Anti-War

The lone voice of dissent

Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland, California was the lone voice of conscience when she had the courage to stand up firmly against the resolution to authorize U.S. military action to respond to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The following is a text of her dissent.

Rep. Barbara Lee: “Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and loved ones who were killed and injured in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Only the most foolish or the most callous would not understand the grief that has gripped the American people and millions across the world.

This unspeakable attack on the United States has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction. September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.

The Gulf War never ended

U.S. policy in Iraq, as reported in the mainstream news, amounts to “we liberated Kuwait” and Saddam “kills his own people.” Saddam Hussein has been so vilified that when we think of Iraq, we fail to think about the millions of Iraqis who unfortunately have no more control over the actions of their dictatorship government than we have over our “democracy.” The mainstream media plays almost exclusively to our fears of “weapons of mass destruction.” With rare exception, the suffering of the Iraqi people is largely an untold story in the U.S. The Gulf War and the sanctions imposed on Iraq for the last 10 years have caused the deaths of over 1.5 million people in a once thriving country of about 22.5 million people. Many people, including the former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq , Denis Halliday, call this genocide. The sanctions themselves have become the new weapon of mass destruction.

The struggle for U.S. hegemony over Iraqi oil resources has a long, sordid, history beginning with the CIA-backed assassination of Abdel Karim Kassem in 1963 leading to the eventual rise to power of Saddam Hussein. When Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972, the U.S.

McCaffrey's wars

No sane person believes in the "War on Drugs" anymore. This implies, of course, that our nation's affairs are being directed by madmen, but you knew that anyway. Besides, there are signs that sanity may be seeping slowly through the halls of Congress. Three times the Clinton-Gore administration has tried to push through a billion-plus aid package for the Colombian military and security forces. Twice Congress has rejected the White House request. Reports from the Hill this week suggest that there's more than an even chance the Senate may once again deliver a rebuff to White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey.

McCaffrey, recently accused by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker of having been involved in war crimes in 1991 at the end of the war in Iraq, has been the most conspicuous advocate for deepening U.S. military involvement in Colombia. In the general's comic-book scenario, the cocaine and opium that undermine America is being cultivated by Colombian peasants under the supervision of communist narco-traffickers, who use their drug profits to buy guns to undermine Colombia's government.

Genocide in Kosovo?

So, is there serious evidence of a Serbian campaign of genocide in Kosovo?

It's an important issue, since the NATO powers, fortified by a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished the charge of genocide as justification for bombing that destroyed much of Serbia's economy and killed around 2,000 civilians, with elevated death levels predicted for years to come.

Whatever horrors they may have been planning, the Serbs were not engaged in genocidal activities in Kosovo before the bombing began. They were fighting a separatist movement, led by the KLA, and behaving with the brutality typical of security forces, though to a degree infinitely more restrained than those backed by the United States in Central America. One common estimate of the number of Kosovar Albanians killed in the year before the bombing is 2,500.

With NATO's bombing came the flights and expulsions and charges that the Serbs were accelerating a genocidal plan; on some accounts, as many as 100,000 were already dead. An alternative assessment was that NATO's bombing was largely to blame for the expulsions and killings.

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