by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
The brutal bombings and on-going
sanctions against Iraq, led by the US but also backed by
many foreign governments
on the US payroll, have been in place for fully ten 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 US 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. Madeline 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 US 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 US is immense. More than half
of the million dead are
children. Indeed, the UN estimates that the under-five mortality
rate has doubled since sanctions
began. Hospitals, water treatment plants, and the rest of
the nation's infrastructure
is 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.
US taxpayers are paying for
all of this. And to enforce this policy of national destruction,
the US keeps service men
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 UN'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 UN 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 US 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 US has agreed to small
shipments of food and medicine, but even here, the US 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 good: syringes without
needles and the like. Since
the UN 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 US 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 US 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 US 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.
August 18, 2000
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,
is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in
Auburn, Alabama. He also
edits a daily news site, LewRockwell.com.