Struggle for the truth

The prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, once said that the best struggle (jihad) is to speak the truth in the face of unjust authority.

Iraq wasn't always such a bad country. It once had free health care, and tuition from kindergarten through the Ph.D. level was $0. The United States didn't seem to have a problem with Iraq or its leader, Saddam Hussein. In the '80s, when Iraq instigated a war with Iran, the United States responded by selling it mass amounts of high weapons and technology at bargain prices. We even financed the sale of industrial technology for making chemical weapons that Hussein proceeded to use on dissident sectors of Iraqi society, as well as on Iran.

So what prompted us to bomb Iraq "into the Stone Age" during the Persian Gulf War? Human-rights violations? Unlawful invasion of another country? Procuring weapons of mass destruction? Just 10 years prior to the Gulf War, we helped Hussein do all three and patted him on the head for it. A contemporary CIA official said of him, "He's a son of a bitch, but he's OUR son of a bitch."

We were shown very little in this country of the schools, milk factories and mosques the United States bombed in the Gulf War. The reality is that we successfully gutted the entire civilian infrastructure (clean water, sewage treatment, roads, bridges, etc.) and killed about a million people in the process, while leaving the military control structure of Saddam's state intact. In fact, by weakening the Iraqi people, we tightened his control on them. We even used shells made of depleted uranium that polluted the countryside with radioactivity.

Then economic sanctions were imposed. Now all water, power, gas, sewer and other utilities are unavailable to the poor. People with university degrees have sold their books, furniture and houses to feed their families. What is worse, medicine is not being allowed into the country. When some does get in, it doesn't come on a regular schedule, as is needed to cure many diseases, because U.S. representatives on the U.N. committee that oversees the sanctions constantly delay or reject shipments.

As a result of sanctions, Iraq was not allowed to clean up battle sites, which has resulted in desert sandstorms shifting radioactive sand contaminated with depleted uranium all over the country. Mutagenesis rates among newborn babies in Iraq is up 50-fold from prewar times. Because of sanctions, neither the babies nor other people falling to cancer at alarmingly high rates can be treated, as medicine is not being let in. The result: more than 500,000 children dead as a result of sanctions alone (not including the constant bombing or war).

The architect of much of our barbaric policy toward Iraq, which has met with much outrage all over the world, is former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. Last year, she addressed the graduating class at UC-Berkeley and was greeted by vocal student protest. When asked on national TV by 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl if the death of more than 500,000 Iraqi children (that is, genocide) was a price worth paying, given the ineffective nature of sanctions, Albright responded that she thought the price was worth it.

UW President Richard McCormick and the Board of Regents apparently agree, and saw fit to invite this war criminal to campus to speak at this year's commencement ceremony on June 15, and to receive an honorary UW doctor of law degree.

The students at UC-Berkley had the courage to tell Madeline Albright that 500,000 million dead children are not worth any price. By all that is human within me, I encourage the UW community to tell her, the UW administration and the world on graduation day that killing a child is never worth it.