The Irony of some news in Grand Rapids

This morning while looking at the headlines on MLive.com I was delighted to see a reasonably good article on Hamzah Al Daeni, the Iraqi boy who came to Grand Rapids to get a prosthetic leg.

Hamzah lost his right leg in 2008 when a US missile exploded just outside his home, killing several relatives and neighbors. The local group Healing Children of Conflict (HCC) raised funds to bring Hamzah and his father here so that he could get the medical treatment necessary, treatment that is not available in Iraq.

The Press article on Hamzah came out of a send-off event last night where volunteers and supporters of HCC came together to say goodbye to Hamzah and his father Imad who returned to Iraq today.

Just a few headlines away from the story about Hamzah was an article about an event hosted the Economics Club of Grand Rapids, which featured both Colin Powell and Madeline Albright. The irony, to anyone who has even the slightest sense of history, was that some of the very people who caused so much devastation and suffering in Iraq were in Grand Rapids at the same time as Hamzah and his father.

Lets talk about Colin Powell first. Powell was part of Ronald Reagan’s national security team in the 1980s at a time that the US was funding Iraq in its war against Iran. This policy of supporting Saddam Hussein was not so much because the US wanted to defend Iraq, rather the policy was designed to weaken Iran. In addition, having Iraq expend so much of their own financial and human resources during those 8 years of war also left that country less stable.

Then in 1990, the US claimed that Iraq was violating international law by invading Kuwait in what Iraq was claiming was a dispute over national boundaries. The US not only condemned Iraq’s actions they quickly mobilized hundreds of thousands of US troops in Saudi Arabia in preparation for an invasion.

Using a fabricated story, which claimed that Iraqi soldiers were taking Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators, the Bush administration was able to convince Congress to support a 1991 US attack on Iraq.

For six weeks the US bombed Iraq into submission. Colin Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 war/occupation of Iraq. The US bombing campaign in Iraq was one of the most devastating in history and declassified documents showed that much of Iraq’s social infrastructure was targeted. Once the bombing campaign was over the US, through the United Nations, imposed the most severe sanctions campaign ever seen in history.

During the more than a decade of sanctions Iraq could not import thousands of items, many of them medical, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. UNICEF reported in 1999 that half a million Iraqi children had died because of the US/UN sanctions. The sanctions were so devastating on Iraq that former United Nations envoy Dennis Halliday referred to the sanctions as “genocidal.”

This fact was not hidden at the time and even US Secretary of State Madeline Albright at the time acknowledged what had happened to Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions. Albright was the guest of a 60 minutes show where she was asked if the death of half-a million Iraqi children was worth it. Her response was, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

In 2002, the Bush administration began to fabricate the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Colin Powell went to the United Nations in February of 2003 to present “proof” of the WMD claim, a presentation, which had tremendous influence on public opinion. Powell’s presentation has been hotly contested as a fabrication and in 2005 Powell himself even admitted that the information provided to him was not accurate.

The 2003 US bombing campaign and the ongoing US occupation of Iraq have caused irreparable harm to Iraq and some estimates put civilian deaths near 1.5 million. Hundreds of thousands of other Iraqi civilians have been wounded and more than a million have become refugees.

To put this into perspective, Iraq has been suffering from war & sanctions since 1980. Their public infrastructure has been devastated to the degree that basic services are not being met. The irony of the MLive coverage today is that there is no acknowledgement of the fact that the Iraqi boy who came to Grand Rapids to get a prosthetic leg could not get that treatment in Iraq because of the violent US policy over the past 30 years and that two of the architects of this policy (Powell & Albright) were in Grand Rapids at the same time.