Cape Cod Times

This is not a campaign issue?
February 1, 2000

Thanks to the State Department and our "adversarial" free press, even those
who consider themselves well informed about foreign policy have tremendous
gaps in their knowledge when it comes to our policy in Iraq.

You may have heard the numbers, which have been confirmed by the most
reputable medical journals in the world: More than 500,000 Iraqi children
(plus a million adult Iraqi civilians) have died as a direct result of the
sanctions that we imposed 10 years ago on that formerly prosperous nation.

Let's try to look at this in human terms, which is difficult for many
Americans because Iraqis, as a rule, are not portrayed as human beings, even
in a "bleeding-heart" media.

It's mentally lazy to solely blame Saddam, who (no rational person disputes)
is a nasty dictator. (Although, his human rights transgressions don't come
close to the atrocities committed by some of our foreign fiends - I mean,
friends). But Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's sagely advice comes to mind:
"We're not all guilty. But we are all responsible."

Some readers might object: "Hey, sanctions are better than Once you cut
through the propaganda, a question arises: Is it our policy to simply punish
any "rogue" nation that even thinks about challenging American dominance of
Middle East oil reserves?

The explicit purpose of the sanctions is to severely harm the civilian
population in order to "persuade" the "duped" to oust Saddam. Never mind the
moral repugnance of such coercive policy objectives, the intellectual
bankruptcy of the policy is that, in this case, the sanctions cannot
possibly reach their own intended purpose.

If Iraqi civilians are forced to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence day to
day, how in the hell are they supposed to kick a dictator out of power?!
What political genius came up with that genocidal idea?

Now, genocide is a much-abused term in our world where talk-radio (il)logic
reigns, but that's exactly what Dennis Halliday called it. Halliday was a
senior United Nations official, who resigned last year in protest of the
stupid and cruel policy.

Some people think the Iraqi people would have the medicine and food they
need if only Saddam would stop spending it on palaces and what-not. Not only
is this an embarrassingly misinformed view, it's also like blaming President
Clinton alone for the increasing number of homeless people in America even
though there's a federal budget surplus.

As U.N. humanitarian coordinator Hans Van Sponeck points out, the U.N. - not
the Iraqi government - controls the money from the oil-for-food program. The
U.N. distributes the food and medicine purchased with that money in northern
Iraq and carefully monitors the distribution of these basic survival goods
throughout the rest of the nation.

A major reason that limited medical supplies are often not being delivered
is because there's an extreme shortage of delivery trucks and personnel.

"You have heard, I'm sure, a lot about the overstocking of medicine. When
you get from someone a monocausal explanation then you should start getting
suspicious. It is not - I repeat, it is not - a premeditated act of
withholding medicine. It's much more complex than that," Van Sponeck told a
group of Seattle doctors who have gone to Iraq several times to study the
situation and openly violate the sanctions, bringing medicine and toys to
Iraqi children.

(According to U.S. law, you can get a 12-year jail sentence and a million
dollar fine for bringing toys and medicine to Iraqi children.)

"If you earn a $1.50 a month in a warehouse that has medicine, will you work
14 hours a day? I doubt it. You can't even afford to be there eight hours a
day because you have to somehow make some other money in order to get at
least enough to get into your kitty to finance the needs of your household,"
he explained to members of the Washington Physicians for Social
Responsibility.

Also banned from Iraq are medical textbooks and other educational material.
"De-professionalization....It is frightening....People who are well trained
have no chance to work with their full capacity in the area of their
training....You have what I would call knowledge depletion. Right now we are
setting the stage for depriving another (Iraqi) generation of opportunity to
become responsible national and international citizens of tomorrow. That may
be the most serious aspect of it all, apart from the nutritional deficiency,
apart from the health problems, apart from the inadequacy of the
food....It's intellectual genocide," Van Sponeck said. There's that word
again.

And this isn't even a campaign issue in the land of the free?