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By a contributor February 20, 2005
It should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.
One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, repeatedly denounced what was happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was "unaware" of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halliday's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.(1)
The Amerikan population as a whole, the majority of whom are exploiters, had and continue to have collective responsibility for Amerikan imperialist militarism and genocide. In his essay "Some People Push Back," Ward Churchill adequately points out that the Amerikan population, and particularly the "well-educated," had collective knowledge of the consequences of the sanctions against Iraq. However, Amerikans had knowledge of the child mortality and other undesirable effects of the Iraq sanctions even earlier than Dennis Halliday's statements in 1998, or 1996, the year of the 60 Minutes broadcast with Madeline Albright.
The following is aimed at those who are spreading lies to the effect that Amerikans could not have known anything substantial, before the September 11, 2001, attacks, about the consequences of the Iraq sanctions. The focus is on u.$. mainstream newspapers, and these are just a handful of the articles Amerikans read in just 1991-1995. Several other similar articles from 1990-1992 are mentioned in "Support Ward Churchill; don't slander him all over again" (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mn/sept112001/wardchurchill021705.html). The first part of "What could AmeriKKKans have known about the Iraq sanctions?" (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/iraq/sanctionspolls.html) provides some television news media examples from 1991-1993. Keep in mind that this is not just about the viscerally repugnant effects of the Iraq sanctions, but rather a pattern of Amerikans, including leftists and even "socialists" (not to mention DemoKKKrats and RepubliKKKans), denying and then feigning ignorance about the consequences of Amerikan imperialist militarism and genocide generally.
On March 28, 1993, the Washington Post reported for the more pragmatic Amerikan parasites:
economic sanctions don't work very well. They sound tough, but in practice they often end up helping the very people who are supposed to be punished.
"None of the sanctions are working," said retired U.S. diplomat Robert B. Oakley, who just completed an assignment as special U.S. envoy in Somalia after serving at various times as ambassador to Pakistan, Zaire and Somalia.(2)
On June 19, 1992, columnist Charles Krauthammer, upholding military action as an alternative to sanctions, mentioned:
almost a year and a half of the most severe sanctions in history, applied to a country devastated by war, U.S. intelligence agencies report that Hussein is stronger today than he was a year ago.(3)
The above is a case of pro-imperialist Amerikan parasites criticizing the Iraq sanctions for selfish pragmatic reasons, but it is revealing. Still, in 1996, 58% of telephoned Amerikans supported continuing "both economic sanctions and military operations," and 16% supported continuing "economic sanctions against Iraq" (poll by the Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1996). In 1992, three times as many Amerikans supported maintaining "economic sanctions" compared with giving "money to finance groups in Iraq that want to overthrow him" (poll by NBC News, March 2, 1992).
On July 24, 1991, USA TODAY reported:
President Bush is looking for a way to relax U.N. sanctions against Iraq to halt ''the suffering of innocent women and children,'' he said Tuesday. . . . Bush has been torn between reports of malnutrition and epidemics in Iraq and his vow to isolate Saddam Hussein's government into oblivion.(4)
It appeared that George H. W. Bush himself made decisions based on knowledge of "malnutrition and epidemics in Iraq."
On December 18, 1991, The Washington Post reported:
Iraq said more than 80,000 of its children under 5 have died because of shortages caused by U.N. sanctions imposed over its invasion of Kuwait. . . . Iraq said last month that 65,000 children had died because of shortages of food and medicine and 350,000 more were at risk this winter. The U.N. Children's Fund said the figures were realistic.(5)
On September 8, 1991, The Washington Post presented excerpts from letters sent from Iraq to the united $tates:
Letters also describe the effect of sanctions in carefully chosen terms. "We are happy as a family. We enjoy reading by lamplight until our eyes are full of tears, then we sleep. Even in the daytime, we read when we have free time because there is no cooking gas, so we cook and make bread on kerosene space heaters. H -- and I spend two or three hours making bread from flour more like animal feed than it is flour, but that is all that is available. More recently, of course, real flour is in the shops, but at outrageous prices. People are beginning to hunt deer out of malnourishment and hunger."(6)
The most recent letters date from mid-July. This is the last one from one family: "I went to Amman for a few days. I tried to get immigration visas for myself and the family to any country in the world. My dear, life has become extremely difficult in Iraq. The prices continue to rise in a mad way beyond imagination but we manage in one way or another. God protect us from what will come next, it is bound to be worse."(6)
Feelings of distress resonated even among Iraqis in the united $tates who were against the Ba'ath Party. On July 24, 1991, an editorial in The Washington Post related:
But the greatest anguish is being endured now, as Iraqi Americans watch the governments of the United States and the allies listen to multiplying reports of hunger and disease with seeming passivity and indifference.
The shortages of food and medicine in Iraq are at catastrophic levels. Children are dying daily from malnutrition, malnourishment and the absence of basic medical care and such common drugs as antibiotics. In addition to cholera, typhoid and gastroenteritis, previously unknown diseases in Iraq such as kwashiorkor and marasmus are killing children.(7)
Other writers urged readers to consider the so-called unintended consequences of the Iraq sanctions. On November 21, 1993, William F. Woo commented in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri):
Sanctions may be politically convenient or cheap for the nation imposing them, but their harsh effects upon civilian populations - despite so-called precautions to exempt food or medicine - make it important that moral considerations occur before they are ordered. They are the economic equivalent of warfare, and like the real warfare of guns and bombs they can add to the suffering of innocent people who already have troubles enough.(8)
Perceptions of the sanctions-caused suffering were reflected elsewhere in the mainstream newspaper press. On August 1, 1993, the Chicago Sun-Times (Associated Press) reported:
Ordinary Iraqis struggle to survive from day to day as the sanctions bite ever deeper, law and order inexorably breaks down and a once rigidly structured society collapses.
Beggars, virtually unknown in Baghdad before the war, crowd the streets. They ask for food, not money. Crime is endemic, despite severe penalties that make even car theft punishable by death.(9)
On April 9, 1993, Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) (Wire Reports) reported that:
Iraq's labor minister said yesterday that U.N. trade sanctions and the effects of the Persian Gulf war have closed most factories in Iraq and caused record unemployment.
Omed Medhat Mubarak said tens of thousands of factories have shut down since the war because of a shortage of raw materials and spare parts.(10)
Of course, far more articles in just the month of April were dedicated to unemployment rates in the united $nakes.
This was not because of a lack of "authoritative" reporting on the consequences of the Iraq sanctions. On July 16, 1991, USA TODAY reported:
A U.N. humanitarian report Monday urged easing sanctions against Iraq, calling such a move ''imperative'' for helping war-ravaged civilians. . . . Claims that 170,000 Iraqi children could die from war-related illness and starvation have been challenged, yet doctors agree malnutrition is rampant among Iraqi children.(11)
On July 5, 1991, The Washington Post reported:
Iraqi civilians, complaining that the country's worsening economic crisis is hurting them far more than the government, are expressing bewilderment and annoyance at U.S. insistence on continuing international trade sanctions. . . . Although they recognize that the U.S. aim is to force the ouster of President Saddam Hussein -- a goal many Iraqis support -- they say this is not likely and in the meantime they are bearing the brunt of the economic hardship. As a result, many say, they are beginning to think that the Iraqi people, not the government, are the target of U.S. hostility. . . . One woman said she didn't know what the word "embargo" means, "but we need food!"(12)
On October 22, 1991, The New York Times reported:
A new public health study by American and other Western experts in Iraq says the country's child mortality rate has nearly tripled and perhaps even quadrupled as a result of the Persian Gulf war, civil strife and international sanctions.
Such an elevated mortality rate could mean tens of thousands of additional deaths in Iraq's population of more than three million children under five years old, officials who took part in the survey said, although they declined in their study to make specific projections of overall deaths.(13)
News articles were interspersed with disturbing editorials and letters to the editors. On October 25, 1991, Frances Farenthold related in USA TODAY:
In May, I saw the wizened faces, the emaciated bodies, the parched skin of babies and children and the fearful expressions of their mothers in Iraqi hospitals. I smelled the stench of sewage and listened to the frantic pleas of exhausted and bedraggled doctors asking that sanctions be lifted.
This week's report indicates conditions have not improved; mortality rates have almost quadrupled since August 1990.(14)
On April 26, 1993, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania) (Wire Dispatches) reported:
Death rates among young children in Iraq have increased by more than 800 percent because of U.N. economic sanctions, Iraq said yesterday. . . . 362 Iraqi children under age 5 died of malnutrition, diarrhea and pneumonia. It said that figure was up to 3,419 children in March 1993, an increase of 844 percent. Iraq blames the increased death on shortages of food and medicine from the U.N. sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.(15)
On December 27, 1995, a Washington Post editorial reported:
A study commissioned by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that a half-million Iraqi children have died because of the international economic sanctions in effect since the end of the gulf war. To this stunning toll must be added the malnutrition and disease affecting the many others, children and adults, who are still alive. It adds up to a second gulf war of historic proportions -- a war whose immense civilian casualties apparently fall most conspicuously upon the young.(16)
Estimates of Iraqi children dead from the sanctions varied, but they were consistently high. Total estimates as of 1996, reported in the mainstream newspaper press and elsewhere, were unquestionably higher than total Amerikan casualties in the Viet Nam War. On December 24, 1995, an editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin) commented:
Iraqi children's suffering is the result of a policy championed by the United States. . . . The dimensions of Iraq's plight, and especially the suffering of its children, were authoritatively documented earlier this month in The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, by two researchers from Harvard University who visited Iraq in August under U.N. auspices. . . . "Water and sanitation systems have deteriorated, hospitals are functioning at 40% capacity, and the population is largely sustained by government rations which provide 1,000 calories per person per day. . . . Since August 1990, 567,000 children in Iraq have died as a consequence" of the sanctions.(17)
The mainstream newspaper press portrayed a struggle, even within the United Nations, over the Iraq sanctions. On December 29, 1995, the Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA) reported:
Sanctions on Iraq will remain in place until Baghdad complies with all U.N. Security Council resolutions, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said Thursday. But Boutros-Ghali said he hopes Baghdad will accept a U.N. offer to let Iraq sell $2 billion worth of oil to buy badly needed food and medicine for its 20 million people. "These sanctions cause me pain," said the U.N. chief, referring to the misery the 5-year-old embargo has caused the Iraqi people. Russia, meanwhile, shipped 27 tons of food and medical supplies to Baghdad Thursday for Iraqi children who are reported to be suffering from malnutrition. Russian officials in Amman, Jordan, said the shipment was trucked to Iraq from Jordan because the United Nations refused to allow it to be airlifted to Baghdad.(18)
On December 11, 1995, Barbara Crossette of The New York Times reported:
The effects that five years of sanctions are having on children in Iraq has been a concern of UNICEF and other U.N. agencies. Experts say they believe that at least 500,000 children may have died because of the sanctions and because of President Saddam Hussein's refusal to allow a United Nations-supervised sale of Iraqi oil to buy food, medicine and other emergency supplies.(19)
On October 16, 1994, The Washington Post, as if anticipating Ward Churchill's "Some People Push Back" essay, reported:
Signs of Iraq's agony -- due in large part to the U.N. trade embargo, imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 -- are abundant in this once prosperous, oil-rich country. The health care system, once among the best in the Middle East, is in shambles; Baghdad's raw sewage is being dumped for the third straight year into the Tigris River, the main source of drinking water; more babies are dying of malnutrition; the proportion of young girls dropping out of elementary school is up to 17 percent from 2.3 percent; crime and corruption are up; the educated are leaving and the middle class is in ruins. . . . The sanctions also have generated anti-American sentiment among Iraqis that some observers fear could be exploited, either by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- if he survives the U.S. challenge to his leadership -- or by Islamic fundamentalists. (20) (emphasis mine)
The divergence between the u.$. governments' intentions with respect to the Iraq sanctions, and the "unintended" consequences of the sanctions, was apparent in other ways. The seeming lack of control gave pause to pro-imperialist pragmatists who were considering "military operations" against Iraq, but should also have motivated people to oppose the sanctions as part of exposing and resisting the crimes of imperialism. On May 22, 1991, Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times reported the following:
The [Harvard University] medical team's report raises new questions about whether the Bush Administration's postwar strategy of continued economic sanctions against Iraq will lead to rising mortality rates in the nation of 18 million, where health problems, disease and malnutrition are reported to be growing out of control.
Senior Bush Administration officials have said in the past that they will not allow Iraqi civilians to starve as Washington calibrates a postwar pressure campaign to keep tight trade sanctions on Iraq to force President Saddam Hussein from power. But the Harvard study suggests that a combination of disease, food shortages and high prices is already causing thousands of deaths.(21)
This is just a sample of the newspaper pieces, from 1991-1995, covering the murderous consequences of the sanctions against Iraq. The mainstream newspaper press and television news media continued to report on the consequences of the Iraq sanctions in 1996-2003.
Notes:
1. "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mn/sept112001/somepeoplepushback.html
2. Stuart Auerbach, "Are Sanctions More Harmful Than Helpful?; Experts Say Embargoes Enrich Targets, Hurt Poor," Washington Post, March 28, 1993, LexisNexis.
3. Charles Krauthammer, "The Sanctions Fallacy; They are no alternative to military force," Washington Post, June 19, 1992.
Also printed in:
Charles Krauthammer, "The Failure of Sanctions," Chicago Sun-Times, June 21, 1992.
Charles Krauthammer, "FORSAKE THE FANTASY THAT SANCTIONS WORK," St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), June 21, 1992.
Charles Krauthammer, "Sanctions are still no replacement for military force," St. Petersburg Times (Florida), June 22, 1992.
Charles Krauthammer, "Let's learn from litany of sanctions," Atlanta Journal and Constitution, June 22, 1992.
And others.
4. Jessica Lee and Lee Michael Katz, "Bush may ease Iraqi sanctions," USA TODAY, July 24, 1991.
5. Washington Post, "Iraq Blames Sanctions for Deaths," December 18, 1991.
6. Yasmine Bahrani, "...and Sorrow In the Mail; Letters From Baghdad: Painting A Portrait of Bitter Desolation," Washington Post, September 8, 1991.
7. Rend Francke, "How to Help Iraq's Innocents," Washington Post, July 24, 1991.
8. William F. Woo, "ECONOMIC WARFARE, TOO, HAS VICTIMS," St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), November 21, 1993.
9. Dilip Ganguly, "In Iraq; Sanctions Bite Into Society's Strictness," Chicago Sun-Times (Associated Press), August 1, 1993.
10. Jordan Amman, "UNEMPLOYMENT SOARS IN IRAQ FROM SANCTIONS," Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) (Wire Reports), April 9, 1993.
11. Lee Michael Katz, "U.N. report: Ease Iraq sanctions // Says civilians on 'brink of calamity'," USA TODAY, July 16, 1991.
12. Caryle Murphy, "Iraqis Say Sanctions Hurt the Wrong People; Saddam 'Has Everything' but Others Suffer," Washington Post, July 5, 1991.
13. Patrick E. Tyler, "Study Says Iraq's Child Mortality Rate Has Tripled," New York Times, October 22, 1991.
14. Frances Farenthold, "USA must share blame," USA TODAY, October 25, 1991.
15. "SANCTIONS BLAMED," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania) (Wire Dispatches), April 26, 1993.
16. "The War Against Iraq's Children," Washington Post, December 27, 1995.
17. Richard Foster, "In U.S.-Iraqi face-off, it's the children who do the dying," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin), December 24, 1995.
18. "IRAQI SANCTIONS WILL STAY, U.N. CHIEF SAYS," Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), December 29, 1995.
19. Barbara Crossette (New York Times), "Children's welfare has been brutalized by warfare, UNICEF says," Houston Chronicle, December 11, 1995.
20. Caryle Murphy, "Sanctions Mean Hardship, Anger For Iraqi Civilians; Diplomats Say U.N. Measures May Hurt Stability of Region," Washington Post, October 16, 1994.
21. Patrick E. Tyler," Health Crisis Said to Grip Iraq In Wake of War's Destruction," New York Times, May 22, 1991.