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I have been to Iraq eight times since sanctions were imposed and reported to the UN Security Council and others on the steady deterioration in the human condition there on each occasion after the first. Typical is the report dated 14 November 1997, which included the following:
Over these years the general health of the people of Iraq has drastically and steadily deteriorated as a direct result of United States forced sanctions imposed by the United Nations.
Deterioration in Health, Medical Supplies and
Increased Death Rates Caused by UN Sanctions
On this trip I found health and hospital conditions poorer than ever. Rates of illness in every category are at all-time highs. The physical conditions of the hospitals, medical care facilities, pharmaceutical and medical supplies plants continue to decline. Availability of medicines, medical supplies, and working equipment are at the lowest level since 1989. Every doctor reports that patients they could save die every day. Often their patients die in their presence because of shortages of medicine, medical supplies, and operational medical equipment.
The overall death rate from monitored causes due to the sanctions has increased each year since 1989. For children under age five the increase in deaths exceeds a multiple of eight, from 7,100 in 1989 to 57,000 in 1996. For persons over age five the death rate has increased more than four times, from 20,200 to 83,200. Diseases related to malnutrition continue to increase. Kwashiorkor, virtually unknown in 1989, has increased nearly sixty times to reach 21,000 cases last year, marasmus fifty times to 192,000 cases last year. Other malnutrition-related illnesses have increased eighteen-fold to 1,354,000 cases in 1996.
Sicknesses related to poor sanitation continue a steady increase. Last year amebic dysentery was up twenty-seven-fold to 243,000 cases. Malaria increased more than seven-fold to 32,000 cases. Typhoid fever increased eight times to 15,000 cases. Scabies has increased from no cases in 1989 to 37,000 in 1996. Cholera is up from no cases to more than 3,000 in 1997 through September.
Births of infants weighing under two and a half kilograms have increased more than five-fold to include 23.8 percent of all live births in September 1997, a tragedy evidencing the stunted generation the sanctions have caused in Iraq.
Major surgery is down from a monthly average exceeding 15,000 operations in 1989 to 4,100 operations in September 1997.
The total cost in lives directly resulting from UN sanctions is now 1,500,000 deaths over the normal death rate.
These tragic statistics do not convey the human horror of the sanctions.
In two large general hospitals, both serving poor areas, one in Basra and one in Saddam City, Baghdad, I saw among many other children, an eleven-month-old child of a young Bedouin woman, her first child, wasted, bloated and not expected to live for more than a day. In Qadisiya Hospital in Baghdad, a nineteen-month-old girl and a three-year-old boy lay wasted and dying in adjoining beds. Ample food and safe drinking water would have prevented the illnesses of all three. Rehydration tablets could have saved all three. All three are by now dead.
A thirty-five-year-old man was dying in Basra, for the lack of simple catheters to perform a crude method of renal dialysis. Only one of the four machines available was working for lack of spare parts. The man was not expected to last through the night. He could have been saved but for the unavailability of catheters. Before sanctions the unit could treat 175 patients a month.
A seventeen-year-old male who had suffered severe headaches was brought in by taxi. No diagnoses were possible for lack of medical supplies. Intravenous feeding required six pints a day. Only one was available in the hospital. He has almost surely died by now.
There is no operational ambulance for all but a few hospitals and the contract with a French company for ambulances has been intentionally delayed by the sanctions committee.
A beautiful fourteen-year-old girl with leukemia, which is occurring in unprecedented numbers apparently from depleted uranium and chemicals released by U.S. bombing, received no treatment, because of the lack of essential medicines and supplies. There is an enormous increase in cancers, tumors, leukemia, birth defects, and miscarriage, probably from the same cause. These victims suffer extreme pain with little or no relief before they die.
A twenty-three-year-old woman who had suffered polio, TB, and was dying from malnutrition was angry and bitter at the injustice of her fate. Most older patients entering hospitals now have multiple medical problems from the effect of the sanctions over these seven years.
A twenty-seven-year-old TB patient, badly wasted, a twenty-one-year-old woman with severe anemia, two older women with advanced diabetes, foot sores, and infections and a woman with breast cancer lay dying with family around them. There has been no insulin for two months. No chemotherapy is available except on rare occasions. All these human beings, near death, were receiving no medications, even pain killers, because nothing was available.
If you saw the faces of these people, needlessly dying, and the doctors, nurses, and families trying to comfort them, you would never forget them.
In Basra, the surgery department in the Training Hospital performs fewer than one hundred operations a month, compared to 1,000 per month in 1989, because of the lack of anesthesia, antiseptics, gauze, bandages, antibiotics, and other medical supplies. Only emergency surgery is performed. Everything else is delayed often until it is too late. Surgery is performed without x-rays in many cases, because of shortages. There is no clean water to wash the floors, no air conditioning, inadequate heat, poor lighting and none in stairwells, recesses, and most corridors. The electricity is off for hours most days. There are not enough sheets, blankets, towels, and other supplies.
Most areas in the city of Basra and parts of Baghdad have no running water or sewage disposal because of the bombing. The sanctions make replacement impossible. This combination compounded by malnutrition is a major cause of death.
Less than half the contracts entered into under UN supervision have been fulfilled because of harassment. Production of pharmaceuticals in Iraq, once nearly half of national needs, has declined to an insignificant level because of lack of machine parts and raw materials.
In short, there is a human disaster created by the United Nations. A genocide intended to destroy a national, religious, and ethnic group, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
The 1997 Britannica Book of the Year shows the death rate for Iraq at 9.8 per thousand. For poor neighboring Jordan it was 3 per thousand. Rich neighboring Kuwait experienced 2.2 deaths for every thousand people in 1997.
Per capita income in Iraq, from the 1989 Britannica Book of the Year, was $2,420. By 1996 it was down to $720. By 1997 it had dropped to $540, less than 25 percent of the average individual income in 1989.
In May 1998 we were able to take over four million dollars (U.S. wholesale value) in medicine and medical supplies directly to hospitals in Iraq, from Mosul to Basra. The group of eighty-four persons carried more than 140 large boxes of the most urgently needed medicines and supplies by arduous overland travel from Amman, Damascus, and Beirut. Despite the goodwill of thousands in the U.S. who contributed to purchase and transport the desperately needed medicine, there could be no satisfaction from the effort, because it did not meet even one thousandth of the annual need.
The U.S. used the occasion of our shipment and others—including its own strategically employed AmeriCares flight, which was quickly organized for propaganda purposes—to claim medicines are not as badly needed in Iraq as in many other countries. There are few if any countries with the shortages of medicines and medical supplies that exist in Iraq, and there are none that have experienced such a drastic decline in available medicines when professional medical and health care personnel are ready to beneficially use them. And, of course, no other country experiences such shortages because of international sanctions—"man’s inhumanity to man."
Ending the sanctions is the essential first step toward the recovery of Iraq and of America’s honor.
When this whole tragic story is examined, the most difficult question will be why the member nations of the Security Council surrendered to U.S. pressure to continue sanctions against Iraq and why the American people let their government do it. The criminal nature of the bombing of Iraq was undeniably obvious. Over a period of more than eight years now, Security Council members have accepted the most cynical, duplicitous, and absurd arguments from the U.S. to continue sanctions. During most of these years the sanctions committee reviewed continuation of the sanctions every two months.
As awareness of the murderously criminal effect of the sanctions spread, the U.S. would come up with the most patently foolish and false excuses to continue the sanctions. Sometimes, appealing to prejudice, it would claim that Saddam Hussein had spent extravagant sums for a yacht on the Euphrates which could have been used to purchase medicines. At other times it would appeal to fear, claiming he was obtaining missiles, or developing nuclear weapons, or manufacturing, deploying, or concealing chemical or biological weapons. These claims would be followed by insistence on further inspections, searching the most intimate places of government, demanding follow-up searches, then claiming Iraq is not cooperating, is lying, is concealing weapons or the evidence of their existence.
Occasionally the U.S. would suggest compliance has improved, then follow with new allegations of discovery, deception, or concealment. Through it all, every Security Council member has known it was a charade. Each member has known the U.S. will not agree to end sanctions unless forced to do so. That the U.S. intends to maintain its major military presence in the Gulf, which it uses the UN to justify, is equally clear. A 1997 Foreign Affairs article co-authored by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, national security advisers for presidents Carter and Bush, respectively, stated the obvious quite clearly: "Every president since Richard Nixon has recognized that ensuring Persian Gulf security and stability is a vital U.S. interest. ... It is imperative that all parties understand an important strategic reality: the United States is in the Persian Gulf to stay."
The U.S. has always blamed Saddam Hussein for the condition of the Iraqi people. Madeleine Albright has repeatedly argued that she loves the Iraqi people more than Saddam Hussein does. He is constantly cited for using "weapons of mass destruction" against his own people.
Unbearably terrible, the vicious assault on defenseless Iraq and the slow, tortured genocide by sanctions happened and the American people have known it all along. The facts are inescapable and undeniable. Still, knowing that our own government has devastated Iraq doesn’t enrage many, because our media, government, and leading public figures falsely tell us that the U.S., with the approval of the United Nations, has acted courageously and selflessly against a dangerous and evil enemy. And most Americans pay little attention. They are distracted by personal problems and insecurities and absorbed in the many circuses provided by power to consume their conscious time and sedate their pain from conscience—television, movies, professional sports, and celebrity antics. The American culture conditions the people to value their own material well-being more than they love justice. As individuals, Americans feel helpless to affect government action anyway. These factors at least partially explain how some millions of Americans could watch a 60 Minutes TV program filmed in late 1995—which portrayed and described the deaths of more than 500,000 children in Iraq caused by U.S.-forced sanctions and then showed UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright saying of those deaths, "Yes, the price is worth it"—without smashing their TV sets and taking to the streets.
Finally, the U.S. reluctantly agreed in 1996 to permit inadequate sales of oil by Iraq. But it required that nearly half the proceeds go to pay reparations, support enemies of Iraq, and pay for intrusive, meaningless inspections. The U.S. has since systematically delayed, frustrated, and often rejected Iraqi contracts requiring Security Council approval for medicine, medical equipment, and food. It has attempted to control the delivery of every purchase, a means of physical and economic intervention.
It became so embarrassing and transparent, as the U.S. manufactured a new crisis every two months, that in 1996, just as opposition to sanctions was mounting within the Security Council, the U.S. forced an agreement for biannual reviews. Meanwhile, several hundred people die every day.
There can be no better evidence of the importance of the second reform to the UN Charter—replacement of the Security Council—proposed in Chapter 12 of The Fire This Time. Permanent membership for five nations is undemocratic and the veto power a guarantee of both abusive action and immoral inaction. Now the Security Council, largely paralyzed for its first forty-five years by the struggle between the U.S. and USSR, has succumbed to the domination of the U.S., which can dictate even genocide.
All the arguments for continuing sanctions against Iraq fail to acknowledge that no threat, or failure, by the government of Iraq can justify sanctions that kill infants, children, pregnant and nursing women, the chronically ill, and the elderly. No sentient moral being can believe the "price is worth it," as Albright proclaimed. But even in a world so cruel and heartless as the secretary of state would have it, there is no rational justification for such sanctions against a small and exhausted Iraq while the U.S. brandishes its nuclear arms, developing more omnicidal delivery systems, and the UN ignores threats of nuclear war in south Asia that are more dangerous than any since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | |
