MER - Washington - 12 Nov: Ramsey Clark was Attorney General of the United States in
the Johnson Administration, and his father was a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. After
resigning in protest over the Vietnam War Clark reassessed both his country and his own
responsiblities and has became one of the most uniquely committed and eloquently Americans
on matters of human rights and international affairs. The role of the U.N. regarding Iraq
is complicated and tragic. Suffice it to say, quoting a senior U.N official who obviously
prefers to remain anonymous, "sadly the U.N. has become an appendage of [the U.S]
State Department on too many things." This letter was written to this month's
President of the U.N. Security Council yesterday by Ramsey Clark:

President Clinton has chosen the anniversary of the armistice ending World War I to
further threaten Iraq with another violent assault. He charges that failure to act
"would permanently damage the credibility of the U.N. Security Council to act as a
force for promoting international peace." It is a phrase reminiscent of Plato's
unnamed Athenian Stranger who favored "seeking peace by making war." He taunts
the U.N. to act, asserting "Failure to respond [will] embolden Saddam to act
recklessly." It is a threat by a weakened President thinking only of his personal
political standing. U.S. contempt for U.N. authority is shown by its defiance of the
recent General Assembly vote of 157 nations versus 2 nations protesting the U.S. criminal
blockade of Cuba, its refusal to pay dues to the U.N. year after year and its selective
defiance, and support for violations by other nations of General Assembly, Security
Council and International Court of Justice resolutions and decisions.

The Security Council should immediately admonish the U.S. that it must not again attack
Iraq. The Security Council is already responsible for military attacks on Iraq, albeit at
the insistence of the U.S., including 110,000 aerial sorties unleashing 88,500 tons of
bombs across Iraq by U.S. aircraft in January and February 1991 which destroyed 80% of
Iraq's military capacity according to the Pentagon. Iraq has been further decimated by the
most severe Security Council sanctions in history since August 6 (Hiroshima Day) 1990.
More than a million and a half people have died in Iraq as a direct result of sanctions in
history since August 6 (Hiroshima Day) 1990. More than a million and a half people have
died in Iraq as a direct result of those sanctions, as U.N. agencies have reported. The
great majority of the victims were infants, children, elderly and chronically ill persons.
This is unquestionably a violation of the Genocide Convention.*

U.N. inspection teams over a period of seven years claim to have destroyed 90% of the
remaining Iraqi missile capacity and designated military material. Iraq is not capable of
a serious threat against anyone.

The notion that Iraq is a threat to the region is a false fantasy created by the U.S.
to justify its vast military presence in the region, to dominate the oil resources and to
contain Islam. Iraq is no threat to its neighbors as every Security Council member knows.
It is barely able to survive. Turkey regularly attacks the Kurdish people and others
living on northern Iraqi soil at will with U.S. support and U.N. acquiescence. There are
many nations on earth that pose far greater threats of minor violence and to world peace
than Iraq. As the recently published "Israel and the Bomb", Columbia University
Press, again demonstrates, Israel developed and has manufactured some hundreds of nuclear
bombs in violation of Security Council resolutions and international law.

Random assaults on Iraq at the whim of the United States since 1991 include scores of
Tomahawk cruise missile and rocket assaults. The U.S. has used the cradle of civilization
as a shooting gallery, striking such dangerous targets as the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad,
killing two employees, the home of Layla al Attar, the famous artist and museum director,
killing her and others, and a United Nations helicopter killing all its occupants.

A new U.S. strike will target vital support systems for the population of Iraq, just as
its 1991 assault targeted the infrastructure; water supply, electric power,
transportation, communications, food storage, processing and distribution, fertilizer and
insecticide manufacture. It is a crueler form of corporal punishment imposed on the entire
population than public lashings and executions favored by former colonial powers.

The destruction of the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan on August 20,
1998 illustrates the U.S. strategy. The plant produced 50% of the pharmaceutical available
in the Sudan. The cost of EL Shifa products was 20% of the international market prices. It
produced 90% of the antibiotics used for malaria which is the leading cause of death
there. Major international pharmaceutical companies do not produce drugs for malaria, or
engage in research to address the spread of new virulent types of malaria which are
reaching epidemic levels in part of Africa and Asia. A single U.S. missile attack
destroyed the single most important health facility in the Sudan and will cause thousands
of deaths. Everyone in the Sudan, including the entire diplomatic corps, knew of the El
Shifa plant and its importance to the health of the people.

U.N. inspections in Iraq over a period of seven years have been manipulated by unproven
U.S. claims time and time again. Strategically placed agents of the U.S. and British
intelligence agencies in U.N. inspectors' positions have had the single purpose of
continuing the sanctions by making false claims that Iraq is developing nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons with missiles and can complete the task in weeks, or months without
inspection.

The United States spends more on arms annually, $275 billion presently, than the rest
of the Security Council combined. U.S. arms expenditures are approximately 25 times the
gross national product of Iraq. The U.S. has in its stockpiles more nuclear bombs,
chemical and biological weapons, more aircraft, rockets and delivery systems in number and
sophistication than the rest of the world combined. Included are twenty commissioned
Trident II nuclear submarines any one of which could destroy Europe. It is the U.S. that
ought to be inspected. The U.S. is today, far more than when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
observed it in 1967, "the greatest purveyor of violence on earth."

It is imperative to world peace, the survival of the U.N. as an organization of
independent nations and to simple justice that the Security Council immediately inform the
U.S. that it must not again attack Iraq, or any other country.

Sincerely,

Ramsey Clark

* Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or
in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. (b) Causing serious
bodily, or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on a group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Art. II, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.