EDITORIAL Spinning Iraq: Sanctions still the central
issue
Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright and others have hit the stump again in recent days with new claims
that the U.S.-inspired economic sanctions against Iraq are not responsible for
the awful suffering of the Iraqi people and for the high death rate among
children under the age of 5.
According to a Sept. 12 New York Times report, Albright is
reacting to concerns expressed by anonymous sources that Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein is abusing the oil-for-food program. The sources maintain that he and
his cronies benefit by cornering distribution rights or through outright
black marketeering.
Others are concerned that Iraq has barred outside human rights
monitors and refused to allow outsiders to collect information on food
distribution. Observers are worried that the Iraqi government is impeding
delivery and refusing aid from other outside relief groups.
The concerns voiced in the Times article and recent
comments by Albright, who sarcastically dismisses as fantasy any suggestion of
U.S. culpability in the suffering of ordinary Iraqis, is the latest
counterassault in the ongoing battle for public opinion over the situation in
Iraq.
If the overriding question is whether Saddam Hussein is a brute
who would seek to benefit at the expense of his people, the answer clearly is
yes. We knew that in the 1980s when we armed him and encouraged him in his war
against Iran and as we sold him, as late as six months before the start of the
Gulf War in 1991, the components for the very biological and chemical weapons
we now want to make sure he doesnt have.
The central question, however, is whether the sanctions are an
effective means of dealing with Saddam. The answer is clearly no.
It is an easy and cheap trick to frame the debate so that
sanctions opponents are seen as supporters of the current regime in Iraq. But
that deceives and ignores other credible voices calling for an end to the
economic blockade.
United Nations professionals like Hans von Sponeck and
Dennis Halliday, both of whom spent their careers dealing with misery around
the globe, decided to end their careers because of what they saw in Iraq. Von
Sponeck and Halliday headed up the U.N. humanitarian effort in Iraq and both
men resigned in protest of the effects of the sanctions.
Their warnings are still relevant -- the sanctions are destroying
a culture, its children, its intellectual life, its health care and education
systems, and the infrastructure that sustained, prior to the Gulf War, what was
widely regarded as the most progressive Arab state in the Middle East.
Expect a new round of spin from the State Department on the heels
of the latest U.N. report on child health in Iraq. The report states that
malnutrition is more widespread in those areas of the country controlled by the
Baghdad government compared to areas in the North where food distribution is
handled by the United Nations directly.
It is easy to use that information to conclude that the Iraqi
government is the sole culprit in the higher malnutrition rates in areas under
its control. That will be the State Department spin.
But the report also notes, according to a recent Reuters dispatch,
that the North receives a disproportionately high share of the oil-for-food
revenues; that is has more rainfall than the drought-plagued southern and
central areas of Iraq; the North produces more of its own food; the North has
better water supplies than the South where the water and sewage treatment
systems were severely damaged in the war. Those systems cannot be fixed because
Iraq cannot get spare parts under the sanctions.
Malnutrition would also take a greater toll in the South because
the health care system has been rendered ineffective under the sanctions
regime.
Albright is fond of laying out the conditions under which Saddam
Hussein can remove himself from the sanctions box.
The opposite, of course, is true. The United States is in the
sanctions box and cant figure how to wiggle out. What Albright wont
admit is that the war ended in a mess, not victory. No one can say that now
because weve already had the ticker tape parades and declared its
generals heroes.
The fact is, the war never ended. Were still bombing
portions of the country several times a week. The awful truth is that Saddam
Hussein may be prospering while the United States, through the sanctions, goes
on killing the most vulnerable in that society.
Perhaps the time has come to put saving innocent noncombatants
ahead of saving face, to admit the dire futility of the current strategy,
conceive other ways of containing Saddam Hussein, and end the sanctions.
National Catholic Reporter, September 22,
2000
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