The brutal bombings and ongoing sanctions against Iraq, led by the
U.S. and also backed by many foreign governments on the U.S. payroll,
have been in place for fully 10 years. To what end? Saddam Hussein is
still in power and his power is unchallenged. But sanctions, not Saddam,
are the biggest problem the Iraqi people face. Thanks to U.S. policy,
the country continues to slip from civilization to pre-modern barbarism,
where children die young, disease is rampant, computers and air
conditioning are known only to a few, and even clean, running water is a
rarity. No one disputes the reality that thousands of people die each
month as a direct result of this policy.
Repeal of the sanctions is long past due. But for the Clinton
administration, it’s a matter of pride that they stay in place.
Madeleine Albright said in 1997 that sanctions will remain so long as
Saddam is president, and she further declared that bloodshed is a
tolerable price to pay. One doubts that a future president Bush would
feel any different, since he might still have it in his mind to
vindicate his father’s war. Meanwhile, Bush’s vice presidential pick is
a founder of a free-trade organization that favors free trade with
everyone in the world except Iraq.
Thank goodness the facts are available for anyone who cares to look.
A new book called “Under Siege: the Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War,”
edited by Anthony Arnove and published this year by South End Press,
documents the carnage to a degree that will shock and appall. To think
that the Clinton administration’s supposed contribution to international
affairs is to use the U.S. military for “humanitarian” purposes. What’s
humanitarian about a policy that leads to the death of one million
innocents? The hypocrisy takes your breath away.
As “Under Siege” demonstrates, the carnage imposed by the U.S. is
immense. More than half of the million dead are children. Indeed, the
U.N. estimates that the under-five mortality rate has doubled since
sanctions began. Hospitals, water treatment plants, and the rest of the
nation’s infrastructure are a wreck. Good nutrition and basic medicines
are unavailable for most people. Every day is a struggle to get by. And
if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the civilians living
in Basra were last year, you just might get bombed.
U.S. taxpayers are paying for all of this. And to enforce this policy
of national destruction, the U.S. keeps servicemen and women away from
home for many months to patrol Iraq’s import-export business and enforce
the “no-fly” zone. It maintains a huge military presence in the Gulf,
the end of which is to continue the slow death of Iraqi society.
American citizens also pay by losing a natural market for their products
and by paying higher oil prices that result from the artificial
suppression of supply from Iraq. Iraq is pumping oil, but not nearly as
much as it would produce in a free market. Worse, the Iraqis themselves
do not profit from the sales, thanks to the U.N.’s “escrow” policy.
But is the purpose of this policy to keep Iraq from developing
nuclear weapons? Hear the words of former inspector Scott Ritter, who
now works on the side of the angels calling for an end to sanctions:
“Iraq has been disarmed. Iraq today possesses no meaningful weapons of
mass destruction.” As for U.N. inspection teams, it is well known by now
that everything Saddam said about them ended up being correct; they were
thoroughly infiltrated by CIA agents doing intelligence work. It’s
hardly surprising that Iraq would complain about dirty pool. You also
have to imagine how all these complaints about Iraq’s supposed dangerous
weaponry play out around the world. The U.S. has the largest nuclear
arsenal on the planet, and, as the anniversaries of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki remind us, remains the only government to have ever used them.
Those are only a few of the myths exploded by “Under Siege.” In fact,
an excerpt
of the book on the website of Voices in the Wilderness, a
magnificent anti-sanctions group, tells most of the story and explodes
myth after myth. You can’t fully appreciate the difficulties of life in
Iraq without considering the details of living under a blockade.
The U.S. has agreed to small shipments of food and medicine, but even
here, the U.S. is only going along reluctantly. For example, in 1999,
the Clinton administration claimed that Saddam was withholding food and
medicine from the people so as to exacerbate human suffering and draw
world attention to the sad state of affairs in Iraq.
“Under Siege” tells a much more plausible story. It turns out that
there are many practical problems associated with getting medicine and
medical equipment moved around the country. Trucks must have cooling
systems. Roads must be in good repair. There must be people to work in
the warehouses and effect the distribution. None of these conditions are
in place.
Also, half the shipments come without the needed complementary goods:
syringes without needles and the like. Since the U.N. must approve
imported medical equipment, bureaucratic tangles require many goods to
be stored until they are used. Also, it’s quite absurd to think that
health can be restored by permitting medicine in the country even while
sanctions and bombings prevent any kind of infrastructure from being
rebuilt. The good that a shipment of penicillin can do is mitigated by
the fact that the drinking water carries diseases, and that the water
treatment plants were all bombed by the U.S. to bring this about.
Just as shocking is the silence on this issue in the American
political landscape. There are no polls out there asking people what
they think of the policy. Indeed, most people don’t know or care. In
contrast, everyone seems to know that Iraq threatened Kuwait in 1990
(even though few know that the U.S. gave its tacit permission for Iraq
to do so). And yet doesn’t it matter that the US is committing far worse
deeds against Iraq than Iraq ever threatened against Kuwait? Where is
the morality in that?
The U.S. needs to make peace with Iraq. The war that began ten years
ago needs to end. Thank goodness some people (“fringe” types like Pope
John Paul II) are willing to denounce the policy, because neither Bush
nor Gore has any incentive to face the reality, much less answer
questions about it. The killing of Iraq is one of those bipartisan
barbarisms that both sides of the political elite agree to. And as we
all know, politics is supposed to end at the water’s edge. Sadly for
many foreign peoples, the water’s edge is where the carnage begins.
The buried secret of the U.S. Senate
Around the Web