Robert Fisk 4

Vlak voor en na het einde van de Golfoorlog vonden er twee grootscheepse oorlogsmisdaden plaats, het verpulveren en levend verbranden van het vluchtende Iraakse leger op de Highway of Death door Amerikaanse gevechtsvliegtuigen (zie: http://deoxy.org/wc/warcrime.htm) en het onder de ogen van de Amerikanen vermoorden van tienduizenden shiieten door de strijdkrachten van Saddam. De Amerikaanse hoogleraar antropologie Augustus Richard Norton schrijft in The Nation in een bespreking van Robert Fisk's nieuwe boek: 'In March 1991 Shiites in southern Iraq were being slaughtered en masse. President George H.W. Bush had called upon the Iraqis to topple Saddam Hussein after the US-led coalition defeated the Iraqi army in Kuwait. The Shiites heeded the call with vigor and savagery, as did their Kurdish countrymen in the north, but now the reconsolidated Baathist regime was striking back, killing tens of thousands. Using helicopter gunships that Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf rashly permitted them to operate under the terms of the previous month's cease-fire agreement, as well as ground forces, Saddam's forces pulverized the rebellion. Many of the mass graves that have been recently unearthed are from this period. While this was going on the Americans stood by and watched, often literally. One of the more disgraceful moral lapses in US history, this moment of "betrayal" fundamentally recast Shiite identity in Iraq. Advocates of the latest invasion--who were caught off-guard by the lukewarm reception Iraqi Shiites accorded their would-be liberators in 2003--seem to have slept through that part of the movie. US officials up and down the line did little to mitigate, much less end, the suffering of the Shiites, perhaps in deference to the wishes of their ally Saudi Arabia, for whom the prospect of a Shiite-dominated Iraq is no more inviting now than it was then. Only Iran offered substantial help, which would later yield dividends in credibility for Tehran and for groups it supported, as the elections in Iraq have revealed. There was at least one American hero in 1991, Staff Sergeant Nolde of the First Armored Division. Robert Fisk, who never learned Nolde's first name, met him at a crossroad in Safwan, the southern Iraqi border town where Nolde's platoon sat while refugees desperately tried to flee to Kuwait. Ordered by a US official to turn them back to the killing fields in southern Iraq, where they were almost certain to die, Nolde responded: "I'm sorry, sir. But if you're going to give me an order to stop these people, I can't do that. They are coming here begging, old women crying, sick children, boys begging for food. We're already giving them most of our rations. But I have to tell you, sir, that if you give me an order to stop them, I just won't do that." You could see the embassy man wince. Alas, US foreign policy is not set by the likes of Nolde, which helps to explain why the United States is widely derided and unloved, not just in the Middle East. This makes it all the more important to come to grips with the double standards and hypocrisies that have come to connote American foreign policy to many people around the globe.' Lees verder: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060206/norton