Gonsalves
I’ve
been duped! But thanks to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, there’s hope
for me yet. “America has lost the propaganda war with Saddam. Period,” he wrote
back in February.
This
happened for many reasons, Friedman explained. “For one, Saddam totally
out-foxed Washington in the propaganda war. All you hear and read in the media
here is that the sanctions are starving the Iraqi people – which is true. But
the U.S. counter-arguments that by complying with U.N. resolutions Saddam could
get those sanctions lifted at any time are never heard,” he wrote.
The
amazing thing is: I wasn’t duped by Saddam and his ministers of propaganda. I
was hoodwinked by American and other Western sources of extraordinary integrity.
Following the war, Col. John Warden explained how military planners targeted
Iraq’s civilian infrastructure to provide “long-term leverage,” in full
knowledge that it “could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of
disease.”
Then
in March 1991, the New York Times ran a front-page article on a U.N. report
de-tailing how the war against Iraq had caused “near apocalyptic damage,” and
also “famines and epidemics.” The report called for “massive life-supporting
aid,” warning that “time was short.”
The
story summarized the U.S. position on the sanctions – “…by making life
uncom-fortable for the Iraqi people it will eventually encourage them to remove
President Sad-dam Hussein from power.”
With
a little digging, I discovered that “uncomfortable” meant no electricity, no
water, no sewage treatment systems, and epidemics caused by water-borne diseases
for the Iraqi people, which led a Harvard study team to (under)estimate 10 years
ago that 170,000 Iraqi children would die because of the sanctions.
What
really washed my brains was a 1992 survey published in the New England Jour-nal
of Medicine. Doctors from Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Oxford went to Iraq to
study the sanctions’ effect. They reported that due to the destruction of Iraq’s
infrastructure, 46,900 Iraqi children under the age of 5 died in the first eight
months of 1991.
At
that point, I was well on my way to dupe-dom – no doubt because “U.S.
counter-arguments…are never heard.” That being the unmitigated truth, ordinary
Americans must be extremely obtuse because U.S. counter-arguments have been
played like a bro-ken record all over the news media, with U.S. officials
blaming only Saddam.
“If
he wants a different relationship…all he has to do is change his behavior,”
according to former President Clinton.
The
well-read opinion pages of the “liberal” New York Times clarified the sanctions
rationale. “The purpose of worldwide sanctions is to induce the overthrow of
Saddam’s genocidal regime,” wrote William Safire. “If you squeeze Iraq long
enough, the Iraqi people will oust Saddam,” said Friedman, who candidly
explained the “logic of the sanctions.”
Until
Friedman woke me from my dogmatic slumber, I was foolishly asking: how are we
not at all responsible for the intended consequences of the sanctions we
imposed? If the sanctions are to “squeeze Iraq long enough” so that “the Iraqi
people will oust Sad-dam,” how come the Security Council resolutions imposing
the sanctions say nothing about such a goal?
And,
if the majority of Iraqis are forced to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence, how
are they supposed to summon the fortitude to oust a dictator?
I
find comfort in the knowledge I wasn’t the only one duped. Denis Halliday,
former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, and his successor Hans von Sponeck
both re-signed in protest of the sanctions, calling them genocide. Add to that
list Scott Ritter, chief UNSCOM inspector in Iraq, the pope and 53 U.S. Catholic
bishops.
Maybe
the biggest casualty of “the war Saddam won” is The Economist. “If, year in,
year out, the U.N. were systematically killing Iraqi children by air strikes,
Western gov-ernments would declare it intolerable, no matter how noble the
intention. They should find their existing policy just as unacceptable. In
democracies, the end does not justify the means,” the conservative Economist
opined last year.
On
July 3, the UN Security Council is scheduled to vote on what the Bush
administra-tion is calling “new, smart sanctions.”
“Sitting on the world’s second-largest oil reserves, Iraq was once, politics
aside, an ad-vanced country. Now its living standards are on par with
Ethiopia’s; UNICEF confirms a 160 percent rise in Iraq’s infant mortality rate
since 1991; and the middle classes have disappeared,” the Economist reported
last month.
Help
us Mr. Friedman. We’re being duped!
“Iraq
needs massive investment to rebuild its industry, its power grids and its
schools, and needs cash in hand to pay its engineers, doctors and teachers. None
of this looks likely to happen under smart sanctions,” the Economist concluded.
Is
there no relief for the victims of Saddam’s minions?
Now,
for those who agree with the British diplomat and writer Arthur Ponsonby that
“when war is declared, Truth is the first casualty,” it’s a good idea to
actually examine the Bush administration proposal for “new, smart sanctions”
against Iraq. That they’re being called “smart sanctions” is in implicit
recognition the current sanc-tions regime is, well, dumb.
Among
those critics are two former senior UN officials of impeccable integrity – Denis
Halliday and Hans von Sponeck who resigned their posts in protest, calling the
sanctions “genocide.” That’s the word used by even the conservative Scott
Ritter, a career military man and former UNSCOM chief inspector in Iraq.
The
main change with the “smart sanctions” is that a list will be drawn up, laying
out what military or “dual-use” items will be prohibited, instead of the current
policy in which imports are allowed into Iraq only if they are on the list of
allowable goods.
Proponents argue that the new plan will increase the amount of goods that flow
into Iraq so that the general civilian population will not unduly suffer as they
have over the past decade, while tightening the controls on any imports that
could be used for military purposes.
The
current sanctions call for 100 percent, quantitative disarmament of Iraq’s
Weap-ons of Mass Destruction program. When UNSCOM was pulled out of Iraq in
1998, Iraq’s WMD program had been qualitatively dismantled, according to Ritter.
Unfortunately, Ritter adds, the 100 percent benchmark is not only impossible to
reach, it’s being used to justify the sanctions indefinitely, giving Iraq no
incentive to comply; to say nothing of the likelihood that Iraq will never be
able to pay off the war reparations claims, totaling $320 billion as of October
2000.
Analyzing statements of US officials, it appears the motivation behind the
“smart sanctions” is to shift public opinion away from blaming the sanctions for
the humanitar-ian crisis in Iraq.
In an
excellent analysis of the new proposal by the director of Inter-Church Action, a
coalition of Canadian churches and agencies working on issues of “development,
relief and justice” in Africa, the Asian-Pacific and Latin America, Dale
Hildebrand quotes a US official who says: “In reality, this is a change in
perceptions. Most people think Iraqis are starving because the evil West is
keeping medicines away…We’re taking the tool of sanctions as propaganda away
from Saddam.”
The
list prohibiting explicit military hardware is a no-brainer, given Saddam’s
heinous human rights record. However, the list of banned “dual-use” items
requires close scru-tiny. For example, given the centrality of computer
technology to any modern economy, how will the smart sanctions determine what
components are for civilian purposes and which are likely to be used for
military purposes?
“An
American official involved in drawing up the new lists of banned items said that
the new plan is designed to prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass
destruction, missiles, and the technologies to build them,” Hildebrand points
out.
“The
concept of dual-use, when applied not only to specific physical goods but also
to capabilities and technologies, can quickly become a pretext for blocking
development of large segments of the civilian economy,” he writes.
Another key component of the sanctions is the Oil-For-Food program, which US
plan-ners point to as evidence of our humanitarian concern. Tragically, the
operation of the program is grossly misunderstood by most Americans who would
otherwise likely be in opposition to its current set-up.
Hans
von Sponeck, who ran the UN program until he resigned in protest, explains that
the $2 billion in oil that Iraq is allowed to sell every six months translates
into $182.70 per person, per year. That’s $15.23 a month. The Security Council
deems those provisions sufficient for all the needs of Iraqi citizens, even
though von Sponeck has explained in detail, on numerous occasions, the
deficiencies of a system that controls Iraq’s entire economy from Security
Council offices. (Interesting that free-market cheerleaders aren’t decrying the
evils of that command economy).
Hidlebrand’s conclusions are worth pondering. “While the proposed changes may
lead to some improvements for the people in Iraq – it is apparent that they do
not equate to the radical changes in policy….that are needed to address one of
the most serious hu-manitarian and political crises in recent history.”
As
former US federal attorney Kate Pflaumer reminded us in her op-ed piece two
weeks ago, it’s difficult to take seriously “the rule of law” when the leaders
of the free world bomb civilian infrastructure in violation of the Geneva
Convention and violate the US federal statue on terrorism by creating and
maintaining life-threatening conditions to coerce a sovereign nation and its
civilian population.