People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [389]
Trying to quiet Republican criticism that the military is underfinanced, President Clinton held a Rose Garden ceremony today to announce that he would seek a $25 billion increase in military spending over the next six years.
The examples most often given by the Pentagon of “two simultaneous major regional wars” were Iraq and North Korea. Yet the 1991 war against Iraq had followed repeated U.S. arming of Iraq in the eighties. And it was reasonable to suppose that heavy military aid to South Korea, and a permanent U.S. military force in that country, had provoked increases in the North Korean arms budget, which was still much smaller than that of South Korea.
Despite these facts, the United States under Clinton was continuing to supply arms to nations all over the world. Clinton, coming into office, approved the sale of F-15 combat planes to Saudi Arabia, and F-16s to Taiwan. The Baltimore Sun reported (May 30, 1994):
Next year, for the first time, the United States will produce more combat planes for foreign air forces than for the Pentagon, highlighting America’s replacement of the Soviet Union as the world’s main arms supplier. Encouraged by the Clinton administration, the defense industry last year had its best export year ever, having sold $32 billion worth of weapons overseas, more than twice the 1992 total of $15 billion.
That pattern continued through the Clinton presidency. In the summer of 2000, the New York Times reported that in the previous year the United States had sold over $11 billion of arms, one-third of all weapons sold worldwide. Two-thirds of all arms were sold to poor countries. In 1999 the Clinton administration lifted a ban on advanced weapons to Latin America. The Times called it “a victory for the big military contractors, like the Lockheed-Martin Corporation and the McDonnell Douglas Corporation.”
Clinton seemed anxious to show strength. He had been in office barely six months when he sent the Air Force to drop bombs on Baghdad, presumably in retaliation for an assassination plot against George Bush on the occasion of his visit to Kuwait. The evidence for such a plot was very weak, coming as it did from the notoriously corrupt Kuwaiti police, and Clinton did not wait for the results of the trial supposed to take place in Kuwait of those accused of the plot.
And so, U.S. planes, claiming to have targeted “Intelligence Headquarters” in the Iraqi capital, bombed a suburban neighborhood, killing at least six people, including a prominent Iraqi artist and her husband.
The Boston Globe reported: “Since the raid, President Clinton and other officials have boasted of crippling Iraq’s intelligence capacity and of sending a powerful message that Iraq leader Saddam Hussein had better behave.” It turned out later that there was no significant damage, if any, to Iraqi intelligence facilities and the New York Times commented: “Mr. Clinton’s sweeping statement was reminiscent of the assertions by President Bush and General Norman Schwartzkopf during the Persian Gulf War that later proved to be untrue.”
Democrats rallied behind the bombing, and the Boston Globe, referring to the use of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter as legal justification for the bombing, said this was “diplomatically the proper rationale to invoke . . . Clinton’s reference to the UN Charter conveyed the American desire to respect international law.”
In fact, Article 51 of the UN Charter permits unilateral military action only in defense against an armed attack, and only when there is no opportunity to convene the Security Council. None of these factors were present in the Baghdad bombing.
Columnist Molly Ivins suggested that the bombing of Baghdad for the purpose of “sending a powerful message” fit the definition of terrorism. “The maddening thing about