white male consumer

Lest we forget…

Squeezed to death

Half a million children have died in Iraq since UN sanctions were imposed – most enthusiastically by Britain and the US. Three UN officials have resigned in despair. Meanwhile, bombing of Iraq continues almost daily. John Pilger investigates
Saturday March 4, 2000

Wherever you go in Iraq’s southern city of Basra, there is dust. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. It swirls in school playgrounds and consumes children kicking a plastic ball. “It carries death,” said Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist and member of Britain’s Royal College of Physicians. “Our own studies indicate that more than 40 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years’ time to begin with, then long afterwards. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff of this hospital. We don’t know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper scientific survey, or even to test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields.”

As the news of today focuses on Saddam Hussein being charged with the 1980s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, I heartily recommend everyone to turn back to the state of Iraq in 2000, after nearly a decade of sanctions. That Guardian article is good, as is Globalissues.org’s page on the sanctions.

It’s all too easy to cry foul over the 2003 invasion of Iraq – as well we should. There is no doubt that the humanitarian aspect was quite far removed from the typical neo-con’s rationale for the invasion. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al., are no humanitarians.

But neither was Clinton, John Major / Tony Blair, or any of the other leaders of the West who were complicit in the deaths of over a million. The 90s sanctions against Iraq were akin to Stalin’s genocidal efforts against the Ukraine.

So what allowed it to happen? How did millions turn out to protest the 2003 invasion? Where were they the previous decade? This is a fundamental failing of the anti-war movement, and any protest movement in general. If that sense of immediacy isn’t there, then they don’t turn out. Regardless of actual circumstances.

If millions had turned out in the nineties, would Clinton have listened? It’s rhetorical – there is no point in debating it now. But today, we have an administration which publicly admits to ignoring us. What a stupid time to raise a fuss.

Should acknowledging the atrocious nature of the Clinton-era sanctions change a person’s view of the latest invasion of Iraq? It really shouldn’t. Yes, occupying Iraq has allowed us to gracefully drop the sanctions. To use a cliche – we’ve jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Or perhaps it’s Iraq which has done the jumping.

As the dozen or more permanent US military bases being built in Iraq make clear, we’re staying. The actual condition of Iraq and its population is irrelevant to our policy-makers. But it shouldn’t be. The air of democracy is not enough to placate them. You can’t eat a ballot, and a political figurehead does not provide clean water or steady electricity. The main objective should be improving living conditions. It’s not currently.

Could a new US administration change all of this? It’s possible. But I wouldn’t look towards the party of Clinton to solve anything. The single greatest prospect for Iraq is it’s own people. Because the “Coaliton of the Willing” is not likely to focus on the reality of the situation. And the anti-war movement has already fizzled, as it and everyone else grows tired of what’s happening to a bunch of foreigners halfway across the world. We’re content to sit here, watch the rising death toll, and smugly say, “I told you so.” We should be absolutely miserable that our predictions of a failed invasion and occupation are being proven daily.

“We are losing the war in Iraq. We are an isolated and reviled nation. We are pitiless to others weaker than ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens’ expanding empire and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself. If we do not confront the lies and hubris told to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, if we do not remove from power our flag-waving, cross-bearing versions of the Taliban, we will not so much defeat dictators such as Saddam Hussein as become them.”
– Chris Hedges

It feels like a cop-out, throwing up your hands and saying that the Iraqis must get themselves out of a mess that the West created. But what’s the alternative?