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CounterPunch
January
9, 2003
Blaming the
Victim:
Sanctions as Scapegoat
By TOM GORMAN
In his remarks to the United Nations on September
12, President Bush stated "the United States has no quarrel
with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity.
Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great
strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it." These comments
echoed those of his father during the build up to the 1991 Gulf
War: "We have no quarrel with the Iraqi people."
Considering the carnage that the elder
President Bush visited upon the Iraqi people (at least 200,000
Iraqis killed, a statistic rife with ambiguity given then-Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell's statement that "It's
really not a number I'm terribly interested in"); the hundreds
of thousands more Iraqis (mostly children and the elderly) killed
by US/UK-led UN sanctions and bombing during the "liberal"
Clinton Administration; and the utter indifference in the present
Bush Administration to the mass murder that the proposed expansion
of war against Iraq will be, one is hard-pressed to imagine what
the US government would do if they did have a quarrel with the
Iraqi people.
We may not have to imagine this antipathy
if we see more articles like "In Iraq, All Sanctions, All
the Time," that appeared on page three of the January 6
Los Angeles Times. Writer Sergei L. Loiko gave me what Michael
Parenti terms a "media moment": much like a "senior
moment" (the self-styled memory lapses of older persons),
a media moment comes when you cannot believe that what you are
reading passes for news. "Your mind does not go blank,"
argues Parenti, "you simply wish it would."
The subtitle to Loiko's piece immediately
set off alarms. "Many blame the restrictions for anything
wrong. And while basic needs go unmet, mosques are springing
up." The obvious thesis here is that there is plenty of
money in Iraq, but people there are more willing to blame the
sanctions than the spendthrift Iraqi government. It's curious,
then, that Loiko actually blames sanctions for having "badly
hit living standards in Iraq." (A UN report, released in
March 1991, calling for an immediate end to the sanctions regime,
termed the situation in Iraq "near-apocalyptic." If
that seems a far cry from "badly hit living standards,"
well, there's your media moment.) Loiko then goes on to write,
"Everyone here talks about sanctions all the time. Their
impact is used to explain almost everything." As the sanctions
maintain a near-apocalyptic situation, it would seem reasonable
that people blame the sanctions for "almost everything."
Oddly, then, Loiko builds a case that
makes the alleged hoarding of funds by the Iraqi regime irrelevant.
"On Dec. 30, the U.N. Security Council approved even tighter
controls on Iraqi imports, including limits on doses of antibiotics
that the United States and Britain say could be used to protect
Iraqi troops in a war. . . . Experts believe that newly restricted
antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin_sold as Cipro in the United
States_could make Iraqi troops relatively safe from the effects
of anthrax if administered in large doses. Atropine, a drug prescribed
for cardiac treatment, could help protect soldiers if President
Saddam Hussein's regime used nerve gases in battle." These
"tightened controls" are more commonly referred to
as "dual use" restrictions. The US does not permit
for sale to Iraq anything that can conceivably be used for chemical
or biological weapons. In the past, the US has gone out of its
way to deny contracts to Iraq for items such as refrigerated
trucks for the transport of food and medicine, chlorine for the
purification of putrid water, and even pencils for schoolchildren.
Iraq's drinking water system, which was purposely destroyed by
the United States during the 1991 Gulf War (see Thomas J. Nagy's
article "The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally
Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply," The Progressive, August
2001, <http://www.progressive.org/0801issue/nagy0901.html>),
cannot be repaired because of "dual use" restrictions.
How fitting that the same country that destroyed the water system
is the same one that refuses to allow the Iraqis to repair it.
Thus, "funding" is not the issue when it comes to these
restricted humanitarian goods; US obstructionism is.
Going further, Loiko would have us believe
that the Iraqi people could fix their infrastructure, but prefer
"luxuries" to such frivolous items as clean drinking
water. Loiko implies that Iraqi complaints about the depredations
of the sanctions regime are nothing more than disingenuous whining.
Loiko's proof of this empty sentiment? Hussein's regime is building
a number of new mosques. "But somehow, even under the sanctions,
money and materials have been available for the construction
of mosques." Let us put aside the issue of "money"
being available, as Loiko himself has graciously shown this point
to be irrelevant. The notion of "materials" being available
is not much harder to disabuse. If we are to accept Loiko's contention
at face value, then yes, there are materials available for the
construction of buildings, specifically mosques. This would only
be a sign of Hussein's indifference to the suffering of the Iraqi
people if housing construction were a dire need. It is not. A
friend who has traveled to Iraq has told me that, of all the
humanitarian problems faced by the Iraqis in their near-apocalyptic
circumstances, lack of housing is not one of them. It is difficult
to discern how, if at all, Loiko thinks the materials used in
mosque-building could better be utilized. Perhaps Hussein should
use the materials for mosques to rebuild homes damaged by US/UK
bombing; but then, perhaps, the US and the UK shouldn't bomb
Iraq in the first place.
This idea of "mosques instead of
food" seems to be a rehash of the decade-old notion that
Hussein has plenty of money to feed the Iraqi people, but chooses
instead to spend it on palaces and military hardware. The "Oil-for-Food"
program is cited by many as proof that the US cares more about
the suffering of the Iraqi people than Hussein himself. A week
after that now-infamous (everywhere outside of the American media)
remark by Madeline Albright about the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of Iraqi children due to sanctions being "worth it,"
she had this to say in a letter to 60 Minutes: "The unfortunate
truth is that the UN Security Council cares more about the people
of Iraq than their own ruler does." Oil-for-Food, though
was never meant as more than a stopgap measure to prevent further
deterioration of the near-apocalyptic conditions in Iraq. The
UN head of the humanitarian program in Iraq, Denis Halliday,
resigned in protest when he felt that Oil-for-Food was failing
even in that regard. Moreover, the idea that Hussein "mishandles"
the funds from Oil-for-Food is nonsensical. Roughly thirty percent
of the proceeds go to pay reparations to Kuwait and the administrative
costs of the UN activities in Iraq, including weapons inspections.
The profits from the oil sales are kept in a UN-administered
account in the Bank of Paris in New York. (This is the fund that
should be used to buy humanitarian equipment and medicine for
the people of Iraq, but the sales are repeatedly blocked by the
US and Britain.) Hussein does not "mishandle" the funds
to build mosques, palaces, weapons, or anything else, for he
never "handles" the money in the first place.
Continuing with his cynicism, Loiko quotes
an auto mechanic who feels that the deprivations of the sanctions
regime have allowed the truly skilled laborers to shine. "Sanctions
are a bad thing, but in my business, they really showed who is
the real master and who is just a spare parts handler,"
said the mechanic. One can only admire such a capitalistic, Darwinian
attitude in the midst of all that suffering.
Loiko finishes by telling the rest of
his opening story about a man named Kasim whose canary had stopped
chirping. After first taking the bird to a vet who said the medicine
required to heal the animal was unavailable due to sanctions
(in what Loiko would most probably term "typical Iraqi fashion"),
the man took his pet to a bird dealer in the marketplace who
told him, "Your bird is overfed. You need to impose sanctions
on her. Don't feed it for a day." Loiko then concludes,
"Kasim's bird sang happily Friday morning. All the family
laughed." The subtext of Loiko's report seems to be that
if the Iraqi people don't begin putting the blame somewhere else
besides where it actually belongs, Kasim and his family will
not be laughing for long.
Tom Gorman
is a writer and activist living in Glendale, CA. He welcomes
comments at tgorman222@hotmail.com
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