December 19, 1998. Two hundred twenty-eight members of Congress, acting as guardians of freedom and democracy, vote to impeach the President of the United States of America. A Pentagon official calmly compares the damage done to Iraqi target sites after four days of Operation Desert Fox air strikes to the ravished Federal Building of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The President of the United States explains the operation in his morning radio address to the nation: "Never again can we allow Saddam Hussein to develop nuclear weapons, poison gas, biological weapons, or missiles to deliver them. He has used such terrible weapons before against soldiers, against his neighbors, against civilians." Cultural critics mull over the prophetic message of Wag the Dog and ponder the theoretical implications of CNN split screen bombing/impeachment news coverage. Two hundred fifty Iraqi human beings die.

Question: Which of the above items was underreported on December 19, 1998?

The Iraqi population–over 20 million people–has been exposed to a "slightly increased risk of death every day for eight years" due to the United Nations sanctions imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, said Richard Garfield, Professor of Nursing at Columbia University and an expert on sanctions. The result of this is that "even if you cut conservative estimates in half, there are still more excess deaths in sanctions-related deaths than from all people involved in the Gulf War who died, military and civilian, from every country," Garfield said.

According to a 1998 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report, there are around 7500 excess civilian deaths per month, most of them children. That amounts to 250 deaths per day, ten per hour. One person will die while you finish reading this sentence. Another will die in six minutes. The UN has verified that over one million people, more than half of them infants and toddlers, have died since August 1990 from sanctions-related causes. That’s over ten times as many people as those killed between 1979 and 1989 as a result of Iraq’s human rights record, which is calculated by Amnesty International at 130,000 people.

Former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday resigned from his post in October 1998 to protest what he called a "bankrupt" sanctions policy that was "quite literally killing people." His resignation came after 34 years of service to the United Nations and over a year working in Iraq.

"Pretty much everyone who agrees with or disagrees with the idea of sanctions, agrees that this particular sanctions regime has been a humanitarian disaster," said Garfield. Although the 1996 United Nations "oil-for-food" agreement permits Iraq to sell a certain quantity of oil every six months to purchase food and medicine, the shortfalls of the program are becoming increasingly apparent as humanitarian conditions in the country continue to decline as a result of the sanctions.

"Malnutrition isn’t only connected to food availability. It is also connected to infective disease and health as affected by water supply and sanitation," said Peter L. Pellett, a professor of nutrition at the University of Massachusetts who has led several UN Food and Agricultural Organization/World Food Programme (FAO/WFP) Missions to Iraq. These systems were destroyed by bombings during the Gulf War. Those facilities that remained intact after the Gulf War have since deteriorated from normal wear and tear. Under the sanctions, Iraq is unable to import most of the spare parts needed for the repair or upkeep of the dilapidated infrastructure, leaving it in an ever-worsening state of disrepair. Even items that are not fully embargoed can be held up in the Sanctions Committee for months or longer if even a single Committee member wants more information about the item’s intended use or distribution. "The whole country is in vegetative status," said Pellett. "In many ways it is like a vast refugee camp. Essentially development isn’t permitted."

Large-scale pumps, for example, are embargoed under the sanctions. "The US will often argue that pumps of this size are of ‘dual use’ and can be used for draining marsh land for military use," explains Pellett. "But they are necessary for clearing sewage and clearing land for agriculture." With the pumps remaining banned, many sewage pumping stations have come to a standstill, causing sewage to overflow, and raw waste to run freely through the streets of many Iraqi cities.

Other dual-use prohibitions include syringes, one of the most basic medical supplies, but one that can also be used for injecting a spore of anthrax into a growth medium in a petri dish; medical journals and books; and pencils, because the graphite they contain can be used to coat the outsides of airplanes. The ban on chlorine means that water cannot be purified. According to a March 1999 UN report, 59% of Iraqi people have no access at all to potable water. Compare this to the 92% access to clean water that the World Health Organization (WHO) reported for Iraq in 1989. Even worse, according to a March 1999 Nation article, the water distribution system has also fallen apart under the sanctions, so that even when chlorine manages to get through the Sanctions Committee, the chlorinated water is not consistently potable by the time it arrives in people’s homes.

These conditions have led to an increase in epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, and gastroenteritis, especially among children, according to an April 24, 1997 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. But these diseases and many others, once easily cured in Iraq, are sometimes impossible to treat because Iraq’s healthcare system is also close to collapse. As of February 1997, WHO had reported that basic medicines scheduled for arrival under the oil-for-food program had not arrived, leaving warehouses virtually empty. This has since changed: a February 1999 report of the United Nations Secretary General reveals that medical supplies are now in greater supply in Iraq, but they are languishing in Iraqi warehouses not because of Saddam Hussein’s intransigence, but because the transport systems necessary to distribute the medicines are also in utter disrepair, Pellett said.

Prior to 1990, Iraq’s healthcare system was the envy of the Middle East and much of the rest of the world. The WHO reported 93% access to high-quality healthcare in Iraq in 1989. Today, children are dying of diarrhea, and the only health statistics that Iraq can boast about is the highest rate of infant mortality in the world.

The food situation is only somewhat better. Under the oil-for-food plan, Iraqi families are provided with a ration of food at highly subsidized prices, since some food prices have increased several thousand times on the free market compared to 1990, before the sanctions began. But Pellett said that although the ration more or less meets the caloric needs of the population, it is nutritionally unbalanced, containing no animal products and virtually no fruits or vegetables. These items must be bought on the free market, where today items like a chocolate bar cost the equivalent of an average Iraqi professional’s monthly salary.

Essential vitamins, minerals, and proteins are thus unavailable to most Iraqis, including children who cannot develop normally without them. As of November 1997, UNICEF reported that 32% of children under the age of five were malnourished - a rise of 72% since 1991. The level of underweight children is twice as high as levels found in neighboring Jordan. A recent internal UN review of the oil-for-food plan also indicated that child malnutrition rates in most of Iraq are unchanged since 1997–despite the improved food ration. "This is mainly due to the fact that the majority of malnutrition in young children is precipitated by the water-sanitation situation rather than by food availability," said Pellett. Mothers, who are also malnourished, are unable to breast feed, resulting in a new crisis which doctors term "sugar babies"–babies who are fed sugar water instead of milk.

Although Iraq was permitted to raise its oil production in February 1998 from $2 billion to $5.2 billion every six months in order to alleviate some of these problems, these numbers suggest that Iraq is taking in more money than is actually the case. A full thirty percent of all revenue is mandatorily set aside to pay for war reparations to Kuwait. A second portion is used to pay the administrative costs of the sanctions regime itself. As the most recent UN Secretary General’s report put it, "If this money had been used for the Iraqi people, rather than for Western companies who lost money in Kuwait & their lawyers, there could have been 59% more humanitarian goods getting to the people."

Further, without the equipment needed to repair Iraq’s shoddy oil facilities, compounded by a drop in oil prices, experts say even the $5.2 billion target is unattainable. Though the current program permits $600 million from oil sales to be used for the purchase of spare parts, only 25 contracts (about $10 million worth) out of a total of 750 have gotten through the Sanctions Committee. Thus what isn’t officially embargoed is easily embargoed in practice. That is why recent proposals to eliminate the production limit altogether are seen by some critics as little more than a public relations ploy. With so many vital items banned from import and with the oil production capabilities so severely hampered, the promised increase in revenue will do little to ease suffering in real terms.

"The irony is that in today’s world, if you have comprehensive sanctions on you, you’d be much better off if you were in occupied territory under warfare," Garfield said. "There are more protections available for you, including even for prisoners of war. These sanctions are being implemented by the political organizations of the UN, not the human rights branches of the UN. If the human rights branches of the UN were implementing them, they would be very different."

Indeed, it is the political nature of the sanctions that most worries some critics. "The goalpost is being moved all the time. We can never in fact get there [the lifting of sanctions] except by the elimination of Saddam Hussein," said Pellett. "You could probably manage to see with a good lawyer that this is illegal. We have stated, not even just covertly, but we have overtly stated that it is our aim to overthrow the government of Iraq. People don’t seem to take much notice, but that is in fact illegal in international law. You are not supposed to consciously attempt to bring down other governments."

Though technically the sanctions are only to be in effect until the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 687 are met (primarily the elimination of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons and long range missiles), statements by US officials have been less coherent on the matter.

Many, including President Clinton, former President George Bush, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and former Secretary of State James Baker, have said that the sanctions would not be lifted as long as Saddam Hussein was still in power. Others, like Ambassador Bill Richardson, have cited as conditions a number of U.N. resolutions that were never linked to the sanctions in the first place. In the words of one reporter, the US said "it will do it [lift the sanctions] when UNSCOM is allowed into Iraq, when UNSCOM can get into the ‘palaces,’ when Iraq abides by all U.N. resolutions, including paying a few hundred billion in reparations, when Saddam Hussein is overthrown, or never. The question [is]: When is it?"

The major dispute involves Iraq’s arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction." But there is controversy even regarding this issue.

According to Hussein Ibish, media director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was entrusted with the review of Iraq’s nuclear program, reported two years ago that it could find no evidence that there is a nuclear program in Iraq. "But the IAEA refused to close the nuclear file, because they can’t say for sure, because they are not omniscient."

The same problem surfaces in the issue of biological and chemical weapons. "Secretary of Defense Cohen has said these can be produced without a great deal of equipment and you don’t need a huge quantity of them" to inflict severe damage, said international law expert John Quigley, Professor of Law at Ohio State University. "Thus even if you could ascertain that all of these weapons have been destroyed, who’s to say that they won’t come back next week or next month? We would need permanent sanctions to make sure that they are not only destroyed but never come back."

Further, despite the media’s and the US government’s allegations of Iraqi noncompliance, weapons inspectors themselves tell a very different story. According to a recent article by Denis Halliday, Richard Butler, the chief of the weapons inspection team, said that if inspections were a five-lap race, we would be three-quarters of the way around the final lap. Another former inspector was quoted in a February 1998 paper by Foreign Policy in Focus as saying that 95% of weapons inspections and monitoring are carried out with full Iraqi cooperation. According to the same paper, Butler reported in late 1997 that UNSCOM had made significant progress in charting Iraq’s chemical weapons program.

The December 1998 UNSCOM report that prompted the Operation Desert Fox air strikes still has not been released to the public. The Iraqi government claims that of the more than 400 inspections documented in the report, only five of them were carried out without complete cooperation, and that the problems arising from those five were mere technicalities. Neither Butler nor the United States have publicly refuted this claim.

If all of this is correct, then inspections had reached a point by late 1998 where Iraq was much more often in compliance than not. Yet the US, rather than easing the sanctions as a reward and an incentive for further cooperation, embarked on a four-day bombing blitz that then evolved into what the New York Times in February 1999 called a "low-level war of attrition," with almost daily bombings continuing through mid-March. Bombings resumed again in early April after a two-week lull.

Even Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector who previously argued for aggressive and intrusive inspections backed by a military threat, told The Guardian in March 1999 that, "Iraq is no boy scout. But it didn’t do anything in December to justify Desert Fox." Ritter said that a particular inspection event was orchestrated by Butler and U.S. Security Advisor Sandy Berger to establish a pretext for military intervention. He added that Butler had exceeded his mandate by writing a scathing indictment on Iraqi non-compliance instead of simply presenting the facts, and that the US and Britain had sacrificed arms control in their determination to destroy Saddam Hussein. Weapons inspections have not resumed since the December bombings.

The weapons inspection rhetoric, then, is "an apparent mechanism of keeping Iraq under sanctions in perpetuity," said Ibish. "Weapons of mass destruction are okay for some countries to have, tolerable for other countries to have, and a crime worthy of thousands of deaths for other countries to have," he adds. "When it comes to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, this must be reversed by massive military action immediately. On the other hand, there is such a thing as U.N. Security Council Resolution 425 from 1978, which calls on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, which they have not done. Nobody sent 500,000 troops to Lebanon, no one put any sanctions against Israel, and no one mentions Resolution 425 except the Lebanese."

Quigley agrees that "there is an attempt to keep Iraq as weak as possible in a military sense. Overall there is interest in this because of the oil. If this were somewhere else, there wouldn’t have been all of this international activity to begin with."

Inconsistencies like these prompt critics to argue that the assault–both economic and military–on Iraq is politically motivated. This agenda would account for the sanctions’ overall failure. "The idea that the US government, by bombing or covert opposition, is in a position to dictate the composition of the next government of Iraq is a bizarre fantasy. Any policy that is predicated on ‘What do we do to get rid of Saddam and put our boy in?’ is destined to fail," Ibish said.

"Sanctions are usually only effective in pressuring a country to change policy, not to commit suicide," explains Garfield. "Some of the goals of the sanctions on Iraq can only be achieved by warfare. And if you want to destroy a regime, that is an act of warfare."

Most would agree that the sanctions have not only failed to topple Saddam Hussein’s government, but they have in fact strengthened it. "The sanctions have helped this regime to stay in power by creating dependence on it and creating starvation that has not allowed people to think beyond their immediate needs," said Ibish. In addition, both Iraq and Saddam Hussein have become martyrs. "They are the victims of a vindictive United States," said Pellett. "This isn’t only the viewpoint of Iraq but the Third World as a whole. There is almost an absolute sense of hypocrisy when the US goes on about human rights because the sanctions can be seen as abusing the human rights of the Iraqi people."

A serious discussion of the current Iraqi crisis is complicated by a web of rhetoric about human rights, evil dictators, weapons of mass destruction, and a "bombing the city in order to save it" propaganda machine that has created a black and white view of a very intricate situation. It is a situation that goes back further than 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait; further than 1984 when the United States began heavily arming Iraq and encouraging use of chemical weapons against neighboring Iran; and further than 1972, when Iraq nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company and greatly diminished the profits of Western companies from Iraqi oil production. It goes back at least as far as 1923, when Britain arbitrarily drew the boundary between Iraq and Kuwait as a reflection of their own imperial interests.

In fact, any conversation about the current Iraqi crisis must also include the Kurds, since the human rights of "Saddam’s own people" are often invoked as justification for the continuing war against Iraq. It is thus relevant that neither United States nor British policy has been very nice to the Kurds. For example, 24 years ago the United States, along with Israel and Iran, instigated a Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq which pitted the Iraqis and Kurds against one other in a constant struggle that neither side could win. Additionally, in 1925 the British broke promises of Kurdish independence in order to add the oil-rich Kurdish province of Mosul to their Iraqi mandate.

The double standard continues even today. "While the US is attacking Iraq almost daily in its self-declared ‘no-fly zones,’ saying that it does so because it cares about the Kurds, it is backing Turkey in its attacks against the Kurds. Turkey has destroyed, drowned villages with dams. They deny or punish any manifestation of Kurdish identity, yet Clinton has called Turkey a ‘shining example to the world of the virtues of cultural diversity.’" said Vera Beaudin Saeedpour, editor of Kurdish Life and the International Journal of Kurdish Studies.

In the words of a United Nations official working in Iraq quoted in the World Press Review in May 1996, "While the allies’ planes fly at 30,000 feet above Kurdistan to prevent Saddam Hussein’s air force from flying north of the 36th parallel, the Turkish air force flies in at 5,000 feet and rains bombs on the very Kurdish villages we are supposed to be here to protect." The Turkish raids have received minimal press even though they have continued to this day.

The historical record does provide a potent analysis of current events. Economic destabilization (sanctions) coupled with support of "internal opposition" groups was the method of choice for CIA-sponsored coups in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and others since then. Though concepts like promoting freedom were the justifications for U.S. actions, the freedom that was usually promoted was that of the United States–not the citizens’ of the country we claimed to protect. In fact, many of the leaders the US has backed or installed in the name of freedom (the Shah of Iran, for example), have been among the more brutal dictators in modern history.

According to Ibish, none of the Iraqi opposition groups targeted for $97 million of U.S. aid under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 has any legitimacy among the Iraqi people. And many of the Kurds and the Shi’a opposition who were denied U.S. support when they heeded George Bush’s call to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War have pointed out that America’s choice for a new Iraqi government is not a democracy, but another dictator–one who protects U.S. interests. Thus to students of history, the sanctions, and Clinton’s promise that "we’ll strengthen our engagement with Iraqis who want a new government, one that will respect its citizens and live in peace with its neighbors," sound uncannily familiar.

In fact, the further back one looks in the history of U.S. foreign policy, the more it seems that words about human rights, the protection of minorities, and, of course, weapons of mass destruction, make good sound bites, but the real game is old-fashioned power politics. This may be one reason why the humanitarian price of the sanctions has been called "worth it" by Madeleine Albright in a television interview with Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes.

For Garfield, "The worst thing about the sanctions is that at the same time that we cut off essentially 90% of resources used in the health system, we did nothing to preserve or build up the information gathering capacity of the Ministry of Health, so it is hard to know the details of disaster. We took away Iraq’s ability to know what it needed. I would call this an administrative crime."

In fact, said Garfield, even the estimates of the Iraqis who have died cited in the beginning of this article are probably inaccurate. He estimates that perhaps half of the commonly reported death toll is closer to reality. That is not because the governments or the aid agencies are lying, but because the infrastructure has been so badly dismantled by the sanctions that even such statistics like these are impossible to collect. Halliday agrees that the data is probably inaccurate, but in the other direction. He imagines that because babies in rural areas die before they are even registered, there is a significantly higher number of dead children than the aid agencies can report. Even the U.S. State Department has not denied the death of at least half a million children since the Gulf War as a result of the sanctions. And whichever numbers are to be believed, the death toll remains indefensible.

"The sanctions are too severe and have been in place for too long," said Quigley. "The idea was to get Iraq to destroy weaponry and allow international inspection. This has gone on with fits and starts over the time period, but the impact on the country, on civilian population, is so horrendous that [the continuing of sanctions] is not justified." In other words, there may simply be no way to get Saddam Hussein to do exactly what the US wants of him. "The bottom line, is that you come to a point in international situations where there is no international solution and you back off and pat yourself on the back for whatever you’ve accomplished and say this is all we can do. Iraq has reached that point. How long can you continue these sanctions?"

Nor is Quigley alone in his opinion. Populist movements worldwide have been protesting U.S. official policies by arguing that sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction.

Shari Silberstein is a 1998 graduate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and is currently a co-director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center in Washington, DC.