From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Sep 30 2002 - 06:36:05 MDT
On Sat, 28 Sep 2002 Ron, commenting on my comments, wrote:
> I believe if you will check ot the facts the U. N. didn't cause those
> deaths anymore than the U. S. did. As I recall the situation after the Gulf
> war provision was carefully made so Sadaam would have the money he needed for
> humanitarian purposes. Later it came out that he preferred to spend the
> money for weapons both conventional and WMD than to buy food and medicines
> for his country's children, elderly or otherwise incapacitated.
[snip]
I suppose we would need to go research this in some detail to really
be able to assign blame. One could cite either the U.S. or the U.N.
as the "source" of the deaths by insisting on sanctions. But given
Sadaam's history over the last 20 years, it seems reasonable for
either us or the U.N. to insist that he be disarmed and impose
sanctions to keep him from rearming. (There are lots of historic
precedents for this with respect to how the winners deal with the
losers in a war.)
Now, I *thought* that the U.N. had setup a system whereby any revenue
from oil sales could only be used to pay for humanitarian supplies but
perhaps I'm wrong about that or perhaps Sadaam figured out a way
around it. I supposed Sadaam could always collect the humanitarian
supplies and resell them to get cash to use for weapons purchases.
I also thought there was a U.N. embargo against selling weapons to
Iraq but perhaps that is leaky as well.
For sure we would need to do some digging to understand exactly
what has gone on over the last decade. For example, I ran across
a small fact the other day that the U.S. and Britain have conducted
~50 bombing runs so far over Iraq this year. You don't hear much
about that in the papers. You also don't hear much about whether
or not Kuwait was horizontal drilling into Iraqi oil fields and
that is what got Sadaam annoyed enough to invade Kuwait in the
first place.
Robert
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