20 yrs ago today on December 16, 1998 Pres. Bill Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, an illegal, unjustified military attack on Iraq in which the US attacked 100 targets with cruise missiles. I there in the middle of the bombing to witness its effects. Here's my story 1/
The attacks took place after seven years of US-backed UN sanctions on Iraq had led to the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqis. That October the head of the UN Oil for Food Program, Denis Halliday, resigned, charging that the sanctions were genocidal. independent.co.uk/news/un-aid-ch… 2/
Pres Clinton unilaterally and illegally bombing Iraq throughout the 1990s, ostensibly to enforce a US-declared no-fly zone over Iraq, killing hundreds of civilians. US media accounts rarely mentioned them, so ingrained was the belief in the US right to attack Iraq. 3/
In December 1998, The Clinton Administration attacked Iraq again, charging that Saddam Hussein was failing to fully cooperate with the UN weapons inspection program UNSCOM and UN Security Council Resolutions, and forcing UNSCOM to withdraw before its work was complete. 4/
The US began bombing Iraq from December 16-19, 1998, to general media praise about the precision of US cruise missiles (for a rare critique see thenation.com/article/bombin…). Three days later House Republicans commenced impeachment hearings on the Lewinsky affair. 5/
I was a third year grad student at Northwestern when the bombing started and had already been to Iraq once. Kathy Kelly @voiceinwild, told me she would be leaving for Iraq the next day on an emergency delegation and asked me if I wanted to come. I jumped at the chance. 6/
A Palestinian couple gave us the tickets to Amman, Jordan that they had been planning to use to go see their family for Christmas. We left on December 17. In Amman, Jordan late on the night of December 18 Kathy and I went shopping before our 14 hour drive to Baghdad. 7/
A crowd of outraged Jordanians surrounded us in a store, demanding to know why we were bombing Iraq. One of them then stopped and welcomed us to Amman. He later drove Kathy and I (with his wife and baby) all over town, buying our supplies and refusing to let us pay for them. 8/
Early on the morning of the 19th we left during a pause in the bombing, racing the 12 hours overland from Amman to Baghdad. We arrived thinking the bombing was over, and visited a family near the hotel, before hearing and feeling the thuds of cruise missiles landing nearby. 9/ 
Kathy and I watched US cruise missiles landing around Baghdad from the roof of our hotel, as Iraqi anti-aircraft fire ineffectually lit up the night sky and the hotel intercom played the Clinton impeachment hearings on the BBC, a surreal lesson in US political ethics. 10/
We walked across the road, lit up by tracer fire, to the Hotel Palestine to get some news. We walked into the bar and said “We are from the US, and we are sorry our President is bombing your country.” The Iraqis at the bar laughed and slid a pack of cigarettes toward us. 11/
The next day we toured Baghdad to survey the damage and visit the wounded in nearby hospitals. The US attacked about 100 targets with cruise missiles, including a defense ministry building next to the largest maternity hospital in Baghdad. 12/
All the windows in the hospital were blown out by the force of the blast, forcing doctors and nurses to evacuate all of the patients in the middle of the attack. Some spontaneously went into labor or aborted their pregnancies. No one knows how many people died. 13/
We knew the press would soon leave Baghdad, and hoped to show that while Operation Desert Fox was over, the real war against the civilian population of Iraq in the form of sanctions was continuing. So Kathy and I crashed press events and held guerilla actions in town. 14/
On December 24 we organized a press conference outside of the destroyed Baghdad maternity hospital with doctors standing in for wise men, offering gifts of medicine, medical journals, and pencils, all banned by the sanctions. A group of Iraqi children accompanied us. 15/
The day before Kathy and I taught them a few verses of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and told them about its history and the struggle of poor people in the US, while our driver translated. “We are not afraid”; “We’ll walk hand in hand”. It was amazing. 16/
We managed to track down the great journalist @stephenkinzer, who was in Baghdad and spent three days with us. Kinzer wrote an amazing series on the sanctions, the only sustained reporting the NYT did until the US invaded Iraq again in 2003.
nytimes.com/1998/12/28/wor… 17/
nytimes.com/1998/12/28/wor… 17/
That Christmas Eve Kathy and I attended services nearby. The priest draped the table with Picasso’s famous antiwar painting Guernica. He titled his sermon “The Baby and the Bomb” and speculated about how Christ would have fared had he been born in Baghdad. 18/
Iraqis were unfailingly kind. At one point some Iraqi soldiers stuffed me in a car at gunpoint, asking if I was with the CIA and threatening to kill me. After explaining why I was there, The officer asked for medicine for his daughter, dying of a respiratory infection. 19/
The soldiers next to me told me of the family members who had died or were dying from cholera, pneumonia, and other diseases that could be treated with a $.05 antibiotic, barred under the sanctions. 20/
On Christmas Eve day I took a ride in the most decrepit taxi I had ever seen – with gaping holes in the floor covered with cardboard and a driver literally dressed in rags. “I love your country but hate your foreign policy,” the driver offered 21/
I explained what I was doing in Baghdad, before telling me about his children, both suffering from malnutrition and one desperately ill from a respiratory infection. Ashamed, I offered him all the money I had on me – perhaps $100 – and begged him to take it for his family. 22/
He refused. “I cannot accept your money, Mr. American,” he replied, with shocking dignity and grace. “But I want to thank you for coming to Iraq to help our people, and wish you a merry Christmas.” We were starving and bombing his country. 23/
I think about that trip a lot, mostly about the extraordinary forgiveness and goodwill shown to us by ordinary Iraqis who could tell the difference between the US people and its foreign policy. Four and a half years later we invaded Iraq. 24/
Clinton's destruction of Iraq was slow, seemingly bloodless, and many liberals cheered our criminal bombing in 1998 as wise and justified. We smugly look back on his impeachment as the height of folly. But Clinton deserved impeachment. Just not for Monica Lewinsky. 25/END
