Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (24 page)

The effect of comprehensive sanctions was deadly. Because
they followed on the heels of a war that had targeted and destroyed Iraq’s physical infrastructure, there was a veritable social and demographic disaster. Yet public knowledge of the humanitarian crisis was slow in coming. Part of the reason lay in the fact that the UN human-rights rapporteur on Iraq was limited to identifying human-rights violations by the government of Iraq; the rapporteur was prohibited by mandate from looking at human-rights violations as a result of the sanctions. At the same time, the oil-for-food program lacked an evaluation component and therefore also lacked a trigger mechanism that would force a response if conditions deteriorated. As the dimensions of the humanitarian crisis became known, two nonpermanent members of the Security Council, Canada and Brazil, pushed through a resolution in 1998 mandating the UN to assess humanitarian conditions in Iraq. The result was the 1999 UNICEF demographic survey, which for the first time brought to light comprehensive and credible evidence of the human tragedy wrought by the sanctions regime.

Before 1999, there had been two kinds of studies: forty-three independent studies on the nutritional status of Iraqi children carried out over fifteen years, and data on the number of deaths in hospitals, compiled by the Iraqi Ministry of Health from 1993. These studies and claims were evaluated by Richard Garfield, professor of clinical international nursing at Columbia University and chair of the human-rights committee of the American Public Health Association. Garfield considered the Iraqi ministry’s statistics highly unreliable both because most deaths are not reported to hospitals and because not all deaths in hospitals can be attributed to the sanctions. When it came to independent studies, he found that, though reliable, they were too local in focus. But Garfield acknowledged that the 1999 UNICEF survey “provides the first reliable mortality estimates for Iraq since 1991.”

UNICEF data showed “that the rate of mortality more than doubled” among children under five years in the fifteen governorates of central and southern Iraq, “from 56 per 1000 births in 1984-89 to 131 per 1000 during 1995-99.” The result was an estimated five thousand “excess child deaths” every month above the 1989 presanctions rate. Writing in the summer of 2000, Garfield gave 300,000 as “a conservative estimate of ‘excess deaths’ among children under five.” Even worse, of those alive, more than 22 percent of young children were chronically malnourished.

Even in this age of mass murder, the gravity of these figures should not escape our attention. Noting that “even in cases of extreme economic decline like the Great Depression in the United States, there was no increase in the rate of mortality,” Garfield underlined the gravity of the Iraqi disaster as “the only instance of a sustained, large increase in mortality in a stable population of more than 2 million in the last two hundred years.” Where death stalked, life was miserable: Iraq’s ranking in the UN Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Index fell from 55 out of 130 in 1990 to 126 out of 150 in 2000.
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By 2000, there was a consensus in both the UN and the human-rights community about the excess child deaths directly linked to sanctions: the June 2000 report to the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights acknowledged that the total deaths “directly attributable to the sanctions” ranged “from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children.” Even the minimum estimate was three times the number of Japanese killed during the U.S. atomic-bomb attacks.

The moral indefensibility of the sanctions regime was clear as early as 1996, when Madeleine Albright, U.S. ambassador to the UN, was asked by Lesley Stahl on the TV program
60 Minutes
about the price of “containing” Saddam: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more than died in Hiroshima. And, and you know, is the price worth it?”

Madeleine Albright responded: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”

How and by whom was such a death toll justified for so long? This question was the subject of research by Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University, who studies the ethics of international relations. She described both her research experience and its findings in a cover story in
Harper’s Magazine
that explored “economic sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction.”

The simple fact is that the United States consistently used its veto on the Security Council’s 661 Committee, the body “generally responsible for both enforcing the sanctions and granting humanitarian exemptions,” to minimize the humanitarian goods entering the country. It was not required to give a reason for the veto, but the reason it gave most often was concern over dual use, civilian and military, claiming that the goods in question—those necessary to provide electricity, telephone service, transportation, even clean water—could also be used to enhance Iraq’s military capabilities.

Gordon found that as of September 2001 the United States had blocked “nearly 200 humanitarian contracts,” including “contracts that the U.N.’s own agency charged with weapons inspections did not object to.” The most notorious were those needed to repair the damaged water and sanitation systems, given that most excess child deaths were “a direct or indirect result of contaminated water.” Yet U.S. officials blocked contracts for water tankers, “on the grounds that they might be used to haul chemical weapons
instead.” As of September 2001, “nearly a billion dollars’ worth of medical-equipment contracts—for which all the information sought had been provided—was still on hold.”

The United States was able to block even contracts approved by UN monitors on the ground because UN procedure allowed it. The only time the United States felt compelled to justify its veto was when it was forced to do so by publicity in the American press, as indeed happened in March 2001, when the
Washington Post
and Reuters reported that the United States had placed a hold on $280 million of “medical supplies, including vaccines to treat infant hepatitis, tetanus, and diphtheria, as well as incubators and cardiac equipment.” Washington’s rationale was “that the vaccines contained live cultures, albeit highly weakened ones,” and that the Iraqi government “could conceivably extract these, and eventually grow a virulent fatal strain.” The veto persisted in spite of testimony from European biological-warfare experts “that such a feat was in fact flatly impossible,” and in spite of “pressure behind the scenes from the U.N. and from members of the Security Council.” Only when confronted with adverse publicity did the United States abruptly announce it was lifting the veto in this specific instance.

UN administrators on the ground argued that they had developed an aggressive monitoring system to guard against dual use of imports. In a 1999 interview, the UN humanitarian-aid coordinator in Baghdad, Hans Von Sponeck, pointed out: “We have to control every gas cylinder that comes into this country. We have a number and we must make sure that ‘gas cylinder 765’ is there and the other one is over there. If you can do it with that detail, surely you can also do it with computers that are necessary for high school or university students that need to learn how to interact with modern technology.”

Forced to take responsibility for a policy they could neither
defend nor influence, many of those in charge of implementing Iraq policy at the UN opted to resign, one after another. The first to resign was Denis Halliday, an Irishman who was the assistant secretary general and humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for thirteen months. He resigned in September 1998, declaring: “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.” His successor, Hans Von Sponeck, who served as humanitarian coordinator until March 2000, was “driven out by U.S. charges of turning soft on sanctions-hit Iraq,” a UN official told Agence France-Presse. The resignation followed Von Sponeck’s warning in a CNN interview that the UN program was failing to meet even the “minimum requirements” for Iraq’s 22 million people: “How long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent on all this, be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done? As a UN official, I should not be expected to be silent to that which I recognize as a true human tragedy that needs to be ended.” Two days later, Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq, also resigned, stating: “I fully support what Mr. Von Sponeck is saying.”

The more the UN’s refusal to modify the sanctions regime in spite of the scale of human carnage in Iraq became public knowledge, the greater the outrage in the human-rights community. Human Rights Watch wrote of the sanctions, “The continued imposition of comprehensive economic sanctions (against Iraq) is undermining the basic rights of children and the civilian population generally,” and called on the UN Security Council to “recognize that the sanctions have contributed in a major way to persistent life threatening conditions in the country.” Save the Children (UK) described the economic sanctions as “a silent war against Iraq’s children.”

We have seen that the rationale for sanctions shifted over the
years: they were later said to be necessary to force Iraq to disarm, particularly because of chemical and biological weapons. Iraq had been armed with weapons of mass destruction during the period of its military collaboration with the United States, which had ended with the Gulf War. There followed a period of disarmament and a debate over how effective the disarmament had been. Among those with hard facts that could help answer this question were the weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter, a marine intelligence officer who was the chief weapons inspector from 1991 to 1998, was the most doubtful that Saddam Hussein’s regime any longer represented a significant, let alone an imminent, threat. Ritter resigned in protest that the U.S. government had sabotaged his mission, placing nine American intelligence officers on the inspection team as far back as 1992. Ritter told CNN on July 17, 2002:

As of December 1998 we had accounted for 90 to 95 percent of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability. We destroyed all the factories, all the means of production and we could not account for some of the weaponry, but chemical weapons have a shelf-life of five years. Biological weapons have a shelf-life of three years. To have weapons today, they would have had to rebuild the factories and start the process of producing these weapons since December 1998.

In his view, this was a remote possibility, since “no one has substantiated the allegations that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction or is attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction.” Hans Blix, the last of the chief weapons inspectors, also confirmed that there was no evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq claimed it had destroyed all its prohibited weapons between 1991 and 1994, either unilaterally or in cooperation with the inspectors. The inspectors were able to verify that unilateral destruction had taken place on a large scale but could not quantify the amounts destroyed. So they recorded the material as “neither verified destroyed nor believed to still exist,” an ambiguity that the United States and Britain seized on to claim the existence of hidden “stockpiles.”

If truth be told, it was not the Saddam Hussein regime but successive U.S. administrations that freely resorted to using weapons of mass destruction beginning with the 1991 Gulf War. We have seen that Professor Joy Gordon described economic sanctions after the Gulf War “as a weapon of mass destruction.” During the invasion of Iraq, the United States used at least two others: an updated version of incendiary bombs brand-named napalm during the Vietnam war, now called Mark-77 firebombs, and depleted uranium. Mark-77 firebombs were dropped on Iraqi troops near the Iraq-Kuwait border at the start of the war. Although the use of napalm was banned by the United Nations in 1980, the United States never signed the agreement. The United States considers the use of Mark-77 firebombs legal for a variety of reasons. To begin with, they are no longer identified by the brand name napalm. Yet this latest generation of incendiary bombs, first developed during the Second World War and used on Japanese cities, is acknowledged to be far more destructive of human life than napalm. Mark-77 firebombs explode into massive fireballs. “Incendiaries create burns that are difficult to treat,” explained Robert Musil, the director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a Washington-based group that opposes the use of weapons of mass destruction.
He described the Pentagon’s distinction between napalm and Mark-77 firebombs as “pretty outrageous” and “clearly Orwellian.” The Pentagon’s response came from Colonel Mike Daily of the Marine Corps: even though he acknowledged that the Mark-77 has “similarly destructive” effects on humans, he emphasized that it has “significantly less of an impact on the environment.”

Depleted uranium (DU) is the radioactive and highly toxic waste product that remains after natural uranium has been “enriched.” Like incendiary firebombs, the first use of uranium in munitions occurred in the Second World War: it was pioneered by the Nazis. During the two Gulf Wars, the U.S. used DU in ammunitions as varied as armor plate, anti-tank penetrators, and cruise missiles. Economic considerations alone are unlikely to be an obstacle to the use of DU. According to Damacio Lopez of the International Depleted Uranium Study Team, testifying to the European Parliament for an immediate ban on the military use of DU: “In Iraq over 1.5 million soldiers and civilians have died of natural causes since the 1991 Gulf War, one third of them children under the age of five. Leukemia, cancer, birth defects and rare diseases have increased at an alarming rate in this country. Studies conducted by Iraqi scientists have found higher levels than that permitted by international standards for U-238 and its products in drinking water of various city supplies and in the Tigris River. Vegetables, fish and meat in southern Iraq are showing levels of radiation contamination as well.” Since DU enters the food chain and contaminates water, and is said to have a “half-life of four and a half billion years,” it will “continue to harm all forms of life in contaminated areas till the end of time” if not cleaned up. Since uranium is known to increase the incidence of lung cancer when inhaled, and bone cancer, leukemia, and genetic defects when ingested, the consequences will be nothing less than drastic—not
only for Iraqis, Kuwaitis, and Afghanis promised “democracy” through American power, but also for America’s sons and daughters, urged to don uniforms in the pursuit of humanitarian missions in distant battlefields. Just as with incendiary firebombs, the use of weapons containing DU violates humanitarian law. In a 1996 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice affirmed that “states must never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civil and military targets.” Willful killing is a grave breach—a war crime—under Articles 51, 52, and 85 of Protocol Additional 1 of the four Geneva Conventions.