Press Action ::: Iraq: Sanctions and the looming war

Thursday, January 02, 2003

Iraq: Sanctions and the looming war

Book review by Tanweer Akram

Arnove, Anthony, ed., Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Updated Edition), South End Press, 2002. 224 pp. $16.

The U.S.-imposed and U.N.-legitimized sanctions on Iraq have been in force for more than a decade. The consequences of the sanctions have been quite deadly. Yet, the possibility of an end to sanctions is remote today and a new Persian Gulf war is highly likely unless there is a massive popular movement in advanced capitalist countries, particularly the United States, to stop the war. Since 9/11, Anglo-American authorities have relentlessly pursued a policy of provoking hostilities with Iraq under one pretext or another.

Iraq’s natural resources continue to loom in the background of the Western powers’ aim of establishing control over the country. This aim cannot be articulated too openly because of the shamelessness of trying to rob the inhabitants of a country of their own resources.

Initially, the Bush administration tried to justify its war plans by linking the Iraqi regime to al-Qaeda terrorists. In spite of concerted efforts, the administration failed to produce an iota of evidence of any link. Subsequently, U.S. authorities have tried to accuse Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction that could threaten Western countries, including the United States. Again no material evidence has been produced that shows Iraq possesses actual weapons of mass destruction. In fact Bush recently admitted: “We don’t know whether or not he has a nuclear weapon.”

Even if Iraq did posses such weapons, there is no reason to believe that it has the capability to launch them against NATO or the organization’s neighboring countries. Even if Iraq had the capability to use them, there is no reason to think that it is about to engage in aggression. None of the neighboring countries of Iraq, including those that it attacked previously, claims that Iraq poses any lethal danger to them at this time.

Nevertheless, the United States claims that Iraq is in “material breach” of U.N. Security Council Resolutions. With little regard for international law, the United States has asserted that it can engage in a preemptive application of force, without any explicit U.N. authorization. The United States currently is in the process of mobilizing its military forces to launch a war with Iraq. If the United States goes to war against Iraq, Israel may try to use it as a cover for its long-term plans of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

A new war is likely to bring greater catastrophe to the Iraqi people and put a large number of people in a more vulnerable and dangerous position. The antiwar movement must resolutely stand for the inalienable right of the Iraqi people to democratically choose their own leaders and their right to resist any regime of tyranny or foreign power.

It cannot be true that the Anglo-American ruling elites are concerned about the well-being and the rights of the Iraqis. No one concerned with people’s welfare could have possibly supported the Iraqi regime when it was killing Iraqis, Kurds, and Iranians in the 1980s. No one concerned with the quality of life of Iraqis can still continue to support a sanction regime that has been destroying Iraqi society and its economy since 1990.

Although the outcome of the planned war with Iraq cannot be predicted, the planned war not only is likely to put an unnecessary economic and social burden on Americans and put the Iraqi population at great risk for immense suffering but will foster conditions that increase the likelihood of terrorism and large-scale violence.

The updated edition of Anthony Arnove’s book, which makes an analytical yet impassioned case for lifting the sanctions against Iraq, is a boon to the antiwar community. It contains a wide range of essays that not only examine the origins of Anglo-American policies toward Iraq but also carefully document the effects of sanctions and the corporate media’s malfeasance, spins and misleading coverage of Iraq.

Several of the essays have been rewritten for the updated edition of the book. Arnove has written a new and detailed introduction that exposes the lies of the War Party. The book contains contributions by activists (Kathy Kelly, George Capiccio, Sharon Smith), journalists (David Barsamian, Robert Fisk, John Pilger), media critics (Ali Abunimah, Rania Masri), scholars (Naseer Aruri, Phyllis Bennis, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,) scientists (Dr. Peter Pellet, Dr. Huda Ammash), former international civil servants (Dennis Halliday) and others.

The price that the people of Iraq have been paying is colossal. More than half a million children have died due to sanctions. Child mortality in Iraq has risen from a level that was comparable to advanced industrialized countries to that of least developed countries with chronic shortages of food or devastation by civil war. Since the imposition of sanctions in late 1990, child mortality rates in Iraq have risen substantially (see the chart below).

The detailed description of life in Basra given in one of chapters of the book is a typical example of the cruelties that sanctions inflict on the people of Iraq on a daily basis. Iraq’s health care system has been ruined. The impact on Iraq’s educational system has been equally horrific. The school system is completely destroyed. This book is a testament to the terrible consequences of sanctions as well as the resilience of the Iraqi people.

More than 1 million Iraqis have died due to the sanctions. Iraq’s water supply facilities and waste disposal systems are in ruins because the sanctions have prevented Iraq from importing spare parts required to operate them. It is now known that U.S. war planners did not hesitate to damage Iraq’s water system. The country’s environment and agriculture are in shambles due to the sanctions and destruction caused by war.

Iraqi child mortality

Far from weakening the regime, the sanctions have strengthened the Iraqi ruling elite. The Iraqi regime had long denied civil and political rights to its population, but the material standards of life for the majority were high before the Gulf War. With the imposition of the sanctions, the economic opportunities and social capabilities of ordinary Iraqis were systematically downgraded and destroyed.

The Western elites have an interest in ensuring a subservient client regime in Iraq that obeys orders because of the country’s huge oil reserves, reported to be the second-largest proven reserves in the world, next in size only to Saudi Arabia.

The United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany as well as Russia and various Arab states were major supporters of the Iraqi regime during its worst days of human rights violations and aggression. The current professed concern for democracy or human rights in Iraq is merely a ruse for drumming up public support for sanctions regime.

Prior to the Gulf War of 1990-1991, a U.S. company called the American Type Culture Collection received U.S. Commerce Department authorization to supply to Iraq spores that could be used as biological weapons. If the U.S. authorities were actually interested in preventing the spread of biological weapons, they would have firstly restrained such production in the United States and secondly prevented international trade in biological weapons. But far from hampering the Iraqi regime’s lethal buildup, Iraq was a favored ally of the Western countries during its war against Iran and its repression of Kurds.

Western authorities provided substantial military and financial support to the Iraqi regime until the regime stopped toeing the line. Iraq’s invasion of Iran was in clear violation of that country’s sovereignty — just as its later invasion of Kuwait was in violation of international law — but pro-Western Arab regimes and the United States backed Iraq because of their dislike and fear of the Iranian revolution.

It was after the invasion of Kuwait when Saddam Hussein violated the acceptable “rules” of the Western powers that the “demonization” of Iraq started. After the Gulf War, U.S. authorities refused to provide access to captured Iraqi army weapons to rebelling Iraqis. Today, not only does Iraq face sanctions and the threat of further war, it is subject to fairly routine bombings by U.S. and British military planes. In the “no fly zone,” which is supposedly to protect Kurds, Turkish planes were allowed to indiscriminately bomb Kurds. Therefore, it cannot be true that Anglo-American elites are concerned about the human rights of the Kurdish people of the region.

Under the sanctions regime, the Iraqi authorities have no incentives to comply because they have no reason to believe that the United States has any intention to end the sanctions. The case for ending the inhumane policy is quite compelling. The deliberate destruction of the economic and social infrastructure of a country is a war crime.

The U.S. authorities have tried to blame the regime for the economic and social consequences of sanctions and have cited the relatively better conditions of the Kurdish region in the north. The Kurdish region in the north, which is under direct U.N. control, has fared somewhat better than the rest of the country, largely because of better funding, less population, cross-border trade, its agriculture, and regional and geographical advantages.

It should be borne in mind that U.N. humanitarian relief in Iraq is being funded with Iraq’s own oil earnings. In fact, 30 percent of Iraq’s oil revenue is devoted to repaying Kuwaitis and others who claim compensation for damages caused by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Therefore, U.N. programs in Iraq are not “foreign aid” programs but apparatuses to administer and control revenue generated through Iraqi oil sales.

It has been exposed that UNSCOM, the U.N. body that was formerly responsible for ensuring Iraqi compliance with U.N. Security Council resolution on disarmament, was used for spying, exactly as the Iraqi authorities had alleged.

The sanctions regime is contrary to humanitarian principles. It is absolutely inhumane to bar the importation of chorine to be used for water purification because of its alleged “dual-use” value. Obviously, any country that has achieved a modicum of human development could potentially develop weapons. There is hardly anything in the world that cannot be used in some way for harm as well as for good. However, for the United States and the United Kingdom, the mere possibility that Iraq could use chlorine for production of nefarious gas suffices to prevent it from importing chlorine for water treatment.

There are two important lessons that may be drawn from what has happened to the Iraqi people as a result of sanctions. Firstly, the sanctions against Iraq have brought catastrophic misery on the people. It is completely avoidable and needless suffering that must be stopped immediately. Secondly, one must remain ever vigilant against imperialist wars and illegitimate violence because the consequences are deadly. Iraq is an example of the tragedy that engulfs the world today. The patterns of deaths and destruction in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Colombia, East Timor and Israel/Palestine are stark reminders of the arrogance of the illegitimate concentration of power.

This book is an informed indictment of the sanctions policy and the War Party’s concerted effort to launch a second Persian Gulf War. It deserves to be widely read, especially by those who have been subjected to the mainstream media’s propaganda about “smart sanctions” and “preemptive” war on Iraq.

The planned Bush-Blair war with Iraq is not inevitable. The challenge for antiwar activists will be to build a movement that can stop this war. The antiwar movement needs to forge a broad-based alliance of progressive, faith-based, and more traditional libertarian political groups opposed to arbitrary violence in order to resist the path to war. Arnove and others contributors to this book should be credited for this extremely readable collection of essays that thoroughly exposes the immorality of Anglo-American Iraq policy. This will be definitely useful to serious antiwar activists.

Tanweer Akram is an economist.

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