Hillary Clinton and Laila al-Attar's Death

In his April 12, 2006 “Fulbright Prize Address” at the IMF headquarters in Washington,D.C., the husband of 2008 Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, recalled what happened the last time the Clintons occupied the White House:

“We used to have meetings in the White House sometimes, when we thought we might have to have military action on occasion. We did. We bombed Kosovo for seventy-seven days…The United Kingdom and the United States bombed what we thought were Saddam Hussein’s storage sites for chemical and biological materials when he kicked our inspectors out.”

One military action that Hillary Clinton’s husband ordered which he didn’t mention, however, was the June 27, 1993 U.S. missile attack on Baghdad which killed Laila al-Attar and her husband, as well as other Iraqi civilians. As Dennis Bernstein noted in a 1998 Salon article (www.salon.com/news/1998/02/23newsa.html), Laila “was a director of the Iraqi National Art Museum and a powerful force in gaining recognition for women artists throughout the Middle East.”

[The following additional information about the Clinton White House’s decision to attack Iraq on June 27, 1993 previously appeared in Downtown (7/21/93)]:

Among the Iraqi civilians killed by some of the 23 cruise missiles which Bill Clinton ordered to be launched against Baghdad was a prominent woman painter, Laila al-Attar. According to the New York Times (6/28/93), “She and her husband were found dead under debris at their home” after some of the Clinton White House’s missiles “blasted craters as deep as 30 feet in Al Manour, an exclusive residential area.” The Times reported on its back page that “A German opposition spokesman on Middle East affairs, Dieter Schinzel of the Social Democratic Party charged that the attack was counter to international law.”

Although former CIA Director Bush was no longer the U.S. Establishment’s commander-in-chief in 1993, according to the Times, “Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton talked by telephone for about 15 minutes…before the raid” and “later that day, Mr. Bush met with” the Clinton Administration’s first secretary of state, Warren Christopher “and an aide for about 30 minutes at Mr. Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine.” The Times also reported that the Clinton White House’s June 27, 1993 missile attack “came after weeks of preparation and was planned with such secrecy that no more than five top White House aides knew of the discussion, administration officials said.”

Perhaps Hillary Clinton should now fully describe the historical role she played in helping to determine the Clinton White House’s militaristic foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Yugoslavia during the 1990s?

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