March 1,1998-- How sad to see a once-promising public figure degenerate.  John Kerry, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, first got public notice as an antiwar Vietnam veteran.  As a former Navy officer who had led patrols in the Mekong Delta,  he offered a telling voice against that genocidal war.  With his flair for publicity, he was able to go from protest to politics, ending up as a senator.

Kerry has done a number of questionable things during his years in the Senate, but has always retained a certain amount of nostalgic support in the left.  Now, however, he has gone too far.  Kerry's statements on the present Iraq crisis have put him out in front of the right wing crowd crying to unleash the dogs of war on the innocent civilians of Iraq.

On February 23, while the world breathed a sigh of relief that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had pulled the U.S. and Iraq back from the brink of war, Clinton administration officials--no doubt feeling the pressure from the antiwar protests--said  that they would "withhold judgment" until they saw the details of what Annan had negotiated.  Senator Kerry felt not such qualms.  He went on ABC to denounce the settlement, unread, as " a disconnect between the depth of the threat that Saddam Hussein presents to the world and what we are at the moment talking about doing" (New York Times, February 23, 1998).

Kerry's warmongering goes way beyond demanding that Iraq conform to the agreement it made to end the Gulf War.  In a press statement available on his website, he declares that
 

This is the first issue of proliferation in the post Cold War period. It is imperative for us as a nation to stand our ground and for the Western world to make it clear that we cannot allow by any nation to possess and use those kinds of weapons ["weapons of mass destruction" ( "Kerry Speaks on Situation in Iraq,"  press release,February 23, 1998 --emphasis added).

It gets worse. Kerry has joined two Republican senators, Arlen Spector (Penn.) and John McCain (Ariz.) are actually calling for the CIA to launch an illegal covert action campaign--described by an unnnamed government official who spoke to the New York Times as "a major campaign of sabotage," including the bombing of power plants--against the government of Iraq  (New York Times, February 26, 1998), with the avowed goal of making life in Iraq so hard that people would overthrow President Saddam Hussein.
 

There is a legitimate policy disagreement here.  I don't much like Saddam Hussein, but I do not share the view that his removal as president of Iraq would be some kind of panacea.  His presidency was produced by the conjuncture of international and domestic social conditions, deriving in good part from the desire of the major oil companies to control the resources of the Middle East against the interests of that region's people.  Unless the conditions are changed, removing Saddam Hussein would just open the way for another similar leader.

Here are some other resources regarding Iraq and the Middle East:

 The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

 Center for Defense Information Online

 Middle East Policy Council Main Page

 MERIP - Middle East Research and Information Project

You can find links to organizations organizing against war and sanctions on my  antiwar page.

Books useful for understanding the current crisis:
 

Greg Bates, ed., Mobilizing Democracy : Changing the U.S. Role in the Middle East (1991)

Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck, eds, Beyond the Storm : A Gulf Crisis Reader (1997)

Fran Hazelton, ed., Iraq Since the Gulf War : Prospects for Democracy (1994)

Noam Chomsky,  Fateful Triangle : The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1984)

Joost R. Hiltermann, ed.,   Bureaucracy of Repression : The Iraqi Government in Its Own Words (1994)

Michael R.Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor,  The General's War : The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (1996)
 

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