The Nation.

Iraqi Sideshow Continues

By Dilip Hiro

This article appeared in the June 7, 1999 edition of The Nation.

May 20, 1999

On May 12 the Iraqi News Agency reported the deaths of twelve people, including two children, and 200 head of livestock near the northern city of Mosul, caused by American bombs. In a statement issued by the European Command at southern Turkey's airport in Incirlik--where US and British warplanes are charged with the mission of excluding Iraqi aircraft from northern Iraq--it admitted only that one target hit had "a number of livestock in the area." It ignored the loss of human life.

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This was a fortnight after a peasant family of seven perished twenty-five miles north of Mosul in airstrikes by US/UK warplanes. Their misfortune was to be near an Iraqi air defense site in the countryside. How does the Pentagon view the continued death and injury to humans and animals? "We whack him [Saddam Hussein] day after day in response to his challenges, then he pulls back and sort of goes down for a period, and does nothing," said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. "Then he comes back up and presents a new series of challenges, sometimes slightly different tactics." Challenges to the world's sole superpower by a country barely able to survive economically? Paranoia, thy name is Pentagon.

About Dilip Hiro

Dilip Hiro is the author of Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of Israelis and Palestinians (Interlink), Between Marx and Muhammad: The Changing Face of Central Asia (HarperCollins), Neighbors, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran After the Gulf Wars (Routledge), War Without End: Rise of Islamist Terrorism and the Global Response (also Routledge), Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (Nation Books), Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and its Furies and, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources (all Nation Books). more...

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