Left I on the News

Sanctions and genocide

Catching up on some reading on a plane ride, I read the latest issue of Socialism and Liberation magazine. In it, an excellent article by Richard Becker makes the following point which I have not seen emphasized elsewhere:

"With astonishing nonchalance, CIA operative and former UN Chief Weapons Inspector Charles Duelfer made a remarkable admission. Explaining the central conclusions of his report on Iraq at a Senate hearing on Oct. 8, Duelfer testified that Iraq had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and dismantled its nuclear program in 1991, immediately after the first Gulf War.

"'Astonishing' because between 1991 and 2003, more than one million Iraqis-half of them children under the age of five, according to international humanitarian aid organizations-had died as a direct result of the U.S./UN sanctions and blockade inflicted on their country. The deadly sanctions were officially explained as a means to force Iraq to give up its weapons of mass destruction. Now Duelfer admits to the world, the weapons that were used to justify such a genocidal policy had ceased to exist months after the sanctions were put in place."

Becker provides an interesting history lesson connecting the sanctions against Iraq with sanctions against the Soviet Union and, although he doesn't mention them, sanctions against Cuba as well:

"The consequences of shutting down foreign trade for a country like Iraq were entirely predictable and long recognized by Washington policy makers. Their intent was to inflict pain on the Iraqi people as a whole.

"The sanction regime brings to mind the words of President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 when describing the imperialist blockade against revolutionary Russia: 'The one who chooses this economic, peaceful, quiet, lethal remedy will not have to resort to force. It is a painful remedy. It doesn't take a single human life outside the country exposed to the boycott, but instead subjects that country to a pressure that, in my view, no modern country can withstand.'"

In other words, sanctions, or blockades, are just a polite word for war.

During the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. destroyed all of Iraq's water purification plants. In the decade of sanctions that followed, it was the prevention of importation of chemicals and equipment which would have allowed those plants to be rebuilt that was the primary cause of the deaths of more than a million Iraqis. The one fact Becker neglects to mention is that the United States knew in advance this would happen. The destruction of the water plants (and other civilian targets) during the first Gulf War was not just a war crime, combined with the sanctions it was a deliberate act of genocide.