Please sign this OPEN LETTER TO UN
SECRETARY-GENERAL KOFI
ANNAN
Please sign this letter
and to pass it along to others to sign.
Should you agree to sign it, PLEASE indicate your name,
affiliation or occupation and/or location (city,
country). Then please return your signature to David
Peterson at: < davidpet@mindspring.com
>.
Signatures have already been received
from all over the world-- including Noam Chomsky, Howard
Zinn, Naseer Aruri, Francis Boyle, Norman Solomon,
fwd from Lane Pope to Jocelyn Braddell.
Dear Sirs and Madams:
Although the U.S. government openly plans a war against
Iraq, U.N. officials and representatives have neither
spoken out in opposition nor taken any actions that might
prevent the United States from embarking on this violent
course. The United Nations was created explicitly to
"save succeeding generations from the scourge of
war" (Preamble, U.N. Charter) and "to take
effective collective measures for the prevention and
removal of threats to the peace..." (Article 1, 1).
The U.N. Charter condemns unilateral attacks across
borders when not justified by self-defense, referring to
the need to fend off an ongoing or clearly imminent
attack. Otherwise, it is obligatory
to obtain Security Council sanction for any such military
action. When a country simply takes it upon itself to
displace a regime of which it disapproves by force of
arms, this is aggression, described by the U.S.
representative at the Nuremberg trials, Robert Jackson,
as "the supreme
international crime differing only from other war crimes
in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole." The recent U.S. assertion of a right to
engage in "pre-emptive" attacks on states,
including Iraq, does not obviate these considerations--it
is another expression of an intent to violate
international law.
Claims regarding Iraq's pursuit or actual possession of
"weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) cannot
justify a U.S attack, any more than an Iraqi attack on
the United States could be similarly justified based on
the U.S. cpossession of such weapons (and much greater
threat of their use). Existing resolutions that address
this issue, such as U.N. Security Council Resolution 687,
do not give the United States the right to launch a
strike without specific authorization from the Security
Council. The idea that the United States is threatened by
Iraq's alleged possession of WMD is untenable. There is
no evidence that Iraq possesses any long-range delivery
systems, or that
its leadership is so irrational as to be planning actions
that would unleash the full force of U.S. military power
on their country.
The United States also lacks clean hands on this issue,
as it and Britain facilitated Iraq's acquisition and use
of WMD in the 1980s--including the U.S. provision of high
quality germ seed for anthrax and other deadly
diseases--when Iraq was fighting a war against Iran and
served U.S. interests. The United States also compromised
the work of the U.N. Special Commission for weapons
inspections (Unscom), using it for espionage and
withdrawing it in advance of the U.S. bombing of Iraq in
December 1998. More recently, as it seeks to preserve its
rationale for going to war, the United States has
rebuffed offers from Iraq to negotiate on re-admitting
inspectors.
Under strong U.S. and British pressure the U.N. imposed
and has maintained sanctions on Iraq for the past dozen
years in the alleged interest of preventing Iraq's
acquisition of WMD. But the price of those sanctions has
been paid by millions of innocent civilians, not the
regime or its leaders. The embargo has made it difficult
for Iraq to recover from the 1991 Gulf War, undermining
its ability to rebuild sanitation and water treatment
systems targeted and destroyed by U.S. bombing. That
deliberate bombing violated Article 54 of the 1977
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Convention.
Although then-President George Bush stated in 1991 that
"we do not seek...to punish the Iraqi people for the
decisions and policies of their leaders...[and] we are
doing everything possible and with great success to
minimize collateral damage" (New York Times, Feb. 6,
1991), the necessarily devastating effects of such
bombing on civilians were understood at the time and in
fact intended by U.S. planners. The Washington Post
reported shortly after the war that "Planners now
say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable
facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign
assistance" (June 23, 1991). It is now known
that these included water treatment facilities, whose
absence was understood to "lead to increased
incidences, if not epidemics, of disease" (Defense
Intelligence Agency, "Iraq Water Treatment
Vulnerabilities," Jan. 21, 1991, quoted in Thomas
Nagy, "The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S.
Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply," The
Progressive, Sept. 2001). Wrecking these facilities and
preventing their repair or replacement would give greater
bargaining leverage by intensifying the adverse effects
of sanctions on civilian welfare.
As is pointed out in the report recently issued by over a
dozen church and human rights groups, "Iraq
Sanctions: Humanitarian Implications and Options for the
Future" (Aug. 6, 2002), "The 1977 Protocols to
the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war include a
prohibition of economic sieges against civilians as a
method of warfare." In their actions involving Iraq,
the United States, Britain, and the United Nations have
violated these laws of war in a historically
unprecedented manner. In an article in Foreign Affairs
("Sanctions of Mass Destruction," 78: 3
[May/June 1999]), John and Karl Mueller contend that
"economic sanctions may well have been a necessary
cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been
slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction
throughout history." The United Nations Children's
Fund has documented an increase in the under-five child
mortality rate in Iraq from 56 to 131 per thousand in the
sanction years 1990-1998, with an estimated child death
toll of several hundred thousand.
Having contributed to these mass deaths through economic
warfare, the United Nations now remains silent in the
face of an openly planned war of aggression against Iraq.
The war will be bloody and will have much wider,
potentially disastrous, repercussions. If the
Secretary-General and members of the United Nations do
not speak out, oppose, and attempt to stop what would be
flagrant aggression, will it not be clear that the United
Nations is not an institution serving to prevent war but
rather a political instrument of the United States and
selected allies?
We urge the UN Secretary-General and U.N. members to act
now or stand condemned as accomplices of aggression, in
defiance of both the clear language of the U.N. Charter
and the desires of the vast majority of the world's
people.
(signed)
Lane Pope10686 SW 79 Ter Miami FL 33173 USA
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