Church Bells

[George Bush]

‘By God we’ve kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.’

[Ramsey Clark]

‘Let me describe briefly what happened. There were 114,000 separate aerial sorties in 42 days. That’s one every 30 seconds. 88,000 tons of bombs were dropped.

Only 7% of the bombs that fell upon Iraq were guided. 93% were free falling bombs that hit where chance, necessity and no free will took them. Therе were 38 aircraft lost by the Unitеd States in this slaughter. That number is less than the number of accidental losses in war games where no live ammunition is even used. No enemy aircraft rose to meet them, we know that, and no enemy anti-aircraft could reach them. And those who were there at the time know that.

The United States claims to have lost 148 people. It concedes that the majority were from accident and friendly fire. There was not a single US tank penetrated by an Iraqi missile. There was not a single B52 downed by enemy fire. We had planes fly from Berksdale, Louisiana without ever touching the ground and return to Berksdale, Louisiana, having killed thousands of people on the ground they never saw. And one of those facts of the enemy of truth was television telling us about the surgical strikes and nobody gets hurt: we just turn the lights out.

We used fuel air explosives, and it incinerates people and it crushes people, and we used it against civilians and military personnel. We had missiles fired from submarines in the Eastern Mediterranean for sport – just to see how they worked. We had Tomahawk cruise missiles by the hundred, launched from the Persian Gulf. A couple of thousand miles from the places that they hit – totally out of range. We put a couple of old fashioned battle ships up there and dumped 2.1 million pounds of hot metal on Southern Iraq, around Basra, killing people with impunity. You remember General Kelly announced before the beginning of the so called ground war….. but there was no ground war, name one battle, there wasn’t a battle: there was a slaughter. General Kelly said, when the troops finally moved forward, "They’re not many of them left alive to fight." And finally we learn that bulldozers and tanks with ploughs on the front, came in and buried thousands – dead, wounded and living.

The Geneva Convention – written in the blood of the millions and millions of people who died in World War II – and the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff of the United States army, when asked how many casualties he thought we had inflicted on Iraqi military and civilians said: "Frankly, that’s not a figure I’m very much interested in." Forty eight hours after the cease fire, on the direct order of General Schwarzkopf as we know, major assaults occurred that took thousands of more lives. We killed at least 125,000 soldiers. We’ve killed to date more than 130,000 civilians. We killed as many as we dared.’

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‘I believe that the United Nations has emerged from this with great authority.’

[…]

‘It will go down in history as being the first really successful operation of the United Nations.’