The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq: The Children Are Dying (Paperback)

by Ramsey Clark (Author)

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500,000 Children have been killed by sanctions against Iraq. This book exposes and documents the truth. Read why the recent agreement on limited oil sales will not eliminate Iraq's crisis conditions I nutrition, sanitation and health. It contains the complete report of a UN scientific investigation team, with charts, graphs and a dramatic 22-page photo essay. The contributors are international figures, including Ramsey Clark, Mararita Papandreou, Ahmed Ben Bella and Miguel D'Escoto.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Break the Silence, by Sara Flounders
International Action Center Sanctions are war. They are the most brutal form of war because they punish an entire population, targeting children, the future, most of all. Sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction. Since sanctions were imposed on Iraq, half a million children under the age of five have died of malnutrition and preventable diseases. Sanctions impose artificial famine. A third of Iraq's surviving children today have stunted growth and nutritional deficiencies that will deform their shortened lives. Gathering and sifting through the material included in this book revived the turmoil of my own impressions of Iraq when, in February 1994, I saw the damage wrought by war and sanctions. Three years earlier, bombs with a total explosive power equal to seven Hiroshima nuclear blasts had crumpled the sewage lines, water pipes and electrical grid. I saw how a modern industrializing society is built on a fragile, vulnerable network. Vast modern housing developments with wide boulevards, built so proudly on the outskirts of Baghdad, had become fetid swamps, lacking pumps or sewage lines for drainage. Chlorine to purify water and pesticides for the swarms of mosquitoes and flies are both banned under UN sanctions. These sights all came back to me as I went over the contributions to this book from doctors, journalists, photographers, and film makers. They have recorded vivid personal impressions of a policy that invades every crevice of Iraqi society. The book uses many different resources to explain the catastrophe in Iraq today. Cold, hard statistics about crop output, caloric intake, water purification, and infant mortality prove the crime. Photos make the victims' faces unforgettable. Impassioned letters and testimony to the United Nations Security Council show the anger against the criminals. Documents and resolutions of international conferences show how opposition is mounting. This book reflects a growing world movement that speaks in many languages. Political campaigns expose the crime. Groups try to send medical supplies through international relief agencies. Others organize resistance, zeroing in on the laws and resolutions imposing sanctions. A few shed light on the horrors of the military use of depleted uranium. A growing number of world leaders and internationally prominent human rights activists have added their voices to the opposition. We need to break the silence and expose the crime. A generation ago in Vietnam, the Pentagon had other weapons to terrorize the civilian population. They were called napalm, white phosphorous, Agent Orange defoliants, fragmentation bombs, and other "anti-personnel" weapons. The early movement against the Vietnam war was small, but was able to put a human face on the suffering caused by the Pentagon. The images of Vietnam burned into the minds of a whole generation, especially the youth, who mobilized into a powerful force that helped end that war. That is what we have to do today. We have to reveal the human face of those targeted by the new weapon of sanctions. We have to get this book, with the reports from the United Nations' own Food and Agriculture Organization and others into every library, onto every campus, into community centers, churches, mosques, synagogues, and union offices to ensure that no public figure can say, "We didn't know." Anyone who wants to end human suffering must know what causes it. This book is a tool for that fight. The official report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization was written by a team of doctors and nutritionists who measured this catastrophe firsthand. It is a powerful indictment of the UN Security Council's policy by an agency of the world body itself. In the period following World War II, the United Nations General Assembly and various international bodies passed a number of conventions and resolutions on the conduct of hostilities to protect non-combatants-especially children. The U.S. government signed such conventions, resolutions, and lofty statements as the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Convention. The hard facts, the photos, and the eyewitness accounts herein make an irrefutable case that the UN Security Council, at the insistence of the United States, imposed sanctions in violation of international law. Every two months for five years, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has defined the political implications of the criminal sanctions policy. Clark has sent letters to every member of the UN Security Council before its bimonthly vote to continue sanctions against Iraq. Some of his correspondence is included in this book. His letters have gained a wide circulation internationally as a voice of conscience. Iraq is home to one of the world's oldest civilizations. Ancient Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, flourished for 6,000 years because of its water resources and irrigated agriculture. During the Gulf War, irrigation canals, bridges and food-processing plants were systematically targeted for destruction. Now fertilizers and preservatives, along with parts for tractors, are a memory of another age, of ancient history, before 1991. Despite the heroic efforts of doctors and other medical personnel, Iraq's new, modern hospitals are now wards of misery functioning without antibiotics or painkillers. High-tech, life-saving equipment is covered with a heavy film of dust, unusable for lack of spare parts. An asthma or appendicitis attack can quickly lead to death. It isn't easy for hungry, emaciated children to learn. It's harder when schools lack even the most basic materials. The UN Security Council defines even the graphite in pencils as possible military material. Sanctions are a silent killer. Those who impose them are thousands of miles away. Modern society is built on a network of trade and communication. At the border it is immediately clear that the country's links to the outside world have been cut. Iraq is a country blockaded, its major highways silent, its air traffic banned. At the beginning of the war mobilization against Iraq, many well-meaning people saw the vast weaponry of destruction being prepared against Iraq-the aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, depleted-uranium-tipped weapons-and raised the slogan: "Sanctions, not war." In the face of these new high-tech weapons, some saw sanctions as a humanitarian alternative. That view lost sight of the destructive force of U.S. economic power. It is no accident or surprise to the Pentagon, U.S. policy makers, or their think tanks that sanctions have this terrible, all-pervasive impact. This is what they intended. Leaders of the powerful imperialist countries have advocated using sanctions for just this reason throughout the century. In 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson advocated sanctions as a quiet but most lethal weapon that exerts a pressure no nation in the modern world can withstand. Sanctions, blockades, and encirclement are a form of warfare older than the siege of Troy. But today this old weapon has been invested with new, horrendous potential. No nation can exist in isolation. Today the world market is global, interconnected. Trade, finance, credits, loans, the price of raw materials, even the markets for seed grain, fertilizers, pesticides, and chemicals for water purification are under the domination and control of a few powerful capitalist countries. The oil that is abundant in Iraq and much of the Middle East fuels the world's industries and military machines. Who owns oil and controls its use is a vital question to the owners of the handful of major corporations and banks that decide development on a global scale. Impelled by the laws of capitalist development, their decisions boil down to what is best for maximizing profit-no matter what that might mean in human suffering. Today's industry and agriculture produce wealth unimagined in earlier epochs, yet one billion people go hungry. There is no profit to be made in feeding them. Here in the United States, where there is so much wealth, people can be hungry, can wander the streets homeless, and go without medical treatment solely because it isn't profitable to provide these services. Imagine the pain the rulers are capable of inflicting when they really target a people, when they set out to destroy a nation, when they organize all their resources to impose starvation. That is sanctions. The U.S. government has used the weapon of blockade in various forms against Cuba, Panama, Libya, Iran, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Korea, and most intensely against Iraq. All the global economic power of the major capitalist nations can be focused on creating an artificial famine in any one of these developing countries at the mercy of the world market. They can destroy the entire infrastructure. Whole industries, communications, transport, and services can be idled. Equipment and products will rust or rot for lack of parts and markets. For decades many developing nations and liberation struggles had an alternative. Total isolation couldn't be enforced as long as there was an alternate world system in conflict with the imperialist powers. Every country freeing itself from colonial rule could count on trade with and aid from the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states. Revolutionary Cuba, for example, has faced a total U.S. blockade since the early 1960s, but had an alternative for thirty years. But now the USSR has collapsed and the imperialist powers are trying to re-colonize the globe-a brutal process. This is what George Bush has dubbed the "new world order." Five years ago the Pentagon in an alliance with other predators and thieves unleashed a firestorm on Iraq. We saw it replayed and rewritten in the TV specials on the fifth anniversary of the war. Sanctions are not a replacement for this military violence. The U.S. military threat continues. Today one fifth of the total Pentagon budget is dedicated to the military occupation of the Gulf. Sanctions are merely an adjunct to this brutal belligerent policy. Many people who feel outrage over the war and the years of blockade are overwhelmed by the enormity of the injustice. Is it hopeless? Is there nothing we can do? The facts show we are far from helpless. When Washington politicians debate the reasons why they stopped the war after forty-two days, and why the Pentagon didn't occupy Baghdad with thousands of troops, it becomes clear that the war ended when it did because the politicians and generals here were afraid. They feared that a foreign occupying army would awaken resistance throughout the Middle East. They feared that any U.S. casualties would awaken mass opposition at home. They feared the Pentagon's allies would collapse in the face of an outraged mass movement, that the criminal coalition would come apart. Sometimes we forget that what we do enters their calculations. The authorities fear opposition-from the occupied country, from their own rank-and-file soldiers, and from poor and working people here at home. They fear exposure of the magnitude of their crimes. We have the evidence of the crime. And we can do something about it. We need to act with determination. Let the children live.

Product Details

• Paperback: 164 pages
• Publisher: Plough Publishing House (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0895671271
• ISBN-13: 978-0895671271
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
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• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,764,584 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)