Dear Patrick
30th January 2001
The western public is, rightly, moved by the sight of sick and dying children. It is thanks to the manipulation of such images of suffering that Saddam Hussein is winning the propaganda war in the west. But if people make no effort to understand the hard realities behind such disturbing images they simply become the playthings of cynical tyrants. The sanctions policy against Saddam is not perfect, but lifting sanctions would only strengthen his position and there is nothing to demonstrate that it would alleviate the terrible conditions that prevail in parts of Iraq.
Britain and the US are currently reviewing their Saddam strategy, but if anything the line is likely to harden. The new US president has said that he will "take him out" if Saddam is found to possess weapons of mass destruction, and according to the UN monitoring agency Unscom, he does have a supply of the nerve agent VX.
It is worth recalling where the UN policy towards Iraq comes from. At the end of the Gulf war in 1991 Iraq accepted the terms of UN security council resolution 687, the ceasefire resolution. This imposed a number of obligations on Iraq, the main one being to eliminate under international supervision its weapons of mass destruction. This whole process was to be completed within 120 days of signing. Ten years on, it has still not happened. During that period, Saddam has violated the no-fly zones, prevented UN arms inspectors from investigating suspect sites, and continued to tyrannise his own people.
Iraq before the Gulf war (and its long war with Iran) was a country which enjoyed relative prosperity and boasted a big, educated middle class. It is now destitute. Meanwhile, Saddam has built 48 palaces, claiming there is not enough money to feed his subjects or provide them with decent health care. Since 1991 he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Saddam City, a new town 85 miles from Baghdad in which his friends and family can wander round man-made lakes, elaborate gardens and deer farms, and live in the 625 luxury homes provided.
Even more pointedly, the regime has earned an estimated $25m per week in January alone from oil exported (mainly to Syria) in violation of UN security council resolutions. Oil exports are now at or near pre-Gulf war levels. Since 1996, Iraq has made $24 billion from UN controlled exports. Of that revenue, $16-$17 billion has been available for humanitarian relief. (In the 12 months before the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq spent only $4.2 billion in total on all its civilian import needs including food, medicine, cars, and education.) Recently tankers full of rice, grain and milk powder delivered to Iraq under the UN humanitarian aid plan have been intercepted on their way out of the country. Baby milk, sold to Iraq through the oil for food programme which began in 1996, has been found in markets throughout the Gulf and 15,000 asthma inhalers were found on Lebanon's black market. All for the benefit of Saddam and his friends, whose companies profit. He has even promised to donate 500m euros cash to the Palestinian cause, and he is planning to donate a further 100m euros to America's poor as a political stunt. Meanwhile ration books, without which no Iraqi can function, can be withdrawn at whim from those who displease the regime.
How can the left in the west-and some of its leading figures such as Tariq Ali and John Pilger-sink so much political capital into the defence of Saddam? This is a leader who has killed around 180,000 Kurds and tens of thousands of Shia. Iraq has one of the worst records on human rights in the world. There is systematic torture and summary executions. It is a state ruled by fear.
Both sides in this bloody argument can play fast and loose with the facts. But let me quote a few that are less well known than they should be in the west. Child mortality rates in northern Iraq, the Kurdish provinces that do not fall under Saddam's rule, are lower than in 1990; in the same period child mortality has doubled in south and central Iraq, which Saddam oversees.
Iraq has the second highest oil reserves in the world and even now it is a relatively rich country-with the same income per head as Egypt, higher than Jordan, Syria and Morocco. And the UN sanctions regime is specifically designed to prevent suffering. The sanctions have always exempted food and medicine and the regime is free to import as much of either as it likes. UN humanitarian aid has been on offer since 1991, although it has been largely rejected. And since 1996 there has been an oil for food programme which allows the income from approved oil sales to be spent on food and other necessities. Iraq has $600m in UN accounts for nutrition and health but has applied for only $100m. It is the same for water and sanitation. There is a budget of $500m; Iraq has applied for less than $200m. It is the Iraqi government that refuses to prioritise purchases for humanitarian aid.
Sanctions, however, have had one very damaging side effect-they have allowed Saddam to paint himself as an oppressed hero in the Arab world. He is now seen as the one Arab leader who has bravely stood up to the imperialist west-the only one with weapons to counter Israel's.
It is also true that sanctions on their own will not work. They have not, alas, undermined Saddam. They need to be applied flexibly as part of a wider strategy. But they have at least succeeded in containing the regime; Saddam has neither used chemical weapons nor invaded his neighbours-yet. There can be little doubt, however, that he is replenishing his arsenal. Just look at the military parade in Baghdad on 6th January that displayed hundreds of Saddam's spanking new tanks and other shiny military equipment.
Heidi
Dear Heidi
2nd February 2001
I am a little perplexed by your letter. You stress that Iraq has an evil regime as if this was justification for sanctions. You say that Saddam has killed a lot of Iraqis, which is true. But this does not justify the UN security council, which in the case of Iraq effectively means the US and Britain, killing a lot more. Defenders of sanctions often imply that to oppose sanctions is to support Saddam. Of course it is not. The prime impact of sanctions has been on the Iraqi people. As you illustrate, members of the ruling elite are least affected. You also concede that sanctions "have not undermined Saddam." But they have killed over half a million Iraqis and impoverished the rest. This is a crime against humanity.
That figure of half a million dead is not plucked out of the air. It comes from Carol Bellamy, executive director of Unicef, speaking in August 1999 after Unicef had conducted a survey of 24,000 households in Iraq. She said that if the reduction in child mortality in Iraq in the 1990s had continued "there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole during the period 1991 to 1998." This, of course, is just children under five. The number of Iraqis of all ages who have died because of sanctions is probably closer to 1m.
You make an extraordinary claim. You say lifting sanctions would play into Saddam's hands and that "there is nothing to demonstrate that it would alleviate the terrible conditions that prevail in parts of Iraq." In other words you believe that it is not sanctions but Saddam who is responsible for the collapse of the Iraqi economy. But this has been repeatedly contradicted by the most senior UN officials in charge of administering sanctions. In 1998 Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, resigned in protest. At the time he denounced a policy which caused "4,000 to 5,000 children to die unnecessarily every month due to the impact of sanctions because of the breakdown of water and sanitation, inadequate diet, and the bad internal health situation." Two years later Hans Von Sponeck, Halliday's successor in Baghdad, gave up his job for the same reason.
I do not think you understand how sanctions on Iraq work. They are far more serious than past sanctions on South Africa or Yugoslavia. They give the UN control of Iraqi oil revenues, the state's main income. All contracts signed by Iraq have to be agreed by the UN in New York. As Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, has pointed out this does not allow for the normal functioning of the Iraqi economy. Instead it creates an economic system akin to that of the old Soviet Union, except centralised control is exercised not from Moscow but New York. All contracts must be submitted to an unsympathetic UN special committee.
This system would cripple any economy. It has returned Iraq to the middle ages. The pretence that Saddam, and not sanctions, is mainly responsible for what has happened depends on systematic exaggerations or distortions. For instance you say that a military parade in Baghdad on 6th January "displayed hundreds of Saddam's spanking new tanks and other shiny military equipment." I watched the parade on television. The tanks are all old Soviet-built vehicles. It is true that Saddam has built himself palaces over the last ten years. This is a deeply offensive act in an impoverished country, but their cost is marginal compared to Iraq's needs. Does some food sent to Iraq end up in the marketplace elsewhere in the middle east? Probably a little is sold abroad. Iraqi officials administering rationing earn at most $5 a month. Not surprisingly there is corruption. But the distribution of foodstuffs is all carefully monitored by the UN mission in Iraq. The idea that "tankers full of rice, grain and milk" are cruising the Gulf is simply untrue. I would also be interested to know where you get the figure of $25m a week in revenues for Saddam from illegal oil sales. Even US officials are only claiming that Iraq gets $2m a day from oil going through the pipeline into Syria which opened in November. The small amount of oil trucked to Turkey goes with the tacit permission of the US and British governments in return for using the Turkish airbase at Incirlik.
You say that "Saddam has violated the no-fly zones." But the no-fly zone in southern Iraq, ostensibly established to protect the Iraqi people, is without a mandate from the security council. When UN officials in Iraq established that US and British planes have killed 144 civilians and wounded 446, the foreign office said that this was Iraqi propaganda "with a UN imprimatur." I know of no Iraqi Shia leader from the south of the country who believes that the no-fly zone has done anything to protect local people from the Iraqi regime.
You say that child mortality in Iraqi Kurdistan, outside Saddam's rule, is going down, in contrast with central and southern Iraq, which is under his control. Since both are subject to sanctions the implication is that it is the Iraqi government which must be responsible for the high death rate among children. This is an argument often used by the foreign office. In fact the reasons are quite different. Kurdistan has 13 per cent of the population of Iraq but gets 19 per cent of the available oil revenues. It was the victim of savage repression by the Iraqi government in the 1980s, so it is not surprising that conditions are improving now.
The suggestion that other countries in the middle east, such as Egypt and Jordan, are almost as poor as Iraq, but do not face its problems misses the point about sanctions. They cripple the economy because nothing-the electricity system, the oil industry, clean water-can be maintained. In the reports on sanctions handed to the security council every 180 days by Kofi Annan there are repeated pleas for the UN special committee to stop blocking essential items needed for the repair of the Iraqi infrastructure. For instance the railway system is falling apart. Essential equipment is not delivered because New York forbids it. Contaminated water is probably the biggest killer of children in Iraq. This is because 90 per cent of raw sewage goes into the rivers from which people then drink. Again, essential water treatment equipment has not been delivered because of the sanctions committee.
The original intention of sanctions was to compel Iraq to eliminate all its weapons of mass destruction. I do not see how Iraq can ever prove that it has no stocks of poison gas. It is easy to manufacture and conceal, as the Aum sect in Japan showed with its poison gas attack in Tokyo. But sanctions on Iraq have themselves become a weapon of mass destruction. Remarkably their impact has been documented every step of the way by the UN officials in charge of implementing them. I think that the picture you paint of an Iraqi government, flush with money, starving its own people for propaganda reasons, is demonstrably false.
Patrick
Dear Patrick
5th February 2001
To say that supporters of sanctions are in favour of killing Iraqis is absurd and insulting. The crime against humanity is being committed by the regime in Iraq, whose arguments sound remarkably similar to yours. I disagree in many particulars on Iraq policy with the British foreign office and the US State department. But to place them in the same category as the Iraq regime is an abdication of rational argument.
I do not, as you claim, argue that it is the Iraq regime itself which is sufficient justification for sanctions. The justification comes from the 1991 Gulf war. And imperfect as sanctions may be they have restricted the regime's access to foreign exchange and therefore made it harder to purchase or make weapons of mass destruction. (You are also wrong to say that no Shia leader supports the no-fly zone in the south. Ayatollah Hakim, leader of the Supreme Islamic Council, says that the no-fly zones have reduced the regime's ability to attack its civilians.)
Those who blame sanctions for returning Iraq to the middle ages overlook two things. First, as I said in my first letter the sanctions regime does allow Iraq to spend large sums on humanitarian aid, including on water treatment equipment, (the absence of which, you say, lies behind many of the child deaths). Indeed, more than $4 billion sits in a UN escrow account available to buy humanitarian supplies. Second, by the latter half of the 1980s (before the Gulf war) living standards and the quality of infrastructure had already fallen dramatically thanks to the eight-year war with Iran.
You are right that the sanctions on Iraq are tougher than those imposed on South Africa, although they are similar to the blanket restrictions imposed on Rhodesia and former Yugoslavia in the early days. But the truth is, that despite differences of emphasis and tactics, the sanctions still enjoy broad international support after more than ten years. Nobody openly flouts them. Are you suggesting that military sanctions be lifted because it is impossible to prove that Iraq has no more stocks of poison gas? If so you are a lone voice.
Nevertheless we do need "smarter" sanctions which hurt the regime, and its fighting ability, more than the civilian population. According to Forbes magazine Saddam is worth $7 billion and a lot of that money is held in western banks. Surely it is not beyond the wit of the leading nations in the west to find means of confiscating such funds without bringing down the world financial system.
Heidi
Dear Heidi
6th February 2001
I do not know why you think it "absurd and insulting" to say that the supporters of sanctions know that they are killing ordinary Iraqis. They are on record as saying that they do. In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, was asked about this very point on the CBS programme 60 Minutes. The interviewer said to Albright: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright gave a chilling reply. She said: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it."
You are also wrong to suggest that sanctions are all about Iraq eliminating its weapons of mass destruction. The US made this clear just after the Gulf war. In 1991 Robert Gates, then deputy national security adviser, said that sanctions would only be lifted if Saddam went. "Therefore," declared Gates, "Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone." Nor was this just post-war machismo on the part of Washington. Six years later Albright said: "We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted."
When in Baghdad I have often asked Iraqi friends how they explain the continuation of sanctions. Their answer may seem to you overly cynical. They feel that, whatever Robert Gates may have said, there is a congruity of interests between Saddam and the west. A weak Iraq suits the west. The war of 1991 confirmed the US as the dominant power in the Gulf. This position would be threatened if Saddam became powerful again. But it might also be threatened if he was overthrown by an Iraqi government less easy to demonise than the present one. Iraqis often say to me: "They wave their fists at each other over the table, and then shake hands underneath it." There is an element of middle east conspiracy theory about this, but it may be closer to reality than the picture you paint.
Most Iraqis I know see themselves as victims of both Saddam and the US/Britain. I think they are right to do so. Why are you so surprised that I put the foreign office and the US State department in the same moral bracket as the Iraqi regime? The death of half a million Iraqis has been painstakingly chronicled by the UN itself. It really will not do to pretend that this was somehow the result of the Iran-Iraq war. According to Unicef "under-5 mortality more than doubled from 56 deaths per 1,000 live births (1984-89) to 131 deaths per 1,000 live births (1994-99)."
The moral argument over who is to blame for the death of so many children reminds me of the debate about responsibility for the Irish famine. Obviously British ministers of the day did not get up in the morning wondering how many Irish peasants they could starve or kill by disease. But the system of land holding they supported and the legislation they introduced led to the deaths of 1m people just as surely as if it had been their clear intention.
It is a little cheap of you to suggest that the Iraqi regime's arguments "sound remarkably similar to yours." On the contrary my arguments are drawn from senior UN officials, whom I name, in charge of administering sanctions. The point they have continually made is that sanctions have destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure over a ten-year period. You cite Forbes magazine (based on a 1991 study) as saying that Saddam has $7 billion salted away in western banks. But I doubt if anybody knows the real resources of the Iraqi government. You mention the $4 billion in a UN escrow account, but not the fact that $2.5 billion in Iraqi contracts was put on hold by the UN special committee monitoring goods which might have a "dual use" military application. This has included chlorine, essential for sewage treatment, but which could also theoretically be used for making chemical weapons.
The solution to all this should be simple enough. Sanctions as presently organised should be ended. Instead there should be sanctions on the import of military equipment into Iraq. It would be perfectly simple to prevent Iraq creating new weapons systems without demanding (as at present) that they account for every screw imported for a military purpose over the past two decades. This is just an excuse-as Madeleine Albright came close to admitting-for keeping overall sanctions in place.
Patrick
Dear Patrick
6th February 2001
Without question US and British foreign policy in Iraq has failed, but that still does not put them in the same moral category as the Iraqi regime. My Iraqi friends believe that without US support there is no way Saddam can be countered, no matter how many particular disagreements they may have with the State department.
You contradict yourself on four points. You say the "original intention of sanctions was to compel Iraq to eliminate all its weapons of mass destruction." And then you say it wasn't. You continue: "I do not see how Iraq can ever prove that it has no stock of poison gas. It is easy to manufacture and conceal." Then, "it would be perfectly simple to prevent Iraq from creating new weapons systems." Well, which is it? You are equally schizophrenic when it comes to the UN. Are they the good guys or the bad guys? And is Iraq a victim of the west, or its co-conspirator shaking hands under the table?
As for the future, I agree with you that civilian sanctions should ultimately be lifted provided that there are enough UN monitors, with enough authority, to adequately deal with Iraq's medical and nutritional needs. For a start the US and British governments should provide military and financial assistance to those groups inside and outside Iraq who are fighting for democracy. There are no quick fixes. And Iraq itself will take at least 50 years to recover.
Heidi
Dear Heidi
7th February 2001
I do not think that US/British policy in Iraq has failed-unfortunately. I believe they wanted to freeze the political situation as it was at the end of the Gulf war, giving them quasi-colonial control of a region containing much of the world's oil reserves. To do this it was necessary to keep Iraq weak. Sanctions accomplish this aim. Those who oppose them can always be blackened as pro-Saddam.
You say I contradict myself in my attitude towards the UN and other matters. Not so. I think UN sanctions are wrong because they have killed over half a million people. On the other hand senior UN officials-not just prominent left-wingers as you pretend-have denounced sanctions and resigned their jobs in protest. Sanctions were originally intended to force Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. I think that quite rapidly weapons inspection became an excuse for continuing sanctions.
But the third point you make goes to the heart of the matter because it suggests where we should go from here. You say that I contradict myself by saying both that Iraq can never prove that it has no poison gas and that it should be simple to prevent them creating new weapons systems. The distinction between a single weapon and "weapons systems" is the key here. The first is not militarily significant. The second is.
Selective sanctions on the import of real military equipment-not the UN's blanket ban on supposedly dual use items on everything from pesticides to trucks-would stop Iraq rebuilding its arsenal. This would have to be enshrined in a treaty and monitored by the UN and would replace the scattergun approach to sanctions which has led to such horrendous civilian casualties.
Patrick
