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Article from SchNEWS BOMBING PEACE TAKE "Our intention is to make sure that the
world is as peaceful as possible"
"Turn your cameras to this boy and tell
me if it is a military target"
You couldn't make it up. Just three days after the U.S and Britain bombed Baghdad, the new Terrorism Act became law. So while in theory pulling up genetic crops or disarming nuclear weapons could now get you put in the slammer as a terrorist, breaking international law and bombing a capital city will only get you grunts of disapproval from the international community. Not that the bombing of Iraq is new - it just usually isn't news. This forgotten war has been going on since 1991 and is costing the taxpayer £4 ½ million a month. It's costing the Iraqi people a lot more - since bombing resumed in 1998, 317 have been killed and 936 wounded because of the air raids in a war, which was first justified on humanitarian grounds - to protect Kurds in the north and Shia's in the southern marshes. Then the bombing was justified to stop Saddam Hussein getting weapons of mass destruction. Now SchNEWS isn't some apologist for the Iraqi regime, but can someone tell us what has changed after 10 years of constant bombing and economic sanctions apart from the deaths of one million people, over half of them children under age of 5. And what would happen if, say, Sweden started bombing the Faslane naval base where Britain's weapons of mass destruction are kept? And should we start bombing Israel now they've elected a president who's a war criminal who invaded Lebanon and commited genocide in Palestinian refugee camps and is single handedly responsible for the current intifada? A War is Born
The UK's Foreign secretary Robin Cook this
week justified the bombing by quoting the occasion when chemical weapons
were used against the Kurds in Halabja, killing 5,000 men, women and children.
What Cookie Monster forgot to say was that it was Western corporations
who sold Iraq the weapons and chemicals in the first place. And the frontline
cheerleader for America's corporate contributors to Saddam, the man who
paved the way for Iraq to purchase millions of dollars worth of weapons
and dangerous dual-use technology from U.S corporations, was none other
than the co-architect of Gulf War I, former president George Bush. Still,
that's business for yer, and woe betide any British citizens who take direct
action to stop such companies making a fast buck out of misery. You'll
only get yourself hauled up in front of a magistrate and labelled a terrorist.
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