The Gulf Crisis and New World Order — Page 367
The Gulf Crisis & The New World Order terms for suspected collaborators. " Mass graves have been unearthed. And Kuwaitis have launched a "reign ofterror" against those terrible fall guys, the Palestinians. Amnesty International - our era's Little Peterkin - reports torture of Palestinians using whips, knives, electric shocks, sexual assaults and - get this one - sulphuric acid. You may recall an especially nauseating moment last January when an outraged George Bush cited Amnesty's description oflraqi cruelty in Kuwait as justification enough for war to be launched against Saddam Hussein. Think his flacks have yet mentioned to the President that Amnesty's latest annual report, just published, includes a bitter attack o n that kind of hypocrisy? Amnesty had been documenting Saddam's "gross and widespread human rights abuses" in Iraq for years without eliciting any particular concern; small wonder, since the world was getting filthy rich supplying him with arms. Suddenly, with Saddam's entry into Kuwait, Amnesty's phone started ringing; suddenly, certain issues Amnesty had been raising in vain for years had become sexy. But only certain issues, naturally. At the very same moment, the new report bitingly notes, "lengthy AI (Amnesty International) reports on grave human rights violations in countries such as Chad, Egypt, El Salvador, Iran, India, Mauritania, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Turkey were fortunate to be given reasonable space in the media, let alone be taken up at a high level by governments. W hat a list. Half these countries are tried and true allies of the United states and the West. And I'm sure George Bush, crusader for human rights that he is, finds compelling reading in Amnesty's accounts of the state of h uman rights in the countries that fought shoulder to s houlder with the G-7 armies against Saddam. Check the entries for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey. Yes, as Richard Nixon said at the time, the war was "a highly moral enterprise". It's true, alas, that the Washington Post revealed last month how the Americans deliberately lied to the world about their real targets during the war. Publicly, they never stopped insisting that Iraq's military capabilities were the coalition's sole targets. Sorry, folks; it was a lie. In fact the premeditated goal, as the Post shows, was to "disable Iraqi society at large. " 367