CacklingHack, shooting himself in the foot once again, opined: "You [Turtles] did say "10s of thousands of innocent civilians". Unless the US can't tell the difference between chemical labs and high population ares this figure is way off the map. How many were killed in Clinton's disgusting (*cough* Sudan *cough*) escapade?"
Really, sparkler, is this the best you can do? Are you so congenitally precluded from undertaking any simple research for yourself on the topic, or would that be too ideologically inconvenient? The consequences of this act of US terrorism have been well documented, but to take one instance,
and only one instance, of insightful commentary on the bombing, I think Mr Chomsky has considerably more to say than anything emanating from the corrosive hackland where you choose to reside.
Or take the destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, one little footnote in the record of state terror, quickly forgotten. What would the reaction have been if the bin Laden network had blown up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the facilities for replenishing them? We can imagine, though the comparison is unfair, the consequences are vastly more severe in Sudan. That aside, if the U.S. or Israelor England were to be the target of such an atrocity, what would the reaction be? In this case we say, "Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake, let's go on to the next topic, let the victims rot." Other people in the world don't react like that. When bin Laden brings up that bombing, he strikes a resonant chord, even among those who despise and fear him; and the same, unfortunately, is true of much of the rest of his rhetoric. Though it is merely a footnote, the Sudan case is nonetheless highly instructive.
[ ... ]
With these truisms in mind, let's have a look at some of the material that was readily available in the mainstream press. I disregard the extensive analysis of the validity of Washington's pretexts, of little moral significance in comparison to the question of consequences. A year after the attack, "without the lifesaving medicine [the destroyed facilities] produced, Sudan's death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly, to rise... Thus, tens of thousands of people- many of them children - have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases... [Al-Shifa] provided affordable medicine for humans and all the locally available veterinary medicine in Sudan. It produced 90 percent of Sudan's major pharmaceutical products... Sanctions against the Sudan make it impossible to import adequate amounts of medicines required to cover the serious gap left by the plant's destruction ... The action taken by Washington on August 20, 1998, continues to deprive the people of Sudan of needed medicine. Millions must wonder how the International Court of Justice in The Hague will celebrate this anniversary" (Jonathan Belke, Boston Globe, August 22, 1999). Germany Ambassador to Sudan writes that "It is difficult to assess how many people int his poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess" (Werner Daum,"Universalism and the West," Harvard International Review, Summer 2001).
"The loss of this factory is a tragedy for the rural communities who need these medicines" (Tom Carnaffin, technical manager with "intimate knowledge" of the destroyed plant, quoted in Ed Vulliamy, Henry McDonald, Shyam Bhatia, and Martin Bright, London Observer, August 23, 1998, lead story, page 1). Al-Shifa "provided 50 percent of Sudan's medicines, and its destruction has left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria," but months later, the British Labour government refused requests "to resupply chloroquine inemergency relief until such time as the Sudanese can rebuild their pharmaceutical production" (Patrick Wintour, Observer, December 20, 1998). The Al-Shifa facility was "the only one producing TB drugs - for more than 100,000 patients, at about 1 British pound a month. Costlier imported versions are not an option for most of them- or for their husbands, wives and children, who will have been infected since. Al-Shifa as also the only factory making veterinary drugs in this vast, mostly pastoralist, country. Its specialty was drugs to kill the parasites which pass from herds toherders, one of the Sudan's principal causes of infant mortality" (James Astill, Guardian,October 2, 100).The silent death toll continues to mount.
These accounts are by respected journalists writing in leading journals. The one exception is the most knowledgeable of the sources just cited, Jonathan Belke, regional program manager for the Near East Foundation, who writes on the basis of field experience in Sudan. The Foundation is a respected development institution dating backto World War I. It provides technical assistance to poor countries in the Middle East and Africa, emphasizing grassroots locally-run development projects, and operates with close connections to major universities, charitable organizations, and the State Department, including well-known Middle East diplomats and prominent figures in Middle Easteducational and developmental affairs. According to credible analyses readily available to us, then, proportional to population, the destruction of Al-Shifa is as if the bin Laden network, in a single attack on the U.S.caused "hundreds of thousands of people-many of them children-to suffer and die fromeasily treatable diseases," though the analogy, as noted, is unfair. Sudan is "one of the least developed areas in the world. Its harsh climate, scattered populations, health hazards and crumbling infrastructure combine to make life for many Sudanese a strugglefor survival"; a country with endemic malaria, tuberculosis, and many other diseases, where "periodic outbreaks of meningitis or cholera are not uncommon," so affordable medicines are a dire necessity (Jonathan Belke and Kamal El-Faki, technical reports from the field for the Near East Foundation). It is, furthermore, a country with limited arable land, a chronic shortage of potable water, a huge death rate, little industry, anunserviceable debt, wracked with AIDS, devastated by a vicious and destructive internal war, and under severe sanctions. What is happening within is largely speculation, including Belke's (quite plausible) estimate that within a year tens of thousands had already "suffered and died" as the result of the destruction of the major facilities for producing affordable drugs and veterinary medicines.
This only scratches the surface. Human Rights Watch immediately reported that as an immediate consequence of the bombing, "all UN agencies based in Khartoum have evacuated their American staff, ashave many other relief organizations," so that "many relief efforts have been postponed indefinitely, including a crucial one run by the U.S.-based International RescueCommittee [in a government town] where more than fifty southerners are dying daily"; these are regions in "southern Sudan, where the UN estimates that 2.4 million people areat risk of starvation," and the "disruption in assistance" for the "devastated population" may produce a "terrible crisis. What is more, the U.S. bombing "appears to have shattered the slowly evolving move toward compromise between Sudan's warring sides" and terminated promising steps towards a peace agreement to end the civil war that had left 1.5 million dead since 1981, which might have also led to "peace in Uganada and the entire Nile Basin." The attack apparently "shattered...the expected benefits of a political shift at the heart of Sudan's Islamist government" towards a "pragmatic engagement with the outside world," alongwith efforts to address Sudan's domestic crises, to end support for terrorism, and to reduce the influence of radical Islamists (Mark Huband, Financial Times, September 8,1998). Insofar as such consequences ensued, we may compare the crime in Sudan to the assassination of Lumumba, which helped plunge the Congo into decades of slaughter, still continuing, or the overthrow of the democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, which led to 40 years of hideous atrocities; and all too many others like it. Husband's conclusions are reiterated three years later by James Astill, in the article just cited. He reviews "the political cost to a country struggling to emerge from totalitarian military dictatorship, ruinous Islamism and long-running civil war" before the missile attack, which "overnight [plunged Khartoum] into the nightmare of impotent extremism it had been trying to escape." This "political cost" may have been even more harmful to Sudan than the destruction of its "fragile medical services," he concludes.
Astill quotes Dr. Idris Eltayeb, one of Sudan's handful of pharmacologists and chairman of the board of Al-Shifa: the crime, he says, is "just as much an act of terrorism as at the Twin Towers- the only difference is we know who did it. I feel very sad about the loss of life [in New York and Washington], but in terms of numbers, and the relative cost to a poor country, [the bombing in Sudan] was worse." Unfortunately, he may be right about "the loss of life in terms of numbers," even if we do not take into account the longer-term "political cost."
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One can scarcely try to estimate the toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims. The complete toll is attributable to the single act of terror -at least, if we have the honesty to adopt the standards we properly apply to official enemies.
Though I'm by no means convinced that they aren't trying to produce nuclear weapons. They are clearly posturing like they might be.
