Much of the current policy towards Iraq had its origins in the administration of Bill Clinton

~snip~

When he speaks himself on the Iraq War or is interviewed and asked his thoughts on the war, Clinton is almost never challenged on his policy in Iraq, nor is there much discussion of Clinton's Iraq policy. This is unfortunate, because much of the current policy towards Iraq had its origins in the administration of President Bill Clinton. During his eight years in the White House, President Clinton over saw an Iraq policy that killed over 350,000-500,000 children via sanctions, repeatedly bombed Iraq out of concern over WMD, and made regime change the official policy of the United States.

The most notable aspect of President Clinton's Iraq policy was his maintenance of a sanctions regime that decimated Iraq's economy and that was estimated to have killed 500,000 children. While the figures would later be disputed with lesser estimates of 350,000, their destructive impact is undeniable. Responding to concerns over the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright would famously state "I think it is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Ordinary Iraqis reported significant hardship from the sanctions, while food and medicine were lacking and the economy crumbled. Scholars of United States foreign policy including Edward Said and Edward Herman described Clinton's Iraq policy as a "war crime." It must also be remembered that the sanctions came on top of the devastation of the first Gulf War.

Despite the horrific impact of the sanctions regime on a generation of Iraqis, Clinton has been fairly silent on the impacts of the sanctions. While former Secretary of State Madeline Albright eventually said that she regretted her statement about the deaths being "worth it," Clinton has not shown similar remorse for his policy. In an interview in 2000 on Democracy Now, Clinton disputed the numbers over how many children died in Iraq under sanctions saying "that's not true." Clinton argued that Hussein "butchered the children of his own country" and that "if any child is without food or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq, it's because he is claiming the sanctions are doing it and sticking it to his own children." Clinton accused Saddam Hussein of squandering the money and withholding it from children to create a death toll that would "build up pressure" to end the embargo so that he could rebuild his weapons programs. He further dismissed claims by two United Nations officials that quit their jobs because the sanctions were genocidal as being "wrong" to make such statements. Clinton's comments reflected what became the United States official response to critics of the sanctions blaming Saddam Hussein rather than acknowledging the United States' role.

The economic sanctions against Iraq during the Clinton administration were a product the same hysteria about WMDs that prompted Clinton to repeatedly bomb Iraq throughout the 1990s. In December of 1998, Clinton launched a three-day bombing campaign against Iraq. Clinton justified the bombing by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that the United States had to enforce the will of the United Nations after the UN pulled its inspectors out of Iraq due to a lack of cooperation from Iraqis. At the time, the United States failed to show that the weapons existed, though it was willing to launch attacks to destroy both the weapons and the infrastructure necessary to manufacture them despite Pentagon estimates that the attacks could kill as many as 10,000 civilians. According to international law scholar Phyllis Bennis, the bombings were a violation of international law. Under Clinton, the United States repeatedly bombed Iraq in the US-imposed "no-fly zones," with the bombings reaching a high point in 1999.

In 1998, the Project for a New American Century-- involving many of the architects of the Iraq War including Paul Wolfowtiz, Donald Rumsfeld, and William Kristol--wrote a letter to Bill Clinton urging him to make removal of Saddam Hussein a foreign policy goal of the Untied States. While the Clinton administration responded that it believed containment was the best way to deal with Hussein, later that year Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act later that year. The Iraq Liberation Act made regime change the official policy of the United States.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/roston

Chalabi's Lobby

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Then there is the matter of how much money the American government itself spent on the services of Chalabi and his INC. One former member of the INC put it at about $90 million, but a safer and more conservative estimate of the total American taxpayer subsidy to Chalabi and his organization is $59 million over the course of eleven years. This includes an estimated $20 million from the CIA secret budget in the early 1990s (although it may be far more); add to this $33 million from the State Department in the years leading up to the war in Iraq and $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency starting in 2002.