Since I don't do it very often--well, OK, never--allow me to say a nice word about Mindy Cameron, head of the editorial page of the Seattle Times.

In case you missed it, Cameron, whose attitude toward the foreign policy misdeeds of the United States can often best be described as willful ignorance, wrote a blistering column on February 20 critiquing U.S.-led economic sanctions against the people of Iraq.

The U.S.-orchestrated economic sanctions against Iraq, like our periodic bombing forays against civilian targets, are the purest form of terrorism: targeting the lives of massive numbers of citizens to achieve a political goal completely beyond their influence. Clinton and his foreign policy teams have done Saddam's work, manipulating or ignoring U.N. policy to kill his people so he doesn't have to. Those people have no more control (less, actually) over what Saddam does than you or I have over Clinton. And they're dying: slowly, painfully, invisibly, in nearly incomprehensible numbers. Bill Clinton's willing mass sacrifice of civilian lives violates international law, U.S. law, the Geneva convention, and any conceivable standard of moral decency.

Perhaps as appalling as Clinton's policy has been the utter lack of American public awareness of its effects. All told, over a million--credible estimates are as high as two million--people have died because of their misfortune to be born in a country whose leader we don't like. We haven't noticed, much less cared, while it's been done in our name by our elected leaders. The story of famine, of loss of safe drinking water and other infrastructure, of lack of medical supplies or basic goods, is a story that has not been told in this country.

The spur for Cameron's late (but welcome) salvo was the resignation of two additional top United Nations officials charged with overseeing the hopeless "food for oil" program that is supposed to mitigate the harshness of the sanctions. Supposed to. Hans von Sponeck, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, and Jutta Burqhardt, the head of the U.N. World Food Program in Iraq, each resigned last week in frustration over the intransigence of the U.S. and Britain's fixation on Saddam Hussein. Last year, von Sponeck's predecessor, Denis Halliday, resigned for the same reason.

The squeezing of Iraq stands alongside Rwanda as the two great genocides of the 1990s; Iraq no less horrific for being slow and invisible, and in each case the brown bodies are stacked like firewood at the door of the Clinton White House.

The heroic opposition of Puget Sound activists like Bert Sacks (Fellowship of Reconciliation), Gerri Haynes (Physicians for Social Responsibility), and Jonas Davis (American Friends Service Committee) has for too long gone largely unheard. These resignations, by U.N. bureaucrats who weren't critical of the sanctions or their sponsors until they saw the machinations and the human damage first hand, are starting to have an impact on folks like Cameron and Rep. Jim McDermott, who has recently--finally--signed a letter to Clinton urging a delinking of economic sanctions from military sanctions.

For the dead and dying of Iraq, that activism can come none too soon.