"And They Called it Peace"  US Policy on Iraq

    Phyllis Bennis

    (Phyllis Bennis, an editor of this magazine, is a fellow at the Institute for Policy
    Studies, Washington, DC.)

    Ten years ago, on
    August 2, 1990, US
    policy in, toward and
    around Iraq
    dramatically changed
    course. From close if
    sometimes distasteful
    allies, Baghdad's
    government and its
    leader, Saddam
    Hussein, were
    transformed overnight
    into Washington's
    public enemy number
    one: "Hitler!"
    thundered President
    George Bush.The
    policies put in place
    then to implement the
    new approach,
    military assault and brutally effective civilian-targeting sanctions, remain largely unchanged
    today. The policies' ostensible goal, primly defined as "regime change," remains as distant as
    ever, and their target is still firmly in power.

    Long before the invasion of Kuwait, one might have wondered about the US-Iraq alliance.
    Certainly it was partly tactical, aimed at preventing outright victory for the ascendant Islamic
    Republic of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. Certainly it reflected the three long-standing goals of
    US policy in the Middle East: protection of Israel, control of access to oil and stability. One
    might have wondered why US officials willingly, if not eagerly, turned a blind eye to the Iraqi
    regime's crimes. It wasn't as if they didn't know of Iraq's repressive rule, its Anfal campaign
    to depopulate Kurdish villages and its use of internationally outlawed poison gas against both
    civilians and Iranian soldiers. Human rights violations are common throughout the
    region--arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, house demolitions, repression of dissidents,
    persecution of Communists--and Iraq's government was right up there with the best.
    Washington knew of Iraq's violations, but expressed little official concern. Nor were US
    officials interested in the incidental reality that the majority of Iraqi civilians enjoyed an almost
    First World-level standard of living, with education and health care systems that remained
    free, accessible to every Iraqi and among the highest quality in the developing world.

    Perhaps the alliance shouldn't have been surprising. Iraq's is a neighborhood of absolute
    rulers, most of whom are uncritically embraced by Washington. Baghdad's power relied on
    ties with the US and its European allies, as well as Russia and others, to provide arms,
    technology, biological weapons seed stock and more. For the US, the primacy of commerce
    trumped any hesitations that might have surfaced regarding Iraq's internal rule.

    Further, in a region where occupation of a neighboring country (or two or three) is
    practically a normative requirement for regional powers--Israel in Palestine and Syria,
    Turkey in Cyprus, Morocco in the Western Sahara--there is little reason to think that Iraq
    expected US opposition, let alone Desert Storm-level opposition, when it joined the ranks of
    occupiers.

    The notion of "dual containment" that shaped US strategy towards the Arab-Persian Gulf
    even before its official articulation in the early 1990s, was primarily designed to prevent
    either Iraq or Iran from emerging as a serious challenger to US interests. For Washington,
    Iraq may or may not have been the lesser evil, but it was certainly the weaker evil. The
    nascent Islamic Republic had inherited the US-supplied bounty of the Shah's military, so
    Washington weighed in on the side of Baghdad when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. After all,
    Iraq was a secular country with a proven pro-US orientation; Washington viewed the
    Islamists in Tehran with significantly more unease. Further, US aid wasn't really to help Iraq
    defeat Iran. It ensured that the war itself, with its commensurate slaughter of Iranian and Iraqi
    soldiers and innocents, and its destruction of oil, wealth, property and the environment of
    both countries, would continue.

    A Superpower Without a Challenger

    Soon after the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, the world's bipolar center could no longer hold.
    The Soviet Union was nearing collapse, and US strategy turned toward trying to justify a
    superpower's hegemony while lacking a strategic challenger. Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait
    gave the US a pretext to reassert its international status. The US would use bribes, threats
    and punishments to assure United Nations endorsement, and would lead the world against
    the "new Hitler." If the US was to be viewed as a world-class "hyper-power," it had to
    defeat a villain worthy of the fight. Iraq had to be elevated to the status of world-class villain.

    The demonization set the stage for widespread acceptance in the US of economic sanctions
    and years of illegal air strikes. Public passivity was rooted largely in a lack of information
    about civilian suffering, but was exacerbated by a subconscious belief that Iraq is really
    populated by 23 million Saddam Husseins, so anything done to Iraq is really against "him."

    The US called the UN Security Council into session and imposed economic sanctions
    against Iraq less than 100 hours after the Iraqi military swept into Kuwait. At the time, Iraq
    depended on imports for 70 percent of its food. Even medicine and food were prohibited
    during the first months of the sanctions regime; but with oil sales forbidden and hard currency
    accounts frozen, there was suddenly no money to buy anything, anyway. Shortages and
    widespread suffering soon followed. The sanctions, originally crafted to pressure the Iraqi
    leadership to withdraw from Kuwait, continued throughout the punishing air and ground wars
    of early 1991. Sanctions remained in place, changing only in their justification, when UN
    resolution 687 imposed a ceasefire and a host of rigorous requirements on the defeated Iraqi
    government in April 1991.

    The US Goes It (Almost) Alone

    The new sanctions regime
    was linked to Iraq's efforts to
    create weapons of mass
    destruction
    (WMD)--nuclear, chemical
    and biological weapons and
    the missiles to deliver them.
    Economic sanctions were
    supposed to end when Iraq
    complied with the prohibition
    on WMD programs. To
    oversee their elimination, the
    UN created UNSCOM, the
    UN Special Commission.
    Over the years, despite Iraqi
    recalcitrance and
    embarrassing revelations of
    US and Israeli spy agencies'
    infiltration and undermining of
    UNSCOM, the agency still
    managed to find and destroy the overwhelming majority of Iraq's weapons sites.

    A key disjuncture soon emerged between the US and the UN, in whose name the
    US-constructed sanctions were imposed. The UN resolution described the precise
    requirements for Iraq to get the economic sanctions lifted. But US officials consistently
    moved the goalposts. From Presidents Bush and Clinton, to their secretaries of state, and
    down Washington's foreign policy food chain, officials asserted that sanctions would stay in
    effect until "the end of time" or Saddam Hussein was out of office, until human rights were
    guaranteed and until Kuwaiti prisoners were returned, among other criteria. So US demands
    derailed any incentive for Iraq to comply with the weapons requirements, and instead
    signaled Baghdad that regardless of its compliance, Washington would not allow the
    sanctions to be lifted. (Now, the most visible non-governmental sanctions defender, Patrick
    Clawson of the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, essentially ignores the UN
    requirements regarding weapons of mass destruction. Appearing on "The NewsHour with
    Jim Lehrer" with Hans von Sponeck on May 3, Clawson focused solely on "containment"
    and "regime change," and never even uttered the words weapons of mass destruction.) The
    UN itself became a victim of US policy in Iraq.

    From 1990 until today, the most comprehensive and tightly enforced economic sanctions in
    history have been the cornerstone of US Iraqi policy. For Iraqis this has meant a decade of
    death--500,000 children under five would be alive today if the economic sanctions did not
    exist, according to UNICEF. The devastation wrought by the US and its militarily spurious
    "coalition" has yet to be repaired. Iraq's oil infrastructure is severely eroded; rusted water
    and sewage treatment plants lie inert for lack of spare parts; schools and universities wither;
    and a new generation of Iraqis is growing up knowing nothing but war, sanctions, deprivation
    and a hatred of Western governments. The Iraqi regime remains in power, and for most
    Iraqis, its continuing political depredations have long been overtaken in significance by the
    physical and human devastation caused by US-led economic sanctions.

    Prowling the Gulf

    At the time of the December 1998 Desert Fox bombing campaign, the Clinton
    administration's Iraq policy seemed immutable. Months before, tens of thousands of
    Americans poured into the streets and into administration-orchestrated "town meetings" to
    protest, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan flew to Baghdad to negotiate a stand-down
    to what seemed an imminent US air assault. Endorsing Annan's deal with the Iraqi
    government, the UN Security Council made clear that future responses to any Iraqi violation
    would have to be decided jointly by the Council. But US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke
    made clear he believed Washington no longer required any UN approval, boldly asserting
    that anything the US believed to be an Iraqi violation would be met in the future by unilateral
    military action. Months later, Desert Fox struck Iraq.

    The UN arms inspectors pulled out of Baghdad on the eve of the strikes. (They didn't bother
    even to notify the hundreds of international and local UN humanitarian staff of the imminent
    strikes.) UNSCOM's withdrawal ended arms monitoring, although their reports through
    November 1998 provided overwhelming evidence that Iraq's weapons programs were
    qualitatively eliminated.

    Resolution 687, besides imposing economic sanctions, called for Iraq's disarmament to be a
    step toward regional disarmament, for a nuclear weapons-free zone throughout the Middle
    East, and for a "zone free of all weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver
    them." But Israeli nukes remain immune from international inspection, and weapons flood the
    already arms-glutted region. US troops, planes and weapons stand ready at bases in Saudi
    Arabia, Turkey and elsewhere in the region, and the US Navy's Sixth Fleet prowls the Gulf
    on virtually permanent assignment. Stationing US military forces in the Gulf was one of
    Washington's biggest prizes from the war. Even the truck-bomb attack on the Khobar
    Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, which killed dozens of US service personnel, did not lead
    to troop withdrawals. They are in the Gulf for the long haul.

    US warplanes patrol the "no-fly zones" in northern and southern Iraq without UN approval,
    and attack Iraq's antiquated air defense systems and a host of civilian targets on an average
    of every third day. According to Hans von Sponeck, the second UN Humanitarian
    Coordinator in Iraq to resign in protest of the economic sanctions, 144 civilians and scores
    of sheep were killed by US--and occasionally British--bombing raids in 1999 alone. Iraq's
    military capacity has never recovered from Desert Storm. Its anti-aircraft batteries lie rusted
    and ineffectual; no US plane has ever been hit patrolling or bombing the no-fly zones.

    Isolation and Dissent

    After years of dogged efforts by faith-based, peace, Arab-American and other groups,
    public opinion slowly began to shift. For many years there were only incremental gains.
    Then, beginning in early 1998, the anti-sanctions movement became a newly viable force.
    Large-scale protest from increasingly diverse communities and constituencies greeted each
    new bombing and persisted against the sanctions.

    As of the spring of 2000, the US-led sanctions remain in place. But changes are undeniably
    afoot. The passage of Security Council resolution 1284 provides a useful indication: it did
    not qualitatively change the devastating impact of the existing economic sanctions (that failure
    led von Sponeck to resign shortly after its passage). It tinkers with the sanctions regime,
    creates a new arms monitoring agency and considers, more than a year down the line, the
    possibility that some economic restrictions might be temporarily suspended. But economic
    sanctions remain the default position, unless the Council, including the US, affirmatively votes
    to keep them suspended after each four-month period. Under such restrictions, no oil
    company worth its stockholders is likely to risk large-scale investment in Iraq, however
    much they may covet Iraq's oil wealth. Without such investment, repair and reconstruction of
    the oil industry itself will remain impossible, and Iraq's poverty will only deepen.

    Even with those limitations, it is certain that 1284 could not have passed US muster as
    recently as two years ago. Ironically, it has long been clear that the sanctions policy holds no
    strategic value. Until the last few months, there was no political constituency (except the
    Kuwaiti royal family) demanding that economic sanctions remain in place. The refusal even
    to consider lifting sanctions reflected craven political concerns: the US couldn't appear "soft
    on Saddam Hussein."

    In early spring 2000, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) suddenly
    seized the pro-sanctions mantle. Until that time AIPAC had largely avoided the fray,
    deeming Iran a far more serious potential threat to Israel than Baghdad's degraded military.
    In February 2000, after a congressional letter had called on President Clinton to lift the
    economic sanctions, AIPAC, by some reports at the urging of the White House, began a
    campaign supporting a "keep the sanctions" letter initiated by Rep. Tom Lantos, chair of the
    House Human Rights Caucus.

    By December 1999, US policy faced isolation, both domestically and internationally. In the
    UN, only the British remained qualitatively supportive. The Netherlands, with a new foreign
    minister from the conservative Liberal Party, moved to defend the US-UK alliance, with
    half-hearted support from dismayed Dutch diplomats. But support for sanctions was fraying.
    Resolution 1284 squeaked by with permanent members France, China and Russia, as well
    as Malaysia, abstaining. France, Russia and China were unwilling to spend the requisite
    political capital to veto 1284. But, as the Wall Street Journal described it on May 1, now it
    was "unclear which side is more isolated: the dictator who has successfully defied sanctions,
    or the Anglo-US alliance that insists they remain in place."

    In that context, the growing domestic opposition took on new visibility. In 1999
    Congressman John Conyers had sent a letter to Clinton signed by 40 of his colleagues,
    calling for a "delinking" of economic and military sanctions against Iraq. Earlier that year,
    during a speaking tour sponsored by major peace, faith-based and Arab-American
    organizations, this writer and former UN Humanitarian Coordinator Denis Halliday spoke to
    over 10,000 people directly, and reached hundreds of thousands more through op-eds,
    radio and TV interviews in 22 cities. But results would take a while longer.

    In the summer of 1999, the first group of congressional staff traveled to Iraq to examine the
    impact of sanctions. All but one represented members of the Progressive Caucus of the
    House; three were also members of the Congressional Black Caucus. By spring 2000 the
    latest congressional letter had 71 signatures, and demanded economic sanctions be lifted.
    Democratic Whip and close Clinton ally David Bonior called the economic sanctions
    "infanticide masquerading as policy." Rep. Tony Hall, known as "Mister Hunger" for his
    twenty-year commitment to that issue, traveled to Iraq in April 2000 to examine the
    humanitarian conditions. He did not call for lifting the economic sanctions, but brought back
    a devastating critique of the sanctions and admitted that the US was the main problem within
    the UN's Sanctions Committee. By May 2000, Representatives Conyers and Cynthia
    McKinney called for an official congressional delegation to Iraq.

    Then there were the resignations. UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday had
    resigned in October 1998 to protest what he later called the "genocidal impact" of economic
    sanctions. His successor, Hans von Sponeck, announced his resignation a little more than a
    year later, convinced that "every month Iraq's social fabric shows bigger holes." A day later,
    the director of the UN's World Food Program for Iraq, Jutta Burghardt, resigned as well.
    The Economist wrote that when Halliday resigned in protest it was interesting; when his
    successor did the same thing it was an indictment. But State Department spokesman Jamie
    Rubin, upon learning of von Sponeck's decision, responded "Good," and repeated false
    accusations regarding von Sponeck's work "on behalf of ...the regime" in Iraq.

    Clinton administration officials, along with their counterparts in London, pressured the UN
    Secretary General to fire von Sponeck, because he had insisted that tracking the civilian
    casualties from the bombings in the "no-fly zones" was part of his job. Von Sponeck also
    stated that sanctions were devastating the people of Iraq--and they, not the Iraqi
    government, were his concern. True to form, Rubin announced in November 1999 that von
    Sponeck had overstepped his mandate in "raising his own personal views as to the wisdom
    of the sanctions regime."

    The administration was starting to look stuck. The day after Halliday and von Sponeck
    testified in Congress, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger struck back, writing an op-ed
    in the Financial Times (May 4) entitled "Saddam Is the Root of All Iraq's Problems." Not
    surprisingly, the article was thoroughly misleading. It claimed that in the past, Iraq never
    spent enough money on its population: "to illustrate, in 1989, Iraq earned $15 billion from oil
    exports and spent $13 billion on its military...." Berger ignored that those military goods
    (largely from the US and its allies) were not purchased with cash but with huge long-term
    loans, mostly from Kuwait and other Gulf states. Berger bragged that "when UN members
    expressed concern about the [sanctions committee] contracts review process, we
    investigated, [and] released contracts worth more than $300 million." True, but he left out
    that the US still had $1.6 billion worth of contracts "on hold."

    On the eve of Desert Storm in January 1991, Eqbal Ahmad quoted Tacitus: "the Romans
    brought devastation, and they called it peace." US policy has indeed brought devastation to
    Iraq and an arms race to the region, all in the name of imposing peace. The task for the
    anti-sanctions movement is to raise the political price for maintaining the status quo. The
    2000 elections do not bode well: a choice between the son of President Desert Storm and
    Anything-for-Israel Gore. But growing public awareness of the sanctions-driven catastrophe
    in Iraq provides some hope. Madeleine Albright cannot appear publicly without being
    challenged by anti-sanctions campaigners. Protesters and the class valedictorian disputed her
    speech at Berkeley's May 2000 graduation. Perhaps for the first time the anti-sanctions
    campaign has the chance to renew a struggle for real peace--in Iraq and in the region
    beyond.