>could draw an advantage from obstructing humanitarian aid, he would no doubt
>do so. However, according to a FAO study: "The government of Iraq introduced
>a public food rationing system with effect from within a month of the
>imposition of the embargo. It provides basic foods at 1990 prices, which
>means they are now virtually free. This has a life-saving nutritional
>benefit . . . and has prevented catastrophe for the Iraqi people."
>
>The rebellion in the UN reaches up to Kofi Annan, once thought to be the
>most compliant of secretary-generals. Appointed after Madeleine Albright,
>then the US representative at the UN, had waged a campaign to get rid of his
>predecessor, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, he pointedly renewed Hans von Sponeck's
>contract in the face of a similar campaign by the Americans. He shocked them
>last October when he accused the US of "using its muscle on the Sanctions
>Committee to put indefinite 'holds' on more than $700 million worth of
>humanitarian goods that Iraq would like to buy." When I met Kofi Annan, I
>asked if sanctions had all but destroyed the credibility of the UN as a
>benign body. "Please don't judge us by Iraq," he said.
>
>On January 7, the UN's Office of Iraq Programme reported that shipments
>valued at almost a billion and a half dollars were "on hold". They covered
>food, health, water and sanitation, agriculture, education. On February 7,
>its executive director attacked the Security Council for holding up spares
>for Iraq's crumbling oil industry. "We would appeal to all members of the
>Security Council," he wrote, "to reflect on the argument that unless key
>items of oil industry are made available within a short time, the production
>of oil will drop . . . This is a clear warning." In other words, the less
>oil Iraq is allowed to pump, the less money will be available to buy food
>and medicine. According to the Iraqis at the UN, it was US representative on
>the Sanctions Committee who vetoed shipments the Security Council had
>authorised. Last year, a senior US official told the Washington Post, "The
>longer we can fool around in the [Security] Council and keep things static,
>the better." There is a pettiness in sanctions that borders on
>vindictiveness. In Britain, Customs and Excise stops parcels going to
>relatives, containing children's clothes and toys. Last year, the chairman
>of the British Library, John Ashworth, wrote to Harry Cohen MP that, "after
>consultation with the foreign office", it was decided that books could no
>longer be sent to Iraqi students.
>
>In Washington, I interviewed James Rubin, an under secretary of state who
>speaks for Madeleine Albright. When asked on US television if she thought
>that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying,
>Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is
>worth it." When I questioned Rubin about this, he claimed Albright's words
>were taken out of context. He then questioned the "methodology" of a report
>by the UN's World Health Organisation, which had estimated half a million
>deaths. Advising me against being "too idealistic", he said: "In making
>policy, one has to choose between two bad choices . . . and unfortunately
>the effect of sanctions has been more than we would have hoped." He referred
>me to the "real world" where "real choices have to be made". In mitigation,
>he said, "Our sense is that prior to sanctions, there was serious poverty
>and health problems in Iraq." The opposite was true, as Unicef's data on
>Iraq before 1990, makes clear.
>
>The irony is that the US helped bring Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party to power
>in Iraq, and that the US (and Britain) in the 1980s conspired to break their
>own laws in order, in the words of a Congressional inquiry, to "secretly
>court Saddam Hussein with reckless abandon", giving him almost everything he
>wanted, including the means of making biological weapons. Rubin failed to
>see the irony in the US supplying Saddam with seed stock for anthrax and
>botulism, that he could use in weapons, and claimed that the Maryland
>company responsible was prosecuted. It was not: the company was given
>Commerce Department approval.
>
>Denial is easy, for Iraqis are a nation of unpeople in the West, their
>panoramic suffering of minimal media interest; and when they are news, care
>is always taken to minimise Western culpability. I can think of no other
>human rights issue about which the governments have been allowed to sustain
>such deception and tell so many bare-faced lies. Western governments have
>had a gift in the "butcher of Baghdad", who can be safely blamed for
>everything. Unlike the be-headers of Saudi Arabia, the torturers of Turkey
>and the prince of mass murderers, Suharto, only Saddam Hussein is so
>loathsome that his captive population can be punished for his crimes.
>British obsequiousness to Washington's designs over Iraq has a certain
>craven quality, as the Blair government pursues what Simon Jenkins calls a
>"low-cost, low-risk machismo, doing something relatively easy, but obscenely
>cruel". The statements of Tony Blair and Robin Cook and assorted sidekick
>ministers would, in other circumstances, be laughable. Cook: "We must nail
>the absurd claim that sanctions are responsible for the suffering of the
>Iraqi people", Cook: "We must uphold the sanctity of international law and
>the United Nations . . ." ad nauseam. The British boast about their
>"initiative" in promoting the latest Security Council resolution, which
>merely offers the prospect of more Kafkaesque semantics and prevarication in
>the guise of a "solution" and changes nothing.
>
>What are sanctions for? Eradicating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, says
>the Security Council resolution. Scott Ritter, a chief UN weapons inspector
>in Iraq for five years, told me: "By 1998, the chemical weapons
>infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed by UNSCOM (the UN
>inspections body) or by Iraq in compliance with our mandate. The biological
>weapons programme was gone, all the major facilities eliminated. The nuclear
>weapons programme was completely eliminated. The long range ballistic
>missile programme was completely eliminated. If I had to quantify Iraq's
>threat, I would say [it is] zero." Ritter resigned in protest at US
>interference; he and his American colleagues were expelled when American spy
>equipment was found by the Iraqis. To counter the risk of Iraq
>reconstituting its arsenal, he says the weapons inspectors should go back to
>Iraq after the immediate lifting of all non-military sanctions; the
>inspectors of the international Atomic Energy Agency are already back. At
>the very least, the two issues of sanctions and weapons inspection should be
>entirely separate. Madeleine Albright has said: "We do not agree that if
>Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction,
>sanctions should be lifted." If this means that Saddam Hussein is the
>target, then the embargo will go on indefinitely, holding Iraqis hostage to
>their tyrant's compliance with his own demise. Or is there another agenda?
>In January 1991, the Americans had an opportunity to press on to Baghdad and
>remove Saddam, but pointedly stopped short. A few weeks later, they not only
>failed to support the Kurdish and Shi'a uprising, which President Bush had
>called for, but even prevented the rebelling troops in the south from
>reaching captured arms depots and allowed Saddam Hussein's helicopters to
>slaughter them while US aircraft circled overhead. At they same time,
>Washington refused to support Iraqi opposition groups and Kurdish claims for
>independence.
>
>"Containing" Iraq with sanctions destroys Iraq's capacity to threaten US
>control of the Middle East's oil while allowing Saddam to maintain internal
>order. As long as he stays within present limits, he is allowed to rule over
>a crippled nation. "What the West would ideally like," says Said Aburish,
>the author, "is another Saddam Hussein." Sanctions also justify the huge US
>military presence in the Gulf, as Nato expands east, viewing a vast new oil
>protectorate stretching from Turkey to the Caucasus. Bombing and sanctions
>are ideal for policing this new order: a strategy the president of the
>American Physicians for Human Rights calls "Bomb Now, Die Later". The
>perpetrators ought not be allowed to get away with this in our name: for the
>sake of the children of Iraq, and all the Iraqs to come
>
>© John Pilger
>
>© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000
>
>
>Michael D. Wallace
>Department of Political Science
>University of British Columbia
>Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z1
>phone:(604)822-4550, fax:822-5540
>_______
>Macdonald Stainsby
>-----
>Check out the Tao ten point program: http://new.tao.ca
>***
>"Those who preach the doctrine of the class struggle are always persecuted by
>those who practice it".
>-George Bernard Shaw
>
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