While the White House continues to accuse Iraq of hiding weapons of mass destruction in a prelude to what many expect will be a full-scale invasion, less well-known is the fact the U.S. is already launching military strikes against Iraq, and has been doing so for years.

In recent months, the number of strikes has greatly increased, inflicting more anguish on an already terrified population, says Ukiah resident David Smith-Ferri. He has twice gone to Iraq to help deliver medical supplies, and saw the effects of such strikes and the fear they induce firsthand.

"The airport in Basra (Iraq's second largest city) was bombed the morning we landed there," Smith-Ferri recalls, noting the attack occurred just hours before his plane touched down in September of this year. Three days later, he adds, the same airport was bombed again.

The U.S. and British governments, acting outside of U.N. authority, established "no fly zones" over parts of Iraq following the Gulf War. The U.S. says the zones are necessary to protect Kurdish and Shiite minorities, while Iraq views them as a violation of its national sovereignty.

Previously, the U.S. has always maintained its strikes in Iraq were limited to gun emplacements and radar facilities which had opened fire on or attempted to track American warplanes. But, as the Washington Post reported Dec. 22, the list of targets was greatly expanded by the Bush administration in August of this year to include, among other things, communication centers and fiber optic links. Some analysts believe this is an attempt to soften up the country's defenses prior to a U.S. invasion.

Over the last four months of this year, the Post noted, U.S. and British warplanes have launched approximately 72 air attacks, a huge increase over the six that occurred during the first four months of the year.

On Dec. 1, Iraq said one of the strikes killed four civilians working at an oil company in the center of Basra. The U.S. said it had attacked an air defense facility, not an oil company, and has repeatedly insisted it strives to "avoid injury to civilians and damage to civilian facilities."

Even so, Smith-Ferri says the ongoing strikes have resulted in the deaths of several hundred Iraqi civilians.

"There are some towns and cities in Iraq that have been bombed repeatedly over the last four years, and people have been killed in those towns. Children," he said, "have died."

During his time in Iraq, the Ukiah resident spoke with a woman whose 4-year-old daughter was killed when a missile fired by an American jet apparently went astray and struck her Basra neighborhood on Jan. 25, 1999. Four other people also lost their lives in that attack, while the woman's 6-year-old son was left with shrapnel permanently embedded in his back.

During his first trip in July 1999, Smith-Ferri recalls being surrounded by a crowd of civilians who lived near a grain silo that had been struck by a bomb. After approaching him, they pulled up their shirts and pant legs to display multiple shrapnel scars, asking why his government would do such a thing.

Even when no bombs fall, the sudden appearance of the warplanes, Smith-Ferri says, strikes fear in ordinary Iraqis.

"The clear message was that these patrols are terrifying to people. The planes don't fly over a given area every day, because it is a fairly large area, especially over the south of Iraq, but when they fly over Basra, the air raid sirens go off, and people don't know if there is going to be a bombing or not, so it is really terrifying, especially for children."

Washington, Smith-Ferri says, claims it wants to protect human rights in Iraq on the one hand, while it violates those same rights on the other.

"The no fly zone patrols and bombings are a further erosion of Iraqi civilians' human rights," he argues. "The very people the patrols are supposed to protect the Shiite people in the south and the Kurdish people in the north are being wounded and killed by the bombings. Their homes and places of work are being damaged, their livestock are being killed, and they very definitely view it as unjust."

Efforts by Americans to criticize and violate official policy toward Iraq have not gone unnoticed by the U.S. government.

Smith-Ferri is a member of Voices in the Wilderness (or VOW), a group that seeks to bring medical supplies to Iraq while calling attention to the effects of the U.S. led sanctions there. Those sanctions, VOW says, have directly contributed to the deaths of thousands of impoverished Iraqi children, a point on which UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, agrees.

On Nov. 6, VOW was fined $20,000 by the Office of Foreign Asset Control (or OFAC), which is part of the Department of the Treasury. Along with the $20,000 fine, three members of the group were also fined an additional $10,000 each.

"This is related to a ban on travel to Iraq and a ban on bringing humanitarian goods there without prior approval," Smith-Ferri explains, adding VOW makes no bones about deliberately breaking both restrictions.

"Our position is that, on principle, it is the very laws that are constraining trade to Iraq that are the problem and we are not about to work within the confines of those laws. We don't believe we should ask permission to bring medicine to a clinic."

The government gave VOW 30 days to respond. Smith-Ferri was among those who signed that response, contained in a letter hand-delivered to OFAC Dec. 6.

"We stated we refused to pay the fine and we intend to continue to travel to Iraq and bring humanitarian supplies as much as we could...We included in the letter 6,750 Iraqi dinars, which in the year before sanctions would have been the equivalent of $20,000. It is worth about $3.50 today."

The point of doing that, he adds, was to demonstrate the toll sanctions have inflicted on the Iraqi economy, along with its sick and malnourished population.

"The value of a dinar is one 6,000th of what it was before the embargo. What it means for a lot of people is that they can't buy simple necessities. I know families that have to decide which child to send to school, because they can only afford one pair of shoes."

There is no doubt, Smith-Ferri repeatedly stresses, that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator, one who responds with ruthless efficiency to any attempt within Iraq to oppose him politically. But, he says, Washington's efforts supposedly directed against him have actually inflicted great suffering on the Iraqi people instead.

And he argues, if the U.S. is really as concerned about Hussein's human rights record and weapons of mass destruction as it portrays itself to be, why didn't that prevent it from actively supporting him in the past, particularly in the 1980s, when Washington backed Hussein in his war against Iran.

Senior officers in the U.S. military have acknowledged as reported in the New York Times Aug. 17 that a covert program under the Reagan Administration provided Hussein's regime "with critical battle planning assistance," even though officials knew Iraq would deploy chemical weapons, including poison gas, against Iranian soldiers. The use of poison gas during that war is now cited repeatedly by President Bush as a justification for a U.S. invasion.

The government has yet to respond to the VOW letter signed by Smith-Ferri, but he says fines won't deter him and the group from carrying on their activities.

Believing the American people would be less likely to support what their government was doing if they knew more about it, the Ukiah resident says he looks forward to shining a light on U.S. policy regarding Iraq, even if he has to stand with other VOW members before a judge to do it.

"We have more delegations to Iraq planned over the next several weeks, each of which will break the sanctions laws by traveling to Iraq and delivering humanitarian goods," says Smith-Ferri. "And we would welcome the opportunity to discuss all of this in court."

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