Try explaining to an Iraqi mother why her 
          child is dead 

             An Iraqi mother has a question for us Americans: 
             "Why are you killing my innocent child?" 

             Well, what's your answer? Why are we 
             killing her innocent child and the innocent 
             children of thousands of Iraqi families? 
             Why are we destroying Iraq? 

             Before we came, Iraq had one of the 
             highest living standards in the Arab world, 
             with an extensive health-care system, clean 
             and abundant drinking water, 
             sewage-treatment plants, electric 
             power-generation plants, free education 
             for all, a network of social services and a 
             thriving intellectual and cultural life. 
             Today the country is in ruins. We have 
             wreaked more death and desolation than 
             the Mongol invaders. 

             Why? Is it because our politicians say 
             Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, is a bad 
             person? But how could the 500,000 Iraqi 
             children we've already killed have 
             overthrown him? 

             George Bush and the U.S. Army failed to 
             overthrow him. Two separate rebellions 
             instigated by the Central Intelligence 
             Agency failed to overthrow him. 
             Innumerable assassination attempts have 
             not so much as put a scratch on him. So 
             why do we expect that killing 4,500 Iraqi 
             children per month is going to overthrow 
             him? 

             By the bye, those numbers of dead children 
             are United Nations numbers, not Iraqi. All 
             you liberals so in love with world 
             government must surely believe the United 
             Nations. The question posed by the Iraqi 
             mother was posed to a Canadian member 
             of parliament, Svend Robinson, who wrote 
             an article about his second trip to Iraq that 
             was published by the Globe and Mail. 
             This mother had just been told by an Iraqi 
             doctor that her sick baby was doomed. 
             They had no medicine. 

             Robinson points out the absurd and 
             hypocritical restrictions the United Nations 
             committee places on the money Iraq is 
             allowed to earn from selling limited 
             amounts of oil. These restrictions have 
             prevented Iraq from buying the medicines 
             and other basics it needs. Iraq was told, 
             for example, it could not import cloth, 
             which it wanted to do to provide jobs for 
             unemployed seamstresses sewing sheets 
             for hospital beds. Oh, no, the cloth might 
             be put to military use. Children have no 
             pencils. After all, graphite is a dual-use 
             commodity, and so it goes. 

             The fault is yours and mine. It is our 
             government that insists on maintaining an 
             economic embargo nine years after the last 
             Iraqi soldier left Kuwait. We also continue 
             to conduct an ongoing undeclared and 
             unconstitutional war by bombing northern 
             and southern Iraq on a weekly basis. 

             Not only is this policy cruel, vicious, 
             immoral and a war crime by any rational 
             definition, it is also not in America's 
             national interests. Even the heads of Arab 
             governments who don't like Saddam 
             Hussein are finding it increasingly difficult 
             as their own people grow angrier and 
             angrier about the unjustified suffering 
             being imposed on innocent Iraqi civilians. 

             I attribute the U.S. cruelty toward Iraq to 
             pure malice. I do so because I know that 
             people in Washington are not so stupid as 
             to believe that an embargo that has failed 
             for nine years is suddenly going to work. I 
             know that they are not so stupid as to fail 
             to realize that the embargo in fact 
             strengthens Hussein politically and 
             enriches him materially. He gets rich 
             because his government controls the 
             smuggling. I know that people in 
             Washington do not believe that Iraq has 
             any hidden cache of weapons that would 
             threaten anyone. They know full well that 
             the only country in the Middle East with a 
             large store of weapons of mass destruction 
             is Israel. 

             This insane policy has sewn a harvest of 
             hatred that innocent Americans will be 
             reaping for the next hundred years. Unless 
             you are willing to confront that Iraqi 
             mother and tell her to her face that it's 
             necessary for her child to die, you ought to 
             take a stand against the embargo.