Call For Resistance to 'War Crime'

• The Clinton administration's plans to attack Iraq have themselves come under attack.

Dr. Robert John, director of the International Council for Human Ecology and Ethnology (ICHEE), condemned the American and British Mideast war plans at the January meeting of the Steuben Society in New York. (The society is named for Maj. Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the Prussian who trained George Washington's Continental Army.)

Iraq has been identified in the mainstream media as a threat to world peace, dr. John said. The so-called "presidential palaces" or bunker areas for Iraqi government personnel would probably be among the first targets. The prime objective would be to kill Saddam Hussein. In this unprovoked attack, civilians would also be killed.

Dr. John called on the commander of United States forces in the Gulf, Gen. Anthony Zinni, to resign rather than carry out a "war crime of an unprovoked attack," and a crime against humanity because of the certain civilian deaths and injuries.

STARVATION COMPARISON

He compared Iraq's takeover of Kuwait seven years ago with Germany's reoccupation of the Rhineland. Further, the deliberate starvation of Iraqis since the Gulf War by a blockade of U.S., British and French forces ight be compared with their starvation of Germany for six months after the 1918 World WarI armistice, and for more than two years after the 1945 surrender of the Second World war, he said.

Starvation was a deliberate policy of the American-British-Soviet European Advisory Committee.

Dr. John said that his uncle, Lt. Col. J.C. John, had volunteered from the western Front in WWI for the Dunster Force that freed Mesopotamia (now Iraq) from Turkish rule. Kuwait was as much a part of Iraq as the former autonomous princely states of India were part of India, the author and lecturer said. The boundary of Kuwait had been drawn in the sand by British imperialists and enlarged by U.S. dikat to Iraq after the Gulf War.

With their tragic experience, Germany and Americans of German descent should never support food and trade blockades as instruments of policy, In an interview with U.S. Secretary of State (then Ambassador) Madeleine Albright (May 12, 1996) on the TV program 60 Minutes, for which Leslie Stahl was given a Columbia University School of Journalism award in 1997, she said that UN Food and Agriculture Organization figures showed that half-a-million children died from starvation as a result of the American-led sanctions against Iraq.

Stahl: "I mean, that's more than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Ambassador Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."

HYPOCRITICAL SANCTIONS

The United Nations is used as a tool of control, Dr John said. Unlike Iraq or Libya or Iran, countries that the U.S. support, Turkey and Israel for example, may confidently ignore its Security Council resolutions without sanctions being imposed against them, Instead, they are subsidized with foreign aid.

The U.S. has grown very powerful in two centuries profiting from the two world wars, when Allied investments there ware sold to buy supplies, and German investments were confiscated. It is also a country rich in natural resources that includes its people, Dr. John said.

But is fundamental policies have been moved far out of alignment from the positions on foreign affairs, and limited central power, of its visionary Founders. That formulation on foreign relation, expressed by its first president as good relations with all, special relations with none, was affirmed by John Quincy Adams: "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy" (1821).

POSITION SWITCH

In 1997, that position was dismissed 100 times a day by American warplanes violating the sovereign air space of Iraq, seven years after the Gulf War. The prohibition and prevention of Iraqi flights across southern Iraq was inposed to protect Shite Moslems waging an American=promoted uprising in the south, from attacks by Iraqi national forces.

Despite receiving millions of dollars in financing from the United States (N.Y. Times, Aug. 24, 1995, A14) in the north, a CIA-sponsored secession was sped by Iraq forces in 1995, and thousands of northerners have been transported to Guam and the U.S. to join the million Vietnamese and other "refugees" from American interventions in other countries. The American congress voted $540 million for the purpose of destroying the currency of Iraq.

"The famous 19th century German American journalist and legislator Carl Schurz opposed U.S. intervention in Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico," Dr.John said. When challenged that he should support his country, right or wrong, Schurz replied: 'If right, to be kept right. If wrong, to be put right,'"

Dr. John concluded: "Let us use our votes for a just American policy. That is patriotism."