Well, on Thursday, April 6, 2000, Eric Yandell interviewd Patrick
Clawson,  Director for Research  at The Washington Institute for Near
East Policy (an offshoot of the Pro-Israel Lobby AIPAC).

In the interview Clawson said "And I must say that I think that Jamie
Rubin  has been outrageous oftentimes in his characterization of those
who are opposed to sanctions, in sort of presupposing that they are
just a bunch of dolts and dummies and don't really know the facts."
(Rubin is the State Dept. Assistant to Halfbright. He is the same Bozo
who, when asked about the allegation that US officials had infiltrated
into Northern Iraq to advise and plan with the Iraqi oppostion to
overthrow the Iraqi govt., Rubin said "Yes, we do enter Iraqi
territory and liase with the opposition occasionally, but  the  US
does respect Iraqi's sovereignty and International law "!!!)

Here is the full interview

Eric Yandell:   My name is Eric Yandell, and I have been working
within the anti-sanctions movement for the last couple of years.  For
example, I participated in the fast in Washington D.C., I don't know
if you heard about that.

Patrick Clawson:  Yes.

E:  And would you like to introduce yourself, please?

P:  Sure.  My name is Patrick Clawson.  I am the Director for
Research here at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  I
first did work on Iraq back in the early 1980's when I was at the
International Monetary Fund and the Desk Officer for Iraq.  I've
never had the pleasure of visiting the country.  Much of my own
professional work has been about Middle East economies.  I'm most
interested in Iran, but I follow the Persian Gulf region as a whole
and have written several articles and books about the sanctions on
Iraq, primarily looking at their political impact rather than their
humanitarian impact.  

E:  I wanted to start by talking about your February 27 (2000)
article that appeared in the (Washington) Post called "A Look at . .
. Sanctioning Iraq;  The Numbers Don't Lie.  Saddam Does."  And I
just wanted to mention a few points that you mention.  You say "The
county's human rights record is one of the bleakest anywhere since
the end of World War II"  and you make reference to a report by Max
van der Stoel who is the UN human rights special investigator for
Iraq.  I thoroughly agree with this point.  The people who I have
talked to who have been to Iraq, I haven't been to Iraq myself, but
they say that there is an aura of fear there.  I wanted to see if you
could elaborate on this.

P:  Well I think that Kanan Makiya's book The Republic of Fear
captures some of the sense of how Iraq operates today and many people
who have worked in the Middle East I think can give you stories about
how Iraq has long been a place with a very difficult political
environment from a human rights perspective.  Elie Kedourie wrote
rather eloquently about how there was a lot of rather thuggish
politics in Iraq during the time of the Ottoman Empire and it was the
place from which some of the most despicable politicians of the
Ottoman Empire came.  And in the modern period we take a look at
episodes like what happened with the 1958 revolution where the entire
royal family is slaughtered.  It has been a place with very vicious
politics and the Ba'ath party has made things much worse and Saddam
in particular has.  We take a look at not just his infamous treatment
of the Kurdish minority, for which the United States wants to
prosecute him for genocide, but also if we take a look at some of the
reports from Amnesty International . . . I think there was a very
nice report that they came out with just before the Iran-Iraq war
started in 1980 and then another one shortly after the war ended in
1988.  We are talking about a country where well into the 1980's I
know that people who visited the country who entered with typewriters
had the serial numbers of the typewriters entered into their
passport.  And I can recall in 1988-1989 after the end of the Iran-
Iraq war when there was some hope of liberalization in Iraq, it was
regarded as a sign of considerable progress that the Iraqi government
agreed to allow people to import photocopy machines with just a
general license from the secret police rather than having to have a
special license for each individual photocopying machine that they
imported.  So it has been a very closed society for a long time and
indeed I think that is one of the principle problems we face in
knowing more about the humanitarian situation is that it is such a
closed society.  And it would seem to me that there is a real
potential for the US government reaching out to the humanitarian
community and making a common cause in favor of opening the country
up.  And I'm quite critical of the United States government for its
discouragement of humanitarian trips to the country.  I would take
the exact opposite attitude which would say that the more people that
go there the better. In other words, the kind of approach that we
have taken with North Korea, which is, anything we can do to open
this place up serves the interests of the humanitarian community, it
serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and it serves the interests
of US government policy.  Oh, by the way I worked for a while for the
United States government.  I got sidetracked.  I worked from 1993 to
1997 at the National Defense University.

E:  I think that oftentimes the anti-sanctions movement people like
me and my colleagues have been criticized by a lot of people and I
think rightly so for overlooking the problem of Saddam Hussein and
his human rights abuses and you know, people like us go and make a
big stink about the sanctions and the humanitarian concerns.  And it
is true that Saddam is a problem.  I think that the solution that has
been suggested by people like Jim Phillips from the Heritage
Foundation  was that, as you know, they pushed for the Iraq
Liberation Act which was passed overwhelmingly in Congress to try to
get an overthrow of the government and to try to get Saddam out of
power

P:  Right

E:  And once that happens then you can end the sanctions because if
you have a more peaceful leasership and government then you can end
the sanctions.  I guess my question is two fold.  Do you think this
anti-sanctions movement has been short-sighted in not addressing this
issue?  

P:  I would say that I would fault the anti-sanctions movement for
not reaching out to people like the Iraq Foundation
(www.iraqfoundation.org) that (Ms.) Rend (Rahim) Francke is the
Executive Director of or for that matter even with things like this
new Iraq Liberation Action Committee that has been set up because I
would think that . . . An awful lot of people in the Iraqi
opposition, the ones who are violently opposed to Saddam Hussein in
some cases taken up arms against him.  Many of them are highly
conflicted about the sanctions and would be quite interested it seems
to me in working with the sanctions movement about what can be done
to address the humanitarian suffering of the Iraqi people so long as
Saddam remains in power.  And offering suggestions about ways in
which a movement to address those humanitarian sufferings that could
be done in a context that is not supportive of the regime.   And this
is a problem the United States has confronted in many places.  I was
talking yesterday with Congressman Tony Hall who is about to go to
Baghdad next week and Congressman Hall has been very active in the
effort to bring in humanitarian supplies into North Korea and
goodness knows that the government of North Korea has made every
effort to take advantage of this aid to support its regime, to take
advantage of the foreign visitors to prop up their propaganda
efforts, so there is a certain experience that we have in other
places and I would say that it is important to draw upon lessons out
of that experience of how to avoid those pitfalls and one of the
elements that is needed is to reach out to the opposition and talk to
them about what can we do there to help.

E:  I had a debate with one of my family members who has been long
time pro-sanctions I think for a lot of the same reasons you mention
in your article and the writings you have had.  And we had been
talking and debating for a long time and we came up with an idea  . .
.   I just wanted to run it by you and see what you thought.

P:  Please

E: First of all, I should explain that I consider myself a pacifist
in the Gandhian tradition.  My idea is to support a Radio Free Iraq,
but a Nonviolent Radio Free Iraq wherein information could be
broadcast to the Iraqi people telling them how to rise up and
nonviolently overthrow Saddam's regime in the tradition of say the
"people power" movement in the Philippines that overthrew Marcos or
something like that.  And also since we already have control over the
airspace over much of Iraq we could drop leaflets and other
information on how to organize nonviolently to overthrow him.

When  Israel promised that the Holocaust would "never again" happen, I
mistakenly thought they meant they would not let it happen to anyone,
not just Jews. Which helps explain why there has been no protest
against AIPAC, the Zionist Lobby in the US which has been very active
in making sure the sanctions on Iraq are prologed indefinitely,
despite the fact they are aware of the large number of people dying
there.

"When I visited Auschwitz I was horrified. And when I visited Iraq,
I thought to myself, 'What will we tell the children in fifty years
when they ask what we did when the people in Iraq were dying?'"
-Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

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On 01 Jul 2000 11:25:54 GMT, il...@aol.com (Ilayg) wrote:

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<snip>

On 02 Jul 2000 03:03:39 GMT, il...@aol.com (Ilayg) wrote:

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Then do to him what Roman did to nero and Iraqy problems will go away.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Ilayg,
In the United States, a person accused of "depraved
indifference" to human life that results in the death of another
individual can be found guilty of homicide.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Ilayg,
In the United States, a person accused of "depraved
indifference" to human life that results in the death of another
individual can be found guilty of homicide.

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