Targeting Arab Children: The Slaughter of Iraqi Children

A few years ago there was a case in New York that was so appalling that it captured the attention of the entire country. It involved a New York lawyer named Joel Steinberg, his battered live-in girlfriend, and a child, a little girl named Lisa. Tiny, skinny, God she was skinny, with a tiny trusting face. Even though Joel Steinberg had kept her locked in a dungeon-like room and starved and abused her to death, she had that trusting look on her face even as she lay like a dead elf in a coffin.

I am almost a pacifist, but I and everyone I knew felt that Joel Steinberg deserved to be put to the most unpleasant imaginable death. If there is any truly unforgivable act, it is the torture and killing of children. If someone did to your child what Joel Steinberg did to little Lisa …?

In September 1990, our government reported that Iraqi soldiers were ripping babies out of incubators and smashing their heads against walls. That really got us riled. If there is any truly unforgivable act, it is the torture and killing of children. In early 1991, President Bush dropped more bombs on Iraq than had been dropped on three continents during all of World War II. Iraq is about the size of California. But how much sympathy can you have for people who bash babies’ heads against walls? I may be an Arab but that doesn’t mean that I approve of everything Arabs do.

To be truthful, sometimes I hate what Arabs do.

368 days after the Gulf War ended, TV Guide featured a cover story titled "Fake News.” The content of the story had appeared earlier on ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s 60 Minutes, and in a New York Times op-ed piece by John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine--but I have put special emphasis on the TV Guide article because it is the most widely read publication in America, The heart of the article was a long sidebar that described in detail how the baby bashing and other atrocities that President Bush had used to whip America into a war frenzy had never happened. Those atrocities had been orchestrated by the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton, headed by Craig Fuller, former chief of staff to George Bush. They were movies with actors, scripts and rehearsals that helped the President of the United States make a mockery of our democracy and attack the people of Iraq—a people who had never hurt us in any way. They loved us and admired us until our bombs killed 200,000 of them, destroyed 20,000 Iraqi homes, leveled schools and hospitals, poisoned their water and destroyed one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East.

Even after all that, President Bush wasn’t able to get rid of his old best friend, Saddam Hussein, so America continued to impose sanctions on Iraq, withholding luxuries like food and medicine. By the most conservative estimates, the sanctions America has imposed on Iraq kill some 5,000 Iraqi children every month. After ten years of our polite murder, some 750,000 Iraqi children under the age of five have died from malnutrition and disease because of our sanctions.

Face this truth: our politicians, in our name, are intentionally starving thousands of Iraqi children, intentionally depriving them of medicine...intentionally KILLING them in the hope that the dead children’s parents will become so crazy with grief that they will overthrow Saddam Hussein.

And, as if that wasn't bad enough, there was the death sentence: "The price is worth it."

"The price is worth it"

Edward S. Herman

Try to imagine how the mainstream U.S. media and intellectuals would respond to the disclosure that at an early planning meeting of the terrorists responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the question had come up about whether the "collateral damage" of prospectively thousands of dead civilians wouldn't be excessive, but that the matter had been settled with the top leader's response: "we think the price is worth it"?

(we pick up Edward Herman's article several paragraphs later)

Turning now to the actual use of the phrase "the price is worth it," we come to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's reply to Lesley Stahl's question on "60 Minutes" on May 12, 1996:

Stahl: "We have heard that a half a million children have died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And--you know, is the price worth it?"

Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."

I was curious about something. I phoned the Holocaust Museum. Oddly enough -- horribly enough -- the number of children killed by U. S. sanctions against Iraq as of 1996 when the interview took place matched almost exactly the best estimates of the number of Jewish children under the age of five killed during the Holocaust. That was the case in 1996. Now, seven years later, the number of Iraqi children killed by America's sanctions is double. Think about that: Our sanctions against Iraq have killed twice as many children as the Nazis killed in the Holocaust.

Can't you just hear one of Hitler's goons saying, "We think the price is worth it"?

One of the most horrifying aspects of Madeleine Albright's casual dismissal of the deaths of Iraqi children is the fact that Madeleine Albright is Jewish. If some American Arab politician said that the killing of half a million Jewish children "was worth it," how do you imagine Americans would react to that? How do you think that American Jews would react to that?

Now do you get some idea how American Arabs feel when a nice Jewish lady casually dismisses the death of half a million Arab children as being "worth it"?

And now, do you have some idea of why people all over the world hate America. Don't kid yourself. It's not just Arabs; it's not just Muslims; it's people everywhere. Everywhere we go, whether it is dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or starving to death nearly a million Iraqi children, we tell people by our actions that America has no respect for human life.

We have so little respect for human life that we starve children to death.

Dear Ms. Albright: Lo chaim, bitch.

Don't pretend to be offended by my language. No word in the world is as obscene as the murder of one ... million ... children.

PS: Dear fellow Americans -- this is a democracy, so everything they do, they do in our name.

"Why do they hate us," we whine in fake innocence.

"WHY?" we whine as we prepare to start yet another war with Iraq to prove to the world that we haven't learned a fucking thing.

I'm not sure if there'll be more of this chapter. This one wore me out.

Ron D

(Do yourself a favor and look up this and other articles by Edward Herman at the web site of Z Magazine.) Edward Herman is not only Chomsky's frequent collaborator, Herman is a great-souled truth teller in his own right.