Sanctions: The Cruel and Brutal War Against the Iraqi People
by Jacob Hornberger
Future of Freedom Foundation
February 15, 2004

Immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush and other U.S. officials announced that the attacks had been motivated by hatred for America's "freedom and values." Nothing could have been further from the truth, and U.S. officials knew it. For 12 years, they had been waging a cruel and brutal, silent and undeclared war against the Iraqi people – a war which not only had plunged the Iraqi populace into economic privation and desperation but had also taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of their children. U.S. officials knew full well that it was just a matter of time before someone struck back, which is why they continually warned about the threat of terrorist attacks during the late 1990s.

Unfortunately, all too many people have forgotten about the cozy relationship between U.S. officials and Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. In fact, it is fascinating how the members of Congress and the mainstream media have, by and large, ignored one of the most critical aspects of that relationship: during the 1980s, the United States furnished weapons of mass destruction to Saddam. As ABC News put it in a report entitled "A Tortured Relationship," by Chris Bury,

Indeed, even as President Bush castigates Saddam's regime as "a grave and gathering danger," it's important to remember that the United States helped arm Iraq with the very weapons that administration officials are now citing as justification for Saddam's forcible removal from power.

(See a list of online articles detailing the history of the U.S. government's furnishing of weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein.)

Even worse, as the New York Times reported in an August 18, 2002, article entitled "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq Despite Use of Gas," by Patrick E. Tyler,

A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.

Keep in mind that the reason that the U.S. government was helping Saddam while he was employing his U.S.-provided WMDs against the Iranian people was that U.S. officials were still chafing over the Iranian people's ouster of the shah of Iran, the U.S.-appointed ruler who had tortured and killed his own people during his reign with the support of the U.S. government.

What does this have to do with the U.S. government's 12-year war against the Iraqi people? It evidences the cruel and brutal mindset of U.S. officials, a mindset that will stop at nothing to retaliate against recalcitrant foreign rulers, including even the targeting of the citizenry who happen to live under them.

The U.S. government's war against the Iraqi people began a few days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and before the U.S. military intervention in the Persian Gulf War. The United States and UN Security Council (led by the United States) imposed what the State Department later described as the "toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history" against the Iraqi people. While ostensibly excluding medicine and, later, food from the embargo, the goal was to shut down all commerce into and out of Iraq, especially the export of Iraqi oil on which the Iraqi economy largely depended.

The embargo was reinforced during the Persian Gulf War in a devious and sinister manner – by deliberately targeting Iraq's water, sewage, and electric-power facilities, with full knowledge of the likely consequence – the rapid spread of dangerous and deadly infectious diseases among the Iraqi population.

In his new book, Terrorism and Tyranny, James Bovard cites the official U.S. reports that document the state of mind of U.S. officials when they decided to destroy Iraq's sewage, water, and electric-power facilities. For example, the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that "unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur." A Pentagon analysis confirmed the DIA's analysis: "Cholera and measles have emerged at refugee camps. Further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation."

When the military operations of the Persian Gulf War came to an end, the embargo, unfortunately, did not. Instead, taking a page from the vindictive Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I, which imposed cruel and brutal punishments on the German people (and which ultimately contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler), the United States decided to indefinitely continue the embargo against the Iraqi people, with the ostensible purpose of requiring Saddam Hussein to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction, the same weapons that the United States had delivered to him only a few years before. The real purpose? To squeeze the Iraqi people to death with a downward spiral of economic privation until they ousted Saddam Hussein from power.

In a section of his personal website entitled "Iraq: Paying the Price," the noted journalist John Pilger, who produced a documentary for British television entitled "Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq," observed that "before 1990 and the imposition of sanctions, Iraq had one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East."

The sanctions put an end to that. Nine years after the sanctions were implemented, Pilger wrote,

Now Unicef reports that at least 200 children are dying every day. They are dying from malnutrition, a lack of clean water and a lack of medical equipment and drugs to cure easily treatable diseases. The current food ration, while nearly sufficient in calories, does not include enough vitamins, minerals and protein for health or growth. Malnutrition is now endemic amongst children. Diseases like kwashiorkor or marasmus are common in paediatric wards. Before 1990 the most important problem faced by Iraqi paediatricians was childhood obesity.

(See this list of online articles about the sanctions, including ones cited in this article.)

Barbara Stocking wrote in the International Herald Tribune on December 27, 2002, "Up to 16 million people – more than two-thirds of the population – already rely on a fragile system of food aid for their survival."

U.S. officials had done their job well with their destruction of Iraq's sewage, water, and electric-power facilities: infectious diseases ran rampant through the Iraqi population, especially among the young and newborn. Why hadn't Iraqi officials repaired those facilities after the war had ended? Because the "toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history" had ensured that the Iraqis could not procure the necessary parts and equipment to do so. The "brilliance" of the U.S. strategy was matched only by its cruel and brutal success.

Here's just one of many examples, as described by Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Larry Johnson, who traveled to Iraq with U.S. physicians who risked U.S. prosecution for violating the embargo by providing medicines and medical assistance to the Iraqi people without the permission of the United Nations:

At Al Mansour Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad, malnourished children, covered with flies, lie on stained mattresses. Mothers and fathers sit on the beds, methodically swatting at the flies. Medicine is in short supply. The hospital is dark; electrical power is shut off periodically each day to conserve resources. The usual antiseptic odor of medical facilities has been replaced with the stench of urine, feces and decay. Moving from bed to bed, Dr. Tarig Al-Shujairi lists the illnesses afflicting the children: typhoid fever, pneumonia, leukemia, tuberculosis, cholera. Even polio and measles are making a comeback, he says.

There are disputes over the exact number of children who died as result of the sanctions, but most everyone agrees that the number ranges between 225,000 and 500,000. (See Sheldon Richman's accompanying Freedom Daily article on this point.) Let that sink in: Our own government – the U.S. government – knowingly and deliberately implemented and maintained a cruel and brutal policy with the intent to target the civilian population of Iraq, with the full knowledge that it would cost the lives of countless innocent people, including innocent children.

Even worse, year after year, knowing full well that economic privation, near-starvation, and death were the actual results of the embargo – and that it was not producing the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power – U.S. officials nonetheless steadfastly continued it. As Anupama Rao Singh, the United Nations Children's Fund representative in Baghdad, put it,

Ten years ago, malnutrition was almost non-existent. From 1991 to 1998, children under 5 were dying from malnutrition-related diseases in numbers ranging from a conservative 2,690 per month to a more realistic 5,357 per month.

And it was all happening because of a 12-year U.S. government obsession with a man who had formerly been a close U.S. ally – one who had never attacked or even threatened to attack the United States and, in fact, one to whom the United States had entrusted weapons of mass destruction to use against others.

By 1996, an increasing number of people were speaking out against the sanctions against Iraq, which motivated U.S. officials to embrace a diplomatic fig leaf that would protect them from adverse public opinion while, at the same time, enabling them to continue their cruel and brutal policy against the Iraqi people. That was when the infamous "oil for food" program was implemented.

An implicit acknowledgement of the desperate plight of the Iraqi people, the ostensible purpose of the oil-for-food program was to provide a minimal, still small, caloric intake for the average person. Given that its setup and operation were based on an almost-perfect model of socialistic central planning, however, it shouldn't have surprised anyone that the program failed to significantly alleviate the plight of the Iraqi people. What it did do though is provide U.S. officials with an opportunity to proclaim how good and caring they were to the Iraqi people.

Referring to the oil-for-food program, Joy Gordon wrote in her excellent Harper's article (November 2002), "Cool War: Economic Sanctions as a Weapon of Mass Destruction,"

Since the program began, Iraq has earned approximately $57 billion in oil revenues, of which it has spent about $23 billion on goods that actually arrived. This comes to about $170 per year per person, which is less than one half the annual per capita income of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

More important, the Iraqi children continued to die of malnutrition and disease. According to the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI), Tun Myat, the UN coordinator in Iraq, stated in October 2000,

The food distribution system ... now ensures that under the new Distribution Plan over 2,470 kilocalories of energy of food is being made available to every man, woman and child in the country ... but the fact is, of course, people have become so poor, in some cases, that they can't even afford to eat the food that they've been given free because for many of them, the food ration represents the major part of their income ... they have to sell it in order to buy clothes and shoes or hats or whatever other things that they would require. So the sort of upturn in nutrition that we would all want to be seeing is not happening.

According to CASI,

In his June 2000 report, the UN Secretary-General wrote that "clean water and reliable electrical supply are of paramount importance to the welfare of the Iraqi people" (§98). Such basic needs have not been provided by the imports allowed to Iraq under oil for food. In November 2002 the Secretary-General noted that "access to potable water is insufficient in both quantity and quality, and in many cases the water and sanitation networks remain in a poor state of repair. On top of this an estimated 500,000 metric tons of solid raw or partially raw sewage is discharged daily into the two rivers, which are the main source of water."

"Oh, but it's not our fault that those children are dying of infectious diseases," U.S. officials continually cried, "because medicines aren't prohibited by the sanctions." Their cries were a sham and a lie, for they knew full well that the medicines that made their way into Iraq were totally inadequate to treat the ever-growing numbers of children infected by what would ordinarily have been treatable diseases. The CASI website points to a devastating 1999 UN Security Council report on the sanctions that concludes,

In marked contrast to the prevailing situation prior to the events of 1990-91, the infant mortality rates in Iraq today are among the highest in the world, low infant birth weight affects at least 23% of all births, chronic malnutrition affects every fourth child under five years of age, only 41% of the population have regular access to clean water, 83% of all schools need substantial repairs. The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] states that the Iraqi health-care system is today in a decrepit state. UNDP [the United Nations Development Programme] calculates that it would take 7 billion U.S. dollars to rehabilitate the power sector countrywide to its 1990 capacity.

Moreover, if U.S. officials were as concerned about helping the Iraqi people with medicines as they claim they were, then why would they make it a criminal offense for physicians to travel to Iraq with medicines to give to the Iraqi people? Indeed, why did U.S. officials file a complaint against the humanitarian group Voices in the Wilderness as late as June 2003 for delivering medicines to the Iraqi people in 1998?

Further, as Gordon pointed out in her Harper's article, even as U.S. officials were trying to blame the deaths and destruction on Saddam Hussein, they were playing cute but deadly games with the bureaucratic power they wielded to veto purchase requests by Iraqi officials:

[The United States] has sometimes given a reason for its refusal to approve humanitarian goods, sometimes given no reason at all, and sometimes changed its reason three or four times, in each instance causing a delay of months. Since August 1991 the United States has blocked most purchases of materials necessary for Iraq to generate electricity, as well as equipment for radio, telephone, and other communications. Often restrictions have hinged on the withholding of a single essential element, rendering many approved items useless. For example, Iraq was allowed to purchase a sewage-treatment plant but was blocked from buying the generator necessary to run it; this in a country that has been pouring 300,000 tons of raw sewage daily into its rivers.

Ironically, while the purpose of the sanctions was to squeeze the Iraqi people into ousting Saddam Hussein from power, the perverse result was the exact opposite. A February 2003 Washington Post article entitled "Stockpiling Popularity with Food" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran pointed out in excruciating detail how the sanctions actually increased Saddam's control over the Iraqi people through the extensive food-rationing programs that he implemented soon after the sanctions were imposed in 1991.

Many Americans remain blissfully unaware of the death and destruction the U.S. government wrought for 12 years in the name of ousting Saddam Hussein from power and in the name of dismantling his much-vaunted and much-feared weapons of mass destruction. But the rest of the world was fully aware of what the U.S. government was doing to the Iraqi people.

For example, in 1998 Denis Halliday, the UN official in charge of the oil-for-food program, resigned his 30-year position with the UN in protest against the sanctions, branding them as a "totally bankrupt concept" and incompatible with the UN Charter as well as UN conventions on human rights and the rights of the child.

Halliday's resignation was followed two years later by that of Hans von Sponeck, the highest-ranking UN humanitarian official in Baghdad, who declared, "Every year that passes, every month that passes, sees the intensity of the sanctions on the lives of the people here increase."

The following is an excerpt from a 1998 BBC article discussing Halliday's resignation:

Mr. Halliday said it was correct to draw attention to the "4,000 to 5,000 children dying unnecessarily every month due to the impact of sanctions because of the breakdown of water and sanitation, inadequate diet and the bad internal health situation." But he said sanctions were biting into the fabric of Iraqi society in other, less visible ways. He cited the disruption of family life caused by the departure overseas of two to three million Iraqi professionals. He said sanctions had increased divorces and reduced the number of marriages because young couples could not afford to wed. "It has also produced a new level of crime, street children, possibly even an increase in prostitution," he said. "This is a town where people used to leave the key in the front door, leave their cars unlocked, where crime was almost unknown. We have, through the sanctions, really disrupted this quality of life, the standard of behaviour that was common in Iraq before."

Two years later, von Sponeck said,

Today, with an unemployment rate that is estimated at between 60 and 75 percent, people depend on what is given to them and that is humiliating and it does not make for a future of self-reliance based on your efforts to earn in a dignified way a living.

More ominous was the following statement by Halliday that was the concluding paragraph in the 1998 BBC article:

It is not well understood as a possible spin-off of the sanctions regime. We are pushing people to take extreme positions.

That's undoubtedly why U.S. officials were so convinced that Iraq had something to do with the September 11 attacks. They knew that after more than a decade of brutal sanctions against Iraq, Iraqi officials and the Iraqi people had the most compelling motive to retaliate against both the civilian and military population of the United States. In the halls of Washington governmental offices on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, the families of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children were undoubtedly likely suspects in the attacks that took place in New York and Washington.

While Americans might not have been aware of the 12 years of death and destruction that the sanctions were producing for the Iraqi people, everyone in the Arab world was fully aware of the sanctions' consequences. And while there was certainly no love for Saddam Hussein among many Arabs, there was tremendous sympathy and empathy for the Iraqi people. Year after year, Arabs seethed with anger and hatred over what the U.S. government was doing to the Iraqi people, which is one big reason that the September 11 suicide bombers came from countries all over the Middle East.

When U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright, who later would be confirmed by the U.S. Senate as secretary of state, was asked by 60 Minutes whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children had been "worth it," her response – "I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it" – reverberated throughout the Middle East.

While Albright is now claiming in her new book that she just made an honest mistake in answering that way, the fact is that her answer perfectly reflected the cruel and brutal mindset of her fellow officials in the U.S. government – the people who knowingly and intentionally instituted and maintained what the State Department had called the "toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history." That's undoubtedly why they chose silence in the face of Albright's shameful statement rather than condemnation or criticism.

Unfortunately, the people who are responsible for implementing and maintaining the sanctions against the Iraqi people for so long will never be called to account for what they have done. The people who paid the price for their cruelty and brutality were the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The best thing Americans could ever do to honor their memory is to permanently prohibit the U.S. government from ever again utilizing economic sanctions and embargoes as tools of foreign policy.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va.