Ten Years On

Iraq Under Siege: Ten Years On

by Anthony Arnove

It has been ten years since the United Nations imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq. The sanctions were adopted on August 6, 1990, forty-five years to the day after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated one hundred thousand people and leaving a toxic legacy that still affects the population of the area.

The bombing was soon followed by an attack on Nagasaki. The coincidence is a telling one. For all the US government's rhetoric about halting the use of weapons of mass destruction, the United States stands in a league of its own in using and proliferating them.

As horrific as the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was, perhaps five to ten times as many people have died in Iraq as a consequence of the war led by the United States and Britain, under United Nations (UN) auspices, during the last decade.

The UN adopted the sanctions four days after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and reaffirmed them after the brutal 1991 Gulf War, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, expelled Iraq from Kuwait, and in the process reduced the country to a "pre-industrial" state, as a UN-led delegation observed just after the war.1

Sanctions were allegedly extended to disarm Iraq of its biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.

Little was said at the time about the contradictions of the United States and other members of the Security Council—the countries responsible for the overwhelming majority of sales of arms in the region and internationally—voicing such concern over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Even less was said about some other inconvenient facts, among them that the Iraqi government had developed its destructive and repressive capacity with the support and encouragement of its friends in Washington, London, and other Western capitals, and that Israel had a nuclear weapons arsenal of some two hundred warheads and continued to occupy southern Lebanon, as well as the territories it had illegally seized in 1948 and 1967, in violation of numerous unenforced UN resolutions.

Ten years on, despite evidence from top former UN arms inspectors and from other international agencies that Iraq has been "qualitatively disarmed," the sanctions remain in place. Sanctions will be maintained "until the end of time, or as long as he [Saddam Hussein] is in power," President Bill Clinton explained.

While US policy now calls for a "regime change" in Iraq, the US government consciously kept Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the Gulf War, preferring "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta," in the words of New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman, to a popular rebellion.2

In reality, the US government would like someone from within the military to take power and rule the country, as Hussein did when he was a US ally during the 1980–1988 war with Iran and through the invasion of Kuwait. However, the United States would like it to be someone without any regional ambitions that conflict with the first rule of Middle East politics: the United States calls the shots.

The ridiculously named Iraq Liberation Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, has set aside ninety-seven million dollars for the alleged Iraqi opposition, a badly divided group based in London and entirely lacking any social base in Iraq. Among the forces receiving US funding and support is a group that hopes to restore the Iraqi monarchy.3

In the meantime, ordinary Iraqis are dying in numbers that defy comprehension, as a deliberate and predictable consequence of a policy designed to strangle the Iraqi economy. The people paying the price are the poor, the working class, and, especially, children—rather than the alleged targets of the sanctions, President Hussein and his inner circle in the ruling Baathist Party.

In fact, the sanctions have benefited the government in many respects, while weakening and dividing the population. A small group of people has grown fabulously wealthy from the black market generated by the embargo. In downtown Baghdad, one sees pristine new Mercedes sedans and sport utility vehicles amid the dilapidated deathtraps ordinary Iraqis drive, negotiating dangerous four-way intersections without functioning stop-lights.

Though the sanctions have kept Iraq from importing items essential for maintaining its water sewage and sanitation system, including chlorine, the tiny elite in Baghdad smuggles in chlorine for their private swimming pools. There has been a boom in private pool construction in Baghdad during the embargo.4

After extensive countrywide surveys, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) found that the Iraqi mortality rate for children under five has doubled in southern and central Iraq, largely as a result of the Gulf War, its impact, and the sanctions. In a country of twenty-two million people over nearly ten years, that translates into five hundred thousand "excess" deaths. The number one killer of children under five in Iraq today is dehydration from diarrhea.

The State Department argument that these deaths are "all Saddam's fault," as evidenced by the improvement in under- five mortality rates in the autonomous region in northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds, doesn't hold up to a moment's examination.

The north is far richer agriculturally than the south and center; receives more humanitarian aid per capita, including cash assistance forbidden in the rest of the country; benefits from the porous Turkish border; and did not suffer nearly the infrastructural damage and pollution from the Gulf War as the south, where the US military fired more than one million rounds of munitions tipped with radioactive depleted uranium.5

Iraqis now face widespread malnutrition and other diseases endemic to the poverty-stricken third world, such as malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis. As repressive and undemocratic as the government was then, Iraq had an advanced medical, educational, and social infrastructure by the end of the 1980s. It has been destroyed.

The UN sanctions committee, which must approve any purchases the Iraqi government wants to make with the revenues of its oil sales, routinely denies permission for contracts to rebuild this infrastructure under its "dual use" criteria: Iraq cannot import civilian goods that might have a potential military application.

Among the items that have been kept out through this mechanism, primarily through the veto power of the US representative on the committee, are ambulances, chlorinators, and even pencils. Currently, some 1.8 billion dollars worth of items requested by Iraq are "on hold," thanks to these restrictions, in some cases making other items that have been imported, such as spare parts, worthless.

London-based investigative journalist John Pilger recently confronted Peter van Walsum, the chair of the UN sanctions committee, about how its decisions are made.

Pilger: How much power does the United States exercise over your committee?
van Walsum: We operate by consensus.
Pilger: And what if the Americans object?
van Walsum: We don't operate.6

In 1990, one Iraqi dinar exchanged for around three US dollars. Now, in the currency exchanges of Baghdad, one dollar trades for 2200 dinars. As a result, the savings and earnings power of almost every Iraqi has been destroyed. Children now leave school earlier, if they start at all, to help their families piece together the means to survive.

In a seventh-grade classroom I visited outside Baghdad in March 2000, with a delegation from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Voices in the Wilderness, a teacher stood before a room full of students without the benefit of a single piece of paper, pencil, book, or notebook.

When she asked the students in Arabic to raise their hands if they had to work after school, every hand went up. Some of the children will shine shoes or sell kerosene; others will sell their bodies for sex. Later, in the hallway, the teacher explained to us that she also had to work after school because she could no longer live on her teaching salary, now the equivalent of around three dollars a month, and could not afford medical treatment she needed.

Blood for Oil

To understand what is happening in Iraq, you need to start with a simple fact that is rarely discussed in the media: after Saudi Arabia, Iraq has the world's largest proven oil reserves. Some 11 percent of the world's oil is under Iraq, and because it is so close to the surface, it is among the world's cheapest oil to extract, making it more profitable than oil from the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea.

While some have attempted to explain US policy in Iraq by pointing to the price of gas at American pumps, the picture is more complicated. The leading supplier of oil to the United States is actually Canada, which only recently displaced Venezuela from the top position. The US interest in Middle Eastern oil goes deeper. In addition to being so profitable, US planners have long understood that Middle Eastern oil is of unparalleled geostrategic importance.

As early as 1945, the US State Department noted that oil "has historically played a larger part in the external relations of the United States than any other commodity."7 In particular, the government recognized that control over the region's oil would give it strategic leverage over competing capitalist states, especially Japan and Germany.

Iraq was dominated by British interests in the 1930s and 1940s. But when explorations uncovered large oil reserves in Iraq in the early 1950s, the United States quickly moved to push the United Kingdom aside. "Conditions changed dramatically" in Iraq in the 1950s, explains historian Samira Haj. "Production rates increased, royalties rose sharply, and oil became the leading sector of the [Iraqi] economy." As socialist Tony Cliff observed:

When speaking about imperialism in the Middle East, what comes to mind first and foremost is oil. . . . If we were talking about Middle East oil before the Second World War, we would have spoken mainly of British oil imperialism. Then Britain controlled 100 per cent of Iranian oil and 47.5 per cent of Iraqi oil; the US interest was only 23.75 per cent in Iraq (equal to France's). Since then the situation has changed radically: in 1959 the US share rose to 50 per cent of all Middle East oil, while that of Britain declined to 18 per cent (France had 5 per cent, the Netherlands 3 per cent, other, including the local Arab governments, 24 per cent). Now oil imperialism is really United States imperialism.8

The United States emerged from the Second World War with unprecedented economic and military power, and immediately sought to capitalize on the advantages it had gained.

Seeking to develop "a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security" (in the words of State Department planner George Kennan, writing in an internal planning document in 1948), the United States established close ties with client regimes in the region, coming to rely especially on Israel and Iran under the Shah.9

But the regional "pattern of relationships" underwent significant changes in 1979. When the US-backed Shah was expelled from Iran in a revolution, the government looked to Iraq and Saddam Hussein, who had risen through the Baathist Party power structure to become president in 1979, to "contain" Iran.

During its brutal war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, the United States armed and supported Iraq, while also secretly playing the two countries against one another.

Today, the media describes at great length how Hussein "gassed his own people." Yet when the thousands of Kurds were gassed in the March 1988 Halabja massacre, the US government increased agricultural credits to his regime and sent a delegation of Washington politicians, including Senator Robert Dole, to encourage better relations between the two countries and to advise Hussein on how to deal with the American media.

Sub-Imperialism

Hussein, of course, would soon go from being a dictator whose weapons and repression were favored (since they were stamped "Made in the U.S.A.") to the government's greatest enemy, the subject of endless discussions of the evil that the United States confronts on the world stage. As historian Howard Zinn comments, "It's as if the United States never encountered a dictator before," the Shah in Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (now Congo), and Hussein in Iraq aside.10

1979 was significant in another respect, in terms of the shifting balance of power in the Middle East. When Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel in September 1978, leading to a March 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, the question of who in the Arab world would "take up the mantle of strategic deterrence vis-à-vis Israel," in Naseer Aruri's formulation, was up for grabs.11 Hussein hoped Iraq could fill that void, an ambition that would place him on a collision course with the United States.

Iraq represented a clear example of what Alex Callinicos has described as "the rise of sub- imperialisms in the Third World:"

The key factor in the development of a more pluralistic and more unstable world order has been the rise over the past two decades of the sub-imperialisms—that is, of Third World powers aspiring to the kind of political and military domination on a regional scale which the superpowers have enjoyed globally. The Middle East, as the most unstable region since 1945 . . . is unfortunate enough to have the largest number of contenders for this role—Israel, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey.12

Hussein crossed the line in the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The United States had built up the Iraqi regime against Iran for strategic purposes, but would not allow Hussein to achieve his regional ambitions unchecked, especially if they threatened US control over oil.

The Gulf War alone ensured this fact, savagely destroying Iraq's infrastructure, as well as targeting sites of historic and cultural importance. The embargo has prevented Iraq from rebuilding, while bleeding the population and holding it hostage to the US commitment to "political and military domination."

The Hidden War

While sanctions have been presented as an alternative to military intervention, they have taken a greater toll than even the Gulf War; and the embargo has been punctuated by numerous military assaults on Iraq. One of President Clinton's first acts in office, after turning back Haitian refugees seeking asylum, was to send missiles into downtown Baghdad, killing a number of Iraqis, including the Iraqi artist Leila al-Attar.

Since the brutal Operation Desert Fox bombing of December 1998, American and British jets have been bombing Iraq on an almost-daily basis.

"Civilian deaths and injuries are a regular part of the little-discussed US and British air operation over Iraq," the Washington Post acknowledged in a rare article discussing the attacks in what are known as the "no-fly" zones over Iraq. The two countries claim to be "enforcing" a nonexistent UN resolution in carrying out the bombings; the zones have no legal basis.

The multibillion dollar operation has far exceeded the scale of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) operation in the Balkans last year, but has been consciously insulated from public attention by the Clinton and Blair administrations. According to Pentagon figures, US and UK fighter planes have flown more than 280,000 sorties since the zones were first established.

Since the massive escalation of the attacks starting in December 1998, the UK has dropped an estimated seventy- eight tons of weapons on southern Iraq alone, compared with 2.5 tons during the previous six years.13

In Basra, Iraq's major southern city, I met Iqbal Fartous, who now calls herself Um Hydir ("mother of Hydir") after the son she lost in one such bombing in January 1999. Hydir was killed with several other neighbors on a close-knit urban street. Her other son, Mustafa, who is now six, survived.

But Um Hydir pulled up his shirt and pulled down his pants to show us the multiple shards of glass and debris that are clearly visible beneath the surface of his skin.

UN officials, including Hans von Sponeck, who recently resigned as UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq to protest the sanctions, have documented that the bombings have routinely hit civilians and essential infrastructure, as well as livestock.

The United States claims the "no-fly" zones were established to protect Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south. Yet they have done nothing of the sort.

The hypocrisy of the US position was exposed again in April when Turkey—a major US and NATO ally, which "plays a critical role in protecting American security interests in the region" (according to the New York Times) and serves as a base for US military operations in the region, including the "no-fly" zone assaults—staged a massive incursion into northern Iraq in an ethnic cleansing campaign intended to eradicate the very Kurds allegedly being protected by Western forces.

"In what has become an annual event that marks the arrival of spring," the Guardian newspaper in Britain reported, "thousands of Turkish troops have crossed the border into northern Iraq during the past few days to hunt down members of the rebel Kurdistan Worker's Party. . . .

Almost anywhere else in the world, thousands of heavily armed soldiers crossing an international border would be big news. But this latest Turkish incursion into Iraq will be greeted with barely a murmur in the west."14

Turning the Tide

As hard as the proponents of sanctions have tried to hide the evidence of the human toll of the war on Iraq, they are increasingly finding themselves on the defensive, thanks to pressure from a growing international activist movement opposed to the embargo.

"The [Clinton] administration's policy toward Iraq faces intensifying diplomatic criticism and international concern that economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations are punishing the Iraqi people, not Mr. Hussein's government," the New York Times reported in July.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council is "faced with growing criticism of embargoes that fail to deter dictators but often hurt civilians" and "is having a hard time responding to critics of sanctions against Iraq, where, according to a new estimate from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 80 percent of the civilian population has been negatively affected."

In late March, US Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted, "We are in danger of losing the argument or propaganda war—if we haven't lost it already—about who is responsible for this situation, President Saddam Hussein or the United Nations." Annan added: "we are accused of causing suffering to an entire population."15

Hans von Sponeck's resignation this spring made him the second top UN official in Iraq to resign, following the principled example of Denis Halliday, the former humanitarian coordinator who stepped down in fall 1998 and has since dedicated himself to ending what he describes as "genocide" in Iraq. Just after von Sponeck stepped down, Jutta Burghardt, the director of the UN World Food Program operation in Iraq, also resigned.

"I fully support what Mr. von Sponeck was saying," said Burghardt. "It is a true humanitarian tragedy what is happening here and I believe any human being who looks at the facts and the impact of the sanctions on the population will not deny that he is right."

Tun Myat, von Sponeck's replacement, reported in October that "although [Iraq's food] distribution system ranked among the world's best, the lot of ordinary Iraqis has failed to improve because their living conditions remain mired in chronic deprivation." 16

The mainstream media have begun reporting on the war in a way that we have not seen in the past ten years. The Economist magazine recently observed that:

Sanctions impinge on the lives of all Iraqis every moment of the day. In Basra, Iraq's second city, power flickers on and off, unpredictable in the hours it is available. . . . Smoke from jerry-rigged generators and vehicles hangs over the town in a thick cloud.

The tap-water causes diarrhea, but few can afford the bottled sort. Because the sewers have broken down, pools of stinking muck have leached through the surface all over town. That effluent, combined with pollution upstream, has killed most of the fish in the Shatt al-Arab river and has left the remainder unsafe to eat. The government can no longer spray for sand-flies or mosquitoes, so insects have proliferated, along with the diseases they carry.

Most of the once-elaborate array of government services have vanished. The archeological service has taken to burying painstakingly excavated ruins for want of the proper preservative chemicals. The government-maintained irrigation and drainage network has crumbled, leaving much of Iraq's prime agricultural land either too dry or too salty to cultivate.

Sheep and cattle, no longer shielded by government vaccination programs, have succumbed to pests and diseases by the hundreds of thousands. Many teachers in the state-run schools do not bother to show up for work any more. Those who do must teach listless, malnourished children, often without the benefit of books, desks or even black-boards.17

Activists in the United States successfully targeted commencement addresses last spring by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a vocal supporter of the sanctions, at University of California at Berkeley, George Washington University, and Northeastern University.

At Berkeley's graduation, Fadia Rafeedie, who was awarded the university's highest honor for a graduating senior, gave a powerful speech condemning the war on Iraq's people.

Albright was spared having to hear Rafeedie's words because the university rearranged the program to put Albright ahead of her. As protestors inside held up banners describing Albright as a "war criminal," security guards quickly escorted her out, driving her past a large protest outside the auditorium; fifty-nine protesters were removed from the hall.

Such activism was critical to ending the Vietnam War and became closely connected to a broader struggle in this country for women's liberation, gay liberation, civil rights, and socialism.

At a time when growing numbers of people have been radicalized and are questioning the price ordinary people here and abroad pay for US imperialism and its domination of institutions such as the UN, the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, the opportunities for reviving the anti-imperialist left in this country have never been better.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the lives of billions depend on building that anti-imperialist movement, starting with the immediate task of ending the sanctions on Iraq.

NOTES

1. Martti Ahtisaari, The Impact of War on Iraq: Report to the Secretary-General on Humanitarian Needs in Iraq in the Immediate Post-Crisis Environment, March 20, 1991 (Westfield, New Jersey: Open Magazine Pamphlet Series 7, 1991), p.5.
2. Barbara Crossette, "For Iraq, a Dog House with Many Rooms," New York Times, November 23, 1997, p. 4: 4, and "US Monitor Now Argues Iraqis Have Little to Conceal," New York Times, July 3, 2000, p.A7. Thomas L. Friedman, "A Rising Sense that Iraq's Hussein Must Go," New York Times, July 7, 1991, p. 4: 1. Tim Russert, interview with Madeleine Albright, NBC, Meet the Press, January 2, 2000.
3. See Ken Silverstein, "Crazy About Hussein," The Nation 268: 17 (May 10, 1999): 19–23.
4. See Sandro Contenta, "The Rich Get Richer, the Poor. . .," Toronto Star, June 25, 2000.
5. UNICEF and Government of Iraq Ministry of Health, Child and Maternal Mortality Survey 1999: Preliminary Report (Baghdad: UNICEF, 1999) and related documents, available online at http://www.unicef.org. See Peter L. Pellett, "Sanctions, Food, Nutrition, and Health in Iraq," in Anthony Arnove ed., Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000; London: Pluto Press, 2000), pp. 161–163.
6. John Pilger, "Collateral Damage," in Arnove, Iraq Under Siege, p. 63.
7. Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 294.
8. Samira Haj, The Making of Iraq, 1900-1963: Capital, Power, and Ideology (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 71. Tony Cliff, "The Struggle in the Middle East," in Tariq Ali, ed., The New Revolutionaries: A Handbook of the International Radical Left (New York: William Morrow, 1969), p. 219–220.
9. State Department Policy Planning Study, February 23, 1948, cited in Noam Chomsky, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (Boston: South End Press, 1987), pp. 15–16.
10. Howard Zinn, "Iraq Under Siege," April 10, 2000, New York. Transcript available from Alternative Radio (http://www.alternativeradio.org).
11. Naseer Aruri, "America's War Against Iraq: 1990–1999," in Arnove, Iraq Under Siege, p. 25. See also Ivor Lucas, "Twenty Years of Saddam Hussein, 1979–1999," in Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI), Sanctions on Iraq: Background, Consequences, Strategies (Cambridge: CASI, 2000), p. 15.
12. Alex Callinicos, "Marxism and Imperialism Today," in Alex Callinicos, et al., Marxism and the New Imperialism (Chicago and London: Bookmarks, 1994), p. 45.
13. Edward Cody, "Under Iraqi Skies, a Canvas of Death," Washington Post, June 16, 2000, p. A1. David Usborne, "The West's Forgotten Conflict," Guardian, June 23, 2000. Richard Norton-Taylor, "Step-Up in Bombing of Iraq Questioned," Guardian, June 8, 2000.
14. Chris Morris, "Turks Pursue Kurds Inside Northern Iraq," Guardian, April 3, 2000, p. 13.
15. Steven Lee Myers, "Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program," New York Times, July 1, 2000, p. A1. Barbara Crossette, "UN Council to Review its Policy on Sanctions," New York Times, April 18, 2000, p. A10, and "Annan Exhorts UN Council on 'Oil for Food' for Iraqis," New York Times, March 25, 2000, p. A3.
16. Agence France-Presse, "UN Food Aid Chief Joins Protest Against UN Resolution on Iraq," February 16, 2000. Christopher Wren, "Iraq Poverty Said to Undermine Food Program," New York Times, October 20, 2000, p. A16.
17. "When Sanctions Don't Work," The Economist 354/865 (April 8-14, 2000): 23–24.

ANTHONY ARNOVE is an editor at South End Press and contributing editor to the International Socialist Review. He is editor of Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Cambridge: South End Press; London: Pluto Press, 2000). Arnove traveled to Iraq in March 2000.

www.monthlyreview.org

Iraq Under Siege

The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War

Anthony Arnove (Editor)

In this critically acclaimed collection, leading voices against the sanctions document the human, environmental, and social toll of the US and UK-led war against Iraq. This updated edition examines George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s escalation of the conflict as part of their global “war on terroism,” even though no evidence exists that ties Iraq to the tragic events of September 11.

Carefully documented, thoroughly researched, and written in clear language, Iraq Under Siege is invaluable for anyone who wants to understand the roots of US policy in Iraq and the Middle East. The volume also includes photographs and first-person accounts from Iraq that show the human story of the sanctions, which have now been in place for 12 years, ending with concrete ideas on how people can help end the war on Iraq.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments and Note to the Updated Edition

Introduction to the Updated Edition (2002) by Anthony Arnove

Part I: The Roots of US/UK Policy

1 America's War Against Iraq: 1990-2002 by Naseer Aruri

2 Iraq: The Impact of Sanctions and US Policy by Phyllis Bennis and Denis J. Halliday; Interviewed by David Barsamian

3 US Iraq Policy: Motives and Consequences by Noam Chomsky

Part II: Myths and Realities

4 Collateral Damage by John Pilger

5 Myths and Realities Regarding Iraq and Sanctions by Voices in the Wilderness

6 The Media's Deadly Spin on Iraq by Ali Abunimah and Rania Masri

7 The Hidden War by Robert Fisk

8 One Iraqi’s Story by Howard Zinn

Part 3: Life Under Sanctions

9 Raising Voices: The Children of Iraq 1990-1999 by Kathy Kelly

10 Targets—Not Victims by Barbara Nimri Aziz

11 Sanctions: Killing a Country and a People by George Capaccio

Part 4: Documenting the Impact of Sanctions

12 Sanctions, Food, Nutrition, and Health in Iraq by Dr. Peter Pellett

13 Toxic Pollution, the Gulf War, and Sanctions by Dr. Huda S. Ammash

Excerpt from "Raising Voices: The Children of Iraq 1990-1999," by Kathy Kelly

It is January 8, 1997. I am in a car driving from Baltimore to Washington, DC, at 6:15 a.m. With me are Simon Harak, a Jesuit priest and theology professor, and Ardeth Platte and Carol Gilbert, Dominican sisters from Baltimore. We will later meet Aft Laffin, a Catholic lay worker, at the Senate Hart Office Building. Our plan is to enter the Senate confirmation hearings of Madeleine Albright for Secretary of State.

Leslie Stahl went to Iraq for 60 Minutes. On the program that aired May 12, 1996, she asked Albright, who was then the US ambassador to the United Nations, to explain US policy in the context of the devastation she had seen among the children of Iraq. Albright responded: "It’s a hard decision, Leslie, but we think the price…is worth it."

We arrive two hours before the hearing. Already thirty people are in line. Tucked inside our coats are folded enlargements of pictures of Iraqi children I visited in August 1996, children whose sunken eyes plead for relief from starvation and disease.

The hearings begin and we hear mutterings that there is no room inside for members of the public. I feel disappointed and a bit silly, having raced from Chicago to Washington on a moment’s notice, apparently for naught. Much to our relief, after then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher is escorted out, the security guards allow the people in line to enter in groups of ten as the hearings proceed.

We are among the first forty admitted. We have agreed beforehand that immediately after Albright concludes her remarks, we’ll stand, one by one, to raise our pictures of the children and express our urgent concerns.

Albright stresses her commitment to universal human rights, but as regards Iraq she only affirms readiness to maintain a tough policy. As the applause subsides, I stand up.

"Albright," I call out, "over one-half million Iraqi children have died because of US/UN sanctions. In May 1996, you told 60 Minutes that this was an acceptable price to pay in order to maintain US interests in the region. Are you prepared to withdraw that statement?"

A security guard, Officer Goodine, is at my elbow. Senator Jesse Helms motions to him to remove me, but the young officer raises his hand politely as if to indicate "just a moment, let her finish," and he gently taps my arm.

"These children are helpless victims," I call out again, moving into the aisle. " Albright, please, you could do so much good."

The officer leads me out as though he were ushering at the opera. Simon Harak is already on his feet, asking Albright if she would impose the same punishment on every other country that fails to comply with US demands.

Ardeth, Carole, and Art rise, in turn, to speak. After we are all escorted out, Albright addresses the committee: "I am as concerned about the children of Iraq as any person in this room. . . . Saddam Hussein is the one who has the fate of his country in his hands, and he is the one who is responsible for starving children, not the United States of America."

On January 10, 1997, Voices in the Wilderness sent out a statement of our response, saying in part:

Iraqi children are totally innocent of oil power politics. All those who prevent the lifting of sanctions, including Madeleine Albright, are not. One line disclaimers of responsibility may appear suavely diplomatic, but the children are dead and we have seen them dying. According to the UN itself, they died as a direct result of the embargo on commerce with Iraq. Many United Nations members favored significantly easing these sanctions. The US government and Madeleine Albright as its spokesperson prevented that from happening. This economic embargo continues warfare against Iraq, a silent war in which only the weakest, most vulnerable and innocent non-combatant civilians—women, children and families—continue to suffer.

One year earlier, in a modest act of nonviolence, we wrote to US Attorney General Janet Reno declaring our intent to deliberately violate the UN and US sanctions against the people of Iraq. We said we realized the possible penalties we faced, but that we hoped she would join us in demanding that the US government lift the embargo against Iraq.

Four Voices delegations traveled to Iraq in 1996 and thirty more have gone as of the end of 1999. Each group openly defies the sanctions by taking medical relief supplies directly to Iraqi children and families. Our trips create a drama that we hope will gain attention for the plight of the Iraqi people, especially the children. Upon return, we "hit the ground running," with presentations in classrooms and community groups. We contact our legislators, send out mailings, and try very hard to push the issue into the mainstream media.

In the meantime, 150 Iraqi children die every day.

Contributors

Ali Abunimah: A media analyst and activist, and frequent commentator on Palestine and the Middle East, Abunimah is vice-president of the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago-based social service and advocacy organization, and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada website (electronicintifada.net). Visit Ali Abunimah's web page.

Dr. Huda S. Ammash: Ammash is an environmental biologist and professor at Baghdad University and is a researcher at the Iraqi Academy of Science. Ammash earned her PhD from the University of Missouri. She has conducted extensive research and written numerous scientific papers on the environmental and biological impact of sanctions.

Anthony Arnove: Arnove worked for seven years as an editor at South End Press before becoming a freelance editor and writer. A regular contributor to ZNet, his writing has appeared in The Nation, International Socialist Review, Monthly Review, Socialist Worker, Z Magazine, In These Times, Financial Times, and other publications. An activist based in Brooklyn, New York, he is a member of the International Socialist OrganizationNational Writers Union. He contributed to The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket Press), edited Terrorism and War, a collection of new interviews with Howard Zinn (Seven Stories Press), and is on the editorial board of International Socialist Review. Arnove is also a member of the Iraq Speaker's Bureau.

Naseer Aruri: Aruri is the Chancellor Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and is chair of the board of the Trans-Arab Research Institute. He has lectured and written widely on Middle East politics and history. He is the author of Dishonest Broker: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (South End Press). He is also the editor of Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (Pluto) and co-editor of Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. Said (Interlink).

Barbara Nimri Aziz: An anthropologist and journalist, Aziz has written extensively on Iraq since her first visit there in 1989. Her articles have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Toward Freedom, and several anthologies including Food for Our Grandmothers (South End Press). She has contributed essays on Iraq to Metal of Dishonor (1999) and Genocide by Sanctions (1998), both published by the International Action Center. Aziz hosts a weekly radio public affairs magazine on Pacifica WBAI Radio from New York. She is also executive director of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc.

David Barsamian: Barsamian lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is the producer of the award-winning syndicated radio program, Alternative Radio. A regular contributor to The Progressive and Z Magazine, Barsamian is the editor of Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire (South EndPress/Pluto), the editor of Propaganda and the Public Mind, a collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky (South End Press/Pluto), and author of The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting (South End Press).

Phyllis Bennis: Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. She is an author and journalist and has written about UN and Middle East issues for almost twenty years. Her most recent books include Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, second edition (Olive Branch Press) and Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis (Olive Branch Press). She also co-edited Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis.

George Capaccio: Capaccio is a writer, storyteller, and teacher based in Arlington, Massachusetts. He has traveled to Iraq on eight delegations to document the impact of sanctions. Capaccio has written on Iraq for The Progressive and other publications. His poetry collection, While The Light Still Trembles, won the 1999 PeaceWriting Award from the University of Arkansas. Capaccio is a member of Voices in the Wilderness.

Noam Chomsky: Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published fourteen books with South End Press, including Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs, and Propaganda and the Public Mind (in the UK by Pluto Press).

Robert Fisk: Fisk is an award-winning reporter for The Independent newspaper in London (www.independent.co.uk). He served as Middle East correspondent for The Times (London) from 1976 to 1987 and for The Independent since 1987. Fisk received the 1998 Amnesty International UK Press Award. He is a seven-time winner of the British International Journalist of the Year Award (most recently in 1995 and 1996). Fisk currently lives in Beirut. His writing appears in The Nation, The Independent, and other publications worldwide. His classic book Pity the Nation was released in a third edition by Oxford Paperbacks in 2001.

Denis J. Halliday: Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Denis J. Halliday to the post of United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq in September 1997. He served as an Assistant Secretary-General until he resigned the post in protest of sanctions in Fall 1998. Prior to that, Halliday served in the UN for 34 years, including as Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resources Management and Director, Division of Personnel, United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Halliday has spent most of his long career with the United Nations in development and humanitarian assistance-related posts both in New York and overseas, primarily in South-East Asia. Halliday graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and holds an MA in Economics, Geography and Public Administration.

Kathy Kelly: An activist based in Chicago, Illinois, Kelly helped initiate Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the sanctions against Iraq. For bringing medicine and toys to Iraq in open violation of the sanctions, she and other campaign members have been notified of a proposed $163,000 penalty for the organization and threatened with twelve years in prison. Kelly has been to Iraq numerous times. She has taught in Chicago-area community colleges and high schools since 1974, and is active with the Catholic Worker movement. Read more about Kelly's work in Iraq.

Rania Masri: Masri is a human rights advocate, writer, researcher, and environmental scientist. Masri is the director of the newly formed Southern Peace Research and Education Center at the Institute for Southern Studies. Masri has a doctorate from North Carolina State University. She is a national board member of Peace Action, the Arab Women's Solidarity Association's representative to the United Nations, and the coordinator of the Iraq Action Coalition. She is a contributor to The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket Press).

Dr. Peter L. Pellett: Pellett is Professor Emeritus of Nutrition at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He served on four United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization missions to Iraq. He has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization, UNICEF, US Department of Agriculture, World Food Program, and National Academy of Sciences. Pellett is a board member of the International Nutrition Foundation for Developing Countries. He is the Editor in Chief of Ecology of Food and Nutrition.

John Pilger: Pilger is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and author. He has twice won Britain's highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year. He has been named International Journalist of the Year and his documentaries have won Academy awards in the United States and United Kingdon. His most recent documentaries for London-based Independent Television (ITV) include Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq and Palestine Is Still the Issue. Pilger's documentary Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy has been shown in theaters internationally. A regular contributor to the Guardian and New Statesman, he is the author of Hidden Agendas (New Press), Heroes (South End Press), and The New Rulers of the World (Verso).

Sharon Smith: Smith was the national coordinator of the signature ad campaign to end sanctions. A leading member of the International Socialist Organization in Chicago, she was active in building opposition to the 1991 Gulf War. A member of the National Writers Union, she is a regular columnist for the Socialist Worker newspaper, as well as a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review. She is author of End of the American Dream (Haymarket).

Voices in the Wilderness: Since March 1996, Voices has led numerous delegations to hospitals and clinics in Iraq, breaking the siege imposed by the sanctions. Voices advocates nonviolence as a means for social change. The organization opposes the development, storage, and use—in any country—of any weapons of mass destruction, be they nuclear, chemical, biological, or economic. Read more about Voices' current work in Iraq.

Howard Zinn: Zinn is Professor Emeritus at Boston University. He is the author of numerous books, including A People’s History of the United States, the plays Emma and Marx in Soho (South End Press), The Zinn Reader, and the autobiographical You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. He lives with his wife, Roslyn, in Massachusetts and lectures widely on history and contemporary politics.

Praise:

“For more than a decade, an inhuman campaign of sanctions—the most complete ever in recorded history—has destroyed Iraq as a modern state, decimated its people, and ruined the agriculture, its educational and health care systems, as well as its entire infrastructure. All this has been done by the United States and United Kingdon, misusing United Nations resolutions against innocent civilians, leaving the tyrant Saddam Hussein more or less untouched. This remarkable book is an invaluable documentation of the tragedy in Iraq, and deserves reading by every citizen interested in the appalling reality of US and UK foreign policy.”

—Edward W. Said

“This book gives us a key to understand the New World Order, and warns about how Iraq’s tragedy may be a model for global bullying and global impunity in coming times.”

—Eduardo Galeano

“Here is a brilliantly collated body of unrelenting, undeniable evidence of the horrors that sanctions and war are visiting upon the people, in particular the children, of Iraq. For ordinary citizens sanctions are just another kind of dictatorship. Remote-controlled, seemingly civilized, they actually, literally, squeeze the very breath from babies’ bodies.”

—Arundhati Roy

“Iraq Under Siege is a very useful weapon in our international struggle against sanctions. This is not only the horrible story of children dying as a result of sanctions, a story our papers are so reluctant to write about. It is also a well argued warning about the kind of 'globalized' world they will build for us, if we let them.”

—Daniel Singer, The Nation

“This is a very important book and I hope it will be widely read.”

—Tony Benn, MP British Parliament (see Benn's review in New Statesman)

“The arguments for change are pretty convincing. The undecided should pay heed.”

—The Economist

“Iraq Under Siege is a vitally important wake-up call to end the sanctions while providing activists with plenty of documentation to back up their claims of U.S. injustice.… A page-turner, regardless of the reader's degree of familiarity with Middle East peace issues.”

—Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

“A solid beginning to understanding a portion of the West's influence on this diverse and complicated part of the world.… The wide range of authorship leaves us with a resource that is diverse, while presenting a focused cry for resolution.”

—Andrew Dickson, Clamor Magazine

“A passionate and hard-hitting analysis of the situation in Iraq by leading voices against the sanctions.… The book comes with a clear message: sanctions against Iraq are wrong. Building a compelling case of deprivation and deception of the tragedy of the Iraqi people coupled with their heroism, Iraq Under Siege concludes with details of the growing international movement to end sanctions. This is a book not only for the activist, but also for anyone concerned with justice and with foreign policy.”

—The New Internationalist

“By documenting the impact of the sanctions, exposing the fallacies and distorted arguments of the establishment and the bias of the media, this book makes a valuable contribution to breaking the silence and complacency that surround the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. It is bound to contribute to the mainstreaming of the growing anti-sanctions movement, which is dedicated to helping the Iraqi people reclaim their destiny.”

—Hala Maksoud,

President, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

“Each page is a document of outrage.”

—Socialist Worker, US

“A sustained, coherent, and comprehensive critique of U.S. policy on Iraq.”

—Texas Observer

“Iraq Under Siege is a remarkable collection of analytical essays, emotive calls to action, and useful ‘to-do’ lists for activists. It must be read. And it must be acted on.”

—Z Magazine

“This marvelous collection of essays is both heartbreaking and inspiring.”

—Socialist Review

“[Iraq Under Siege] is not just an amazingly useful tool to activists working to end the sanctions, but a very important work that adds to the growing literature on international relations, the mainstream media’s failure to include balanced coverage of this issue, [and] myths that cloud our vocabulary and understanding of the Middle East.”

—Fellowship Magazine

“The first book to grant a glimpse behind the veil of ideology and propaganda that shrouds the contemporary official record.”

—Sean Gonsalves,

Common Dreams News Center

“The anthology Iraq Under Siege is a solid, credible, and comprehensive rebuttal to the prevailing US/British policy of continued enforcement of cruel sanctions on the people of Iraq. This anthology—authored by prominent writers and practitioners—constitutes a long-awaited corrective to the obvious imbalances that characterize much of the media coverage which, in turn, often reflect a sickening obliviousness of policy-makers to the unending miseries of a proud and gifted people.”

—Clovis Maksoud, Center for the Global South

“Each of the contributors takes on a different aspect of the sanctions. What is their impact on the Iraqi population? Who imposed them and why? What’s at stake for the US? How complicit is the media? How does the oil-for-food program really work? And, most importantly, what can we do to end the sanctions? Through its powerful eyewitness accounts of life in Iraq and carefully researched, myth-busting chapters, Iraq Under Siege provides a powerful antidote to our rulers’ lies and does a great service to the cause of ending the sanctions.”

—International Socialist Review

“This is a definitive and powerful indictment of one of the greatest war crimes of the last quarter of the twentieth century.”

—Bookmarks Review of Books

“A brilliant book, which exposes the grim reality behind the US New World Order and British 'ethical foreign policy'.”

—Socialist Worker, UK

“Scrupulously edited for accuracy, readability and diversity of voice, [it] works either as a good introduction to the crisis in Iraq or a resource for activists.”

—The Socialist

The Book Publisher:

South End Press | 7 Brookline Street #1 | Cambridge, MA 02139-4146 | info@southendpress.org