Chomsky on Iraq Sanctions

Noam Chomsky has started a blog, called Turning the Tide. Here’s an excerpt from his latest entry concerning the murderous Iraqi sanctions:

There is reason to believe — as Halliday and von Sponeck had argued — that if the vicious sanctions regime had been ended the population of Iraq would have been able to send Saddam Hussein to the same fate as other murderous gangsters supported by the US and UK: Ceausescu, Suharto, Marcos, Duvalier, Chun, Mobutu…. — quite a rogue’s gallery, some of them easily comparable to Saddam, to which new names are being added daily by the same Western leaders, whose values are unchanged. If so, both murderous regimes could have been ended without invasion. Postwar inquiries, such as David Kay’s, add weight to these beliefs by revealing how shaky Saddam’s control of the country was in the last few years.

We may have our own subjective judgments about this matter, but we should at least have the honesty to recognize that they are completely irrelevant. Completely. Unless the population is at least given the opportunity to overthrow a murderous tyrant, as they did in the case of the other members of the rogue’s gallery supported by the US and UK (including the current incumbents), there is no justification for resort to outside force to do so. Another truism, which has repeatedly been pointed out — and systematically ignored within the doctrinal system.

That is sufficient to undermine the arguments contrived by Blair and Bush, or their handlers, after the collapse of their official reasons for invasion: WMD and Iraq’s alleged ties to terror. On different grounds, these arguments have been thoroughly refuted by Human Rights Watch in the introduction to its latest annual report. But there are further considerations as well. It was predicted by just about every serious specialist that the invasion of Iraq would increase the threat of terror as well as proliferation of WMD. The first prediction has been amply verified, with terrible consequences and probably more to come, and Iraq itself has admittedly become a “terrorist haven” for the first time. The second prediction is also considered to have been confirmed by many regional specialists and strategic analysts, and is unfortunately all too plausible. There is more. Uncontroversially, the invasion struck a serious blow at the system of international law and institutions that offers at least some hope of saving the world from destruction. And though victors do not tabulate the consequences of their crimes, there is little doubt that the numbers of Iraqis killed is in the tens of thousands. And there is a good deal more.

Read the rest here.

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