to pay oil bills.
Reduction or cut-off in bilateral aid is an additional threat...
In effect, the [Western] powers have taken to employing a form
of state terrorism at the UN - the threat being more death, malnutrition,
disease or no education among millions of already poor people...
The [UN Security] Council is now regarded as a captive [by most
of the UN membership], where the North secures decisions by economic
intimidation, abuses the peaceful-redress procedures inscribed
in the charter and authorizes a kind of vigilantism against countries
of the North's own choosing.
p243
Western policy has systematically engaged in state terrorism,
both indirectly by sponsoring regimes indulging in terrorism and
directly by conducting military operations that utilize terrorism.
p302
The 2003 war on Iraq ... was nothing less than a brazen colonial
enterprise, fundamentally opposed to elementary humanitarian principles,
and motivated by longstanding imperial values. Neither the flagrant
lies of American and British political leaders, nor the web of
distortions woven by a largely subservient mass media, can ultimately
gloss over the horrifying reality of what has been wrought in
a country that was once the cradle of civilization.
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