2.01.2001 00:23
America's complicity in torturing Iraq
THIS IS ABOUT the United Nations sanctions against Iraq, from which I have just returned, and the terrible human suffering they have caused. (Even Bill Clinton's secretary of state, the hawkish Madeleine Albright, concedes that.)

This is not about Saddam Hussein, although American politicians and many ordinary Americans argue that it is he who is responsible for the death and misery caused by the most draconian sanctions in history.

Saddam, to be sure, will have to answer to history, and his own people, for his actions over the decades, but it is the United Nations, with the United States as the driving force, that established the economic blockade that for a decade has led to the death of more than a million people, most of them children under the age of five, and suffering of many kinds not much better than death.

I argue that we, too, will have to answer to history. We are not responsible or accountable for what Saddam has done; we are responsible and accountable for what we have done. I submit that what we have done is shameful indeed. The defenders of the sanctions say that, yes, they have taken a terrible toll, but the cost has been worth it. Let's quietly, dispassionately, tally up that toll and then try to strike a moral balance, the human cost on one side, the benefits on the other.

Let's start with Iraq before the Gulf War, 10 years ago. Albeit under authoritarian rule (hardly unique in that region), Iraq was probably the most advanced, and rapidly advancing, nation in the Arab, perhaps even the Muslim, world. It had free education through graduate school and free medical care (it still has both, although severely crippled by the sanctions); it was a secular society with little of the Islamic fundamentalism that is so worrisome.

Then Iraq invaded, and briefly occupied, the neighboring state of Kuwait, violating international law and accepted norms of international behavior. However, Iraq was soon driven out of Kuwait by U.N. forces, largely American, which took a catastrophic toll on the Iraqi army, with tens of thousands killed even as they fled in full retreat.

During the war, in those few days, the U.N. forces, largely American, unleashed one of the fiercest bombardments in history. Not only were military targets destroyed but civilian installations as well: water-purification and sewage-treatment plants, electrification plants, even hospitals, schools and mosques.

It was total war, a preview of the war against the civilian sector that NATO, again largely the United States, waged against Serbia during the Kosovo affair some years later. Little was spared.

When the war ended, Iraq was utterly defeated, but the vanquished nation, unlike Germany and Japan after World War II, was not allowed to rebuild. Instead, because of professed fears about Iraq's threat to its neighbors, and fears of Iraq's developing weapons of mass destruction, sanctions more severe than any known in history were imposed.

The dread consequences of those sanctions are plain. Because water-purification and sewage-treatment plants could not be rebuilt, infectious disease became rampant. Because Iraq could not import sufficient food, malnutrition was widespread and spartan food rationing, still in effect, had to be instituted.

Space does not permit a full discussion of the human costs of the sanctions, but deaths of children under five caused by respiratory infection, diarrhea and gastroenteritis and malnutrition grew tenfold between 1989 and 1999. The incidence of low-birthweight children grew from 4.5 percent to 24.1 percent between 1990 and 1999. Kwashiorkor, a disease caused by malnutrition, had scarcely ever been seen before in Iraq, but by 1998, the number of cases had increased by 61 times. Communicable diseases preventable by vaccination have soared. Doctors and nurses report that children who could easily have been saved have died for lack of medicine. Hospital equipment lies idle for lack of spare parts. There is not even sufficient cleaning supplies to maintain sanitation in hospitals.

A visit to Iraqi hospitals, once the pride of the Arab world, brings tears to your eyes as you see children suffering who need not be ill, or who could be easily cured, were it not for the sanctions.

Then there is the horrifying problem of children in southern Iraq developing leukemia or being born with cancers and grotesque malformations, something never before seen in that region. Although the United States asserts that depleted-uranium ammunition causes no such effects, there is no other reasonable explanation in a region where enormous quantities of ammunition with depleted uranium (perhaps contaminated with the deadly toxin plutonium, as we have just learned) were used against Iraqi forces, weaponry that remains in the environment 10 years later.

This brief list does not include the effects of widespread unemployment and rampant inflation.

Even if the sanctions were to end tomorrow and Iraq could pump much more of its oil wealth into the economy instantly, it would take years for the nation to recover. Of course, the hundreds of thousands who have died are forever gone, and the health of millions can never be entirely restored.

That, in drastically compressed form, is the cost. What are the benefits to weigh against those costs? They are hard to discern. If the removal of Saddam Hussein were a goal, he is stronger than ever and untouched by the sanctions. If reducing the threat of Iraq to its neighbors was a goal, that was accomplished by the Gulf War and the certain knowledge that if Saddam tried another such adventure, the consequences would again be swift and terrible.

We cannot know if Iraq is trying to build a stock of weapons of mass destruction, but balanced against what might be is the knowledge of what is , the use of weapons of mass destruction by the United Nations, which is to say largely the United States. Can anyone seriously argue that sanctions, as in this case, are any less weapons of mass destruction than nuclear, biological or chemical weapons?

Iraqis we met often said they understood the distinction between the U.S. government and the American people, blaming the government for the horrors visited on them. But I don't think we can wiggle off the moral hook that easily. Maybe they were being gracious or maybe in their society there is a distinction between government and people, but in the United States, a nation that purports to be a democracy, no policy can be long sustained that is not, even if tacitly, approved by the people.

And history is clear on this: In Iran, in Guatemala, in Vietnam, in Chile, in Nicaragua, and certainly in Iraq, the American people cannot plead ignorance. Even if the mainstream press covers such stories inadequately, there is sufficient information for us to know what our government is doing in our name. But for some reason, we prefer to avert our eyes and point the finger elsewhere.

So abhorrent are the cruel and inhumane actions of the U.S. government in Iraq that one could easily, given human tendencies, turn away from the cruel actions of the Saddam government. However, the inescapable fact is that, once again in history, the suffering ordinary people are being used as pawns by the leaders of both America and Iraq.

It is an inescapable fact that the United States is pulling the trigger in a one-sided war against an utterly defenseless people. So to those defenders of the sanctions who try to divert the discussion to the actions of the Saddam government, I say that by what we have done to the suffering people of Iraq and what we continue to do with sanctions and otherwise (U.S. bombs fell during our visit), we have forfeited that right.

We, as Americans, are not accountable for the actions of the Iraq government but we are accountable for the actions of our own government; if we do not oppose them, we share that responsibility. As history has amply proven, silence is complicity.

The sanctions have failed; they have accomplished nothing but suffering on an unimaginable scale. As William Cohen said shortly before he left office as the Clinton administration's defense secretary, Iraq is no longer a threat to its neighbors. Mr. Bush should end the sanctions that we could see crumbling around us as briefcase-toting businessmen swarmed into our hotel in Baghdad. The rest of the U.N. Security Council, save perhaps our satellite Britain, no longer has the stomach for them.

If the United States has concerns about Iraq, then we should watch that nation warily as we do other nations. Most of all, we should let the long-suffering people of Iraq rebuild the nation we have so cruelly shattered. Iraqis, citizens of a proud nation, want no help from their tormentors. They just want us to let them live. As we solidarity workers used to be asked in Nicaragua daily, Iraqis asked us plaintively, "What have we ever done to you?"

History, to our shame, will forever record what we have done to them.

Richard J. Walton, of Pawtuxet Village, is the author of nine books on U.S. foreign policy and a member of the national committee of the Green Party. He has just returned from a week-long trip to Iraq to deliver medicine and to challenge the U.N. sanctions on moral grounds. He was part of a 50-person delegation led by former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark and organized by the International Action Center, a group founded by Mr. Clark.