Bleeding The Gulf

The United Nations Sanctions on Iraq

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

I. The U.S.-UN Sanctions on Iraq

II. The Impact of the Sanctions

II.I Genocide through Economic Warfare

II.II Oil for Food or Oil for Blood?

II.III The Objective of the Sanctions: Paying the Price

II.IV. An Illegal Policy

III. False Pretexts

III.I Weapons of Mass Destruction: Permissible for Our Clients

III.II Weapons of Mass Destruction: Reserving the Right

III.III The United Nations Weapons Inspections

III.IV Inspections or Intelligence Gathering?

III.V The Ongoing War

III.VI U.S. Objectives

“[A] war of collective punishment, a war of mass destruction directed at the civilian population of Iraq. The UN, at the insistence of the U.S., and contrary to international conventions and treaties, has created, in Iraq, a zone of misery and death - with no end in sight... The toll of these sanctions on an entire generation of Iraqi children is incalculable. What are the implications of Iraqi children growing up traumatised by hunger and disease, if they survive at all? How can the deeds of one leader or even an entire government be used to justify this unprecedented, internationally sanctioned violation of human rights?... The devastating effects continue to harm the environment, agricultural production and health of the Iraqi people significantly.”

(Catholic Worker Magazine, January/February 1998)

Introduction

This paper is a detailed assessment of the sanctions on Iraq, their history, their effects, and the objectives behind them. The paper systematically examines and refutes the official justifications for the sanctions policy and reveals its devastating impact on the lives of the Iraqi people. Using official reports, it documents the escalation of the humanitarian crisis in Iraq under the UN sanctions regime, and exposes the international community’s unconscionable complicity in an ongoing tide of genocide, undertaken falsely in the name of humanitarianism. It also analyses the variety of myths employed to veil the reality of the crisis in Iraq - and Western responsibility for it - from the public.

The paper finally assesses the sanctions regime in context with an ongoing Western military strategy against Iraq, thus clarifying the political, economic and strategic objectives of policy. In this manner, the theory that Western policy towards Iraq has any genuinely humanitarian basis to it is fundamentally contested, and the challenge these facts hold for the idea of the general benevolence of world order under U.S./Western hegemony is fundamentally challenged. It is hoped that this paper clarifies the utter failure of the contemporary world order to genuinely implement ethical values, to protect human rights, to foster self-determination, to create a just and peaceful world community.

Given the atrocious scale of the Western-imposed humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq, and the variety of successfully propagated Orwellian myths created to veil this catastrophe from the general public, the relevance of the concept of a global “civil society” for understanding the actual structure of world order is extremely questionable.

We are living today in a world based fundamentally on the twin prongs of power and greed, vices that have come to penetrate almost all aspects of policy. Unless this obvious fact is recognised by the academic community, that community will totally fail to understand reality beyond the construction of endless theories that have little relevance in capturing the patterns of historical and current affairs which can be empirically discerned. The facts details here have immense implications in this respect that must be taken into account if we are to genuinely understand international relations, and thus forge a peaceful and just world.

http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq17.html