Iraq Under Seige - Book review
The Unending War: Considering the Sanctions against the People of Iraq
by Rahul Mahajan; photographs by Alan Pogue
IRAQ UNDER SIEGE:
The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War.
Edited by Anthony Arnove.
Photographs by Alan Pogue.
South End Press.
216 pages. $16.00 (paper).
They made a wasteland and called it peace.
- Tacitus
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it.
- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked by
reporter Leslie Stahl whether U.S. policy objectives in Iraq were worth the death of 500,000 children
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The war against Iraq is not over. The past decade, marked internationally
by a ceaseless U.S. effort to force other countries to open their markets
to First World multinational corporations, has simultaneously seen Iraq cut
off from the world, under a state of siege known as "economic sanctions."
The situation is not as paradoxical as it first seems, since both "free
trade" and the sanctions involve control of the policies of other countries
by the elites of the First World. The sanctions against Iraq constitute the
most comprehensive economic blockade of any country in modern times: in
actual effect, a war against civilians that preferentially targets
children, the elderly, and the poor.
The effects of this blockade on a country that once imported 70
percent of its food requirements, whose entire infrastructure was reduced
to rubble by possibly the most intense bombing campaign in history, have
been devastating. The number killed by the sanctions alone since 1990,
variously estimated by different United Nations agencies, is likely over 1
million in all. Half of the dead are children under the age of five.
According to reliable international estimates, another 5,000 or more
children under five die every month as a consequence of sanctions. These
innocent victims are caught between two forces that have repeatedly shown
their callous disregard for human rights: Saddam Hussein and the U.S.
government.
The effects of the sanctions are becoming widely known. After years of
silence, the U.S. media, in response to the heroic efforts of a small but
dedicated group of international activists, have recently given some
mainstream coverage to the conditions of life in Iraq, most notably in an
excellent feature by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (available at
www.seattle-pi.com/iraq/). Although such coverage is not comprehensive, and
is generally anecdotal rather than statistical, cumulatively it does paint
an illuminating picture of a country in crisis.
One cannot, however, rely on the mainstream media to understand or report
the diabolical way in which the sanctions are enforced, the steady stream
of lies and disinformation disseminated by the U.S. government, the
culpability of the United States, or, indeed, the real reasons for the
policy. Over the past several years, much has been written on postwar Iraq.
The work spans a broad range: Out of the Ashes, by Andrew and Patrick
Cockburn, details the inner workings of Iraq's government and of covert
U.S. operations in Iraq; Endgame, by Scott Ritter, chronicles the saga of
weapons inspections; Iraq: Sanctions and Beyond, by Anthony Cordesman and
Ahmed Hashim, analyzes Iraq as a security issue from a military
perspective; The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law, and Natural Justice, by
Geoff Simons, is a magisterial analysis and critique of the sanctions and
of U.S. motives in Iraq. Interestingly, each of these authors characterizes
the sanctions as a cruel and untenable policy, which inflicts massive harm
on innocents while offering no chance of attaining any of the U.S.
government's stated goals.
Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, a new collection
from South End Press, is a valuable addition to this literature. Like
Simons' book, it contains the necessary analysis to see beneath the surface
of U.S. proclamations, and adds the vital dimension of personal experience.
Most of the contributors have visited Iraq, and among them are some of the
foremost activists in the anti-sanctions movement. The book includes pieces
by political analysts Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn; journalists Robert Fisk
and John Pilger; Middle East experts Phyllis Bennis and Barbara Nimri Aziz;
Peter Pellett, head of three U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization
missions to Iraq; Iraqi biologist Huda Ammash; and prominent anti-sanctions
activists Kathy Kelly (founder of Voices in the Wilderness, which has made
over thirty trips to Iraq bringing medicine, in defiance of the sanctions),
and Rania Masri, director of the Iraq Action Coalition. The book also
includes an interview with Denis Halliday, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in
Iraq until he resigned in 1998 in protest of the sanctions. (His successor,
Hans von Sponeck, and Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program's
mission to Iraq, have done the same.) The result is a sustained, coherent,
and comprehensive critique of U.S. policy on Iraq.
The Results of the Sanctions
Kelly describes hospitals full of children suffering from kwashiorkor and
marasmus (diseases of severe malnutrition); doctors forced to stand by and
watch while these children die because they have no medicine; people dying
from waterborne diseases because Iraq has been allowed to import neither
enough chlorine to treat the water nor new pipes to replace old, broken
ones. Robert Fisk describes an estimated 300 tons of depleted uranium
ordnance in southern Iraq, and an explosion of childhood leukemia and
grotesque birth defects in that region since the war. In pre-war Iraq, the
cure rate for leukemia was 76 percent; under the sanctions, leukemia is a
death sentence. Professor Pellett covers the effects on the country as a
whole: average food intake has declined by one-third; growth-stunting and
wasting are now as common as in the worst-off Third World countries;
mortality for children under five years old is almost 2.5 times the
pre-sanctions rate.
Considering these heavily documented, accumulating casualties, the
reflexive U.S. response has been that all this suffering is the fault of
Saddam Hussein. It is undeniable that Hussein cares more about his own
power than about the welfare of his people; that a small elite lives very
well while most Iraqis are suffering; and that anyone perceived as a threat
to Hussein's power risks imprisonment or death. But it is also true that
during the Seventies and Eighties, prior to the Gulf War, Hussein presided
over a tremendous increase in the health and well-being of the Iraqi people
- illiteracy almost wiped out, education free through the graduate level,
health care excellent and free. In addition, most U.N. relief officials
confirm that the only thing now preventing mass starvation has been the
Iraqi government's food rationing system, implemented shortly after the
institution of sanctions. That system has drawn praise for its fairness and
efficiency from all knowledgeable quarters.
It is true that the Iraqi elites - like those in most countries,
including the United States - will buy expensive M.R.I. machines despite
widespread shortages of basic medical supplies. But the amount of money
re-directed by those sorts of transactions is minimal in relation to the
needs of the Iraqi people. If anything, in the U.S. the social inequity is
much greater - hospitals here glitter with fancy equipment while 45 million
people, disproportionately children, remain uninsured and without access to
basic preventative care. It is illuminating to see the conventional
defenders of the free market and of corporate super-profits, when they
consider Iraq, suddenly discovering socialism.
Since the actual facts are far from sufficient for the U.S.
government to defend its sanctions policy, the administration has resorted
instead to a remarkable array of disinformation. One of the hoariest
charges is that Saddam has misappropriated United Nations Oil-for-Food
funds to build palaces. Yet the simple structure of these transactions make
that misappropriation quite impossible. Under Security Council Resolutions
986 and 1153, Iraq is allowed to sell up to 5.2 billion dollars worth of
oil every six months (that cap was recently raised). Roughly 3 billion
dollars of that money goes to meet the needs of 23 million Iraqis (the rest
is designated in advance for "reparations" to Kuwaitis and others). As the
piece here by Voices in the Wilderness points out, no funds from the
Oil-for-Food program even enter Iraq: all the money goes to a New York
account of the Bank of Paris, from which funds are disbursed by the U.N. to
pay for specific contracts Iraq has with foreign companies.
Similarly false is the charge, usually accompanied in the U.S.
press by photographs of warehouses full of goods, that supplies are being
"hoarded" by the regime. U.N. officials in charge of monitoring the
distribution disagree. The explanation lies rather in the way the
Oil-for-Food program works. Every contract Iraq makes with a foreign
company must include a complete specification of the end use of every item
contracted for. It must then be approved by the U.N. Sanctions Committee, a
body with one representative from each member of the Security Council, any
one of whom can veto or indefinitely suspend any contract for any reason.
If a contract cannot be fulfilled exactly as written, it is cancelled and
the whole process must begin again. This procedure creates many problems
for the Iraqis. They are not allowed to import refrigerated trucks because
such trucks could have military uses - which means that perishable items
(e.g., cancer medicine) cannot be transported. Some warehouses have only a
single operating forklift.
Equally serious is the problem of "complementarity." Frequently,
the Iraqis receive insulin but no syringes, heart-lung machines but not the
computers to run them. They are then forced to keep the goods they receive
warehoused, hoping that the Sanctions Committee will allow the
complementary equipment in. This problem occurs so often that many
activists suspect that it is done on purpose. The U.S. is responsible for
over 1,000 vetoes and holds on Oil-for-Food contracts; Britain is a distant
second with 120.
The Stated Motives
Such peremptory behavior suggests we should question closely the
government's stated motives. The two primary justifications for U.S.
support of the sanctions are (a) that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
make it a threat to its neighbors, and (b) that the U.S. is simply
interested in upholding international law. As Anthony Arnove points out in
the introduction to Iraq Under Siege, however, the U.S. has expressed no
desire to limit its own weapons of mass destruction, or those of its
allies. The U.S. maintains the largest such arsenal in the world, including
nuclear and chemical weapons, and it supports and arms allied countries
with severe records of regional aggression and human rights violations,
such as Israel and Turkey. Nor is Iraq the only country to use weapons of
mass destruction - the U.S. has used such weapons more than any other
country.
Furthermore, Iraq is no longer a threat to any of its neighbors.
Scott Ritter, once a U.N. official in the weapons monitoring program and no
friend of the Hussein regime, writes, "Iraq today possesses no meaningful
weapons of mass destruction," and his claims have been echoed by other
weapons inspectors. While Iraq's military has collapsed and its weapons
have been dismantled, other countries in the area have engaged in an orgy
of weapons-buying, mostly from the U.S.
The international law argument is even more absurd. The sanctions
violate the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the starvation of civilians
as a method of warfare, and also, as Pellett points out, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(ratified by every country except the U.S. and Somalia). The December 1998
Desert Fox campaign, and the continuing "low-level" bombing ever since -
never authorized by the Security Council - are violations of the U.N.
Charter. The so-called "no-fly zones" have no U.N. authorization, and are
simply a bi-lateral (U.S. and Britain) exertion of imperial power. The
bombing - barely reported in the mainstream media, yet the longest campaign
since the Vietnam War - has killed hundreds of innocent civilians.
Another frequent defense of the sanctions is that they are somehow
intended to bring down Hussein and his regime. This is an odd claim, since
observers across the political spectrum - including the Iraqi opposition -
insist that the sanctions have strengthened the Iraqi leader. The sanctions
give the regime more control over the lives of ordinary Iraqis, who are now
entirely dependent on the government dole, and have shifted the focus of
ordinary Iraqis' anger away from their government and toward the U.S.
Moreover, public energy is entirely consumed in the struggle for survival,
making political action all the more difficult.
The Permanent Motivations
So what are the real motives driving this policy? It's hard to do more than
speculate, but the writers in Iraq Under Siege present some plausible
possibilities. Arnove argues that the primary motivation of postwar U.S.
foreign policy has been to retain its position of extreme privilege - as
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it approvingly, "The hidden
hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot
flourish without McDonnell Douglas." To this general motivation Chomsky
adds the first rule of U.S. Middle East policy: that the resources of the
region belong not to the people of the region, but to the U.S. Any
development that might imperil that presumed ownership must be met with
appropriate force. Given that unspoken and unacknowledged presumption,
Chomsky argues, the sanctions make sense. After nationalizing its oil, Iraq
had spread the benefits of its oil revenues, creating a significant
highly-educated middle class which could not so easily be controlled by a
weak feudal elite, such as those that rule in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Under this logic, continuing U.S. hegemony in the area requires the
targeting of not just the rulers, but the general populace.
A related question is whether the sanctions can be considered
genocide. As Denis Halliday says in his interview, "It certainly is a valid
word in my view, when you have a situation where we see thousands of deaths
per month, a possible total of 1 million to 1.5 million over the last nine
years. If that is not genocide, then I don't know quite what is." The U.N.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(adopted in 1948, ratified with reservations by the U.S. in 1988), includes
within its definition: "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of
life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part." The sanctions do seem calculated to destroy a significant segment of
Iraqi society. The question of intent is less clear - certainly it is not
as crude as the express desire to kill all Iraqis.
But practically speaking, the continued sanctions hold the Iraqi
civilian population hostage against the (undefined) good behavior of Saddam
Hussein. Yet Hussein has no incentive to comply any further - for, as even
conservatives like Cordesman and Ritter acknowledge, Clinton and various
subordinates have repeatedly indicated that even should Iraq disarm
completely, sanctions will not be lifted until Hussein is dead.
Furthermore, the shapers of the policy consistently proclaim Hussein's
indifference to the suffering of his people - never acknowledging that this
supposition entirely obviates their argument for the sanctions.
The basic mandate behind the sanctions is also unreasonably broad -
as Chomsky says, "There is indeed a way to eliminate the capability of
producing weapons of mass destruction, only one way, and that is the
Carthaginian solution: you totally destroy the society." However extreme
such a measure might appear, it seems to be, alas, effectively what the
sanctions are doing.
Iraq Under Siege concludes on an uncertainly hopeful note, with a
description of various activist efforts against the sanctions, which
sympathetic readers shall wish to pursue. It is mildly heartening to note
that a recent letter to the president calling for the lifting of economic
sanctions, sponsored by Congressmen John Conyers of Michigan and Tom
Campbell of California, was signed by seventy congresspeople (only two of
whom, Ciro Rodríguez and Sheila Jackson Lee, are from Texas). Iraq may
still be saved, if enough Americans can be persuaded to act on their moral
responsibility to put an end to the genocidal crimes of our government.
Reading Iraq Under Siege is a good place to begin.
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To: iac-discussion@egroups.com
From: Rahul Mahajan <.rahulm@mail.utexas.edu>
[If you want to get information on Iraq and the sanctions not readily
available elsewhere contact: http://iraqaction.org/discussion.html
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