Bashir Al-Samarrai1
On August 6, 1990, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 661 imposing a trade and financial embargo against Iraq. The objective was to persuade Iraqi forces to withdraw from Kuwait. The embargo was the most comprehensive and effective economic measure the world had ever known. It totally isolated Iraq from the rest of the world, severing links from air, sea, and land routes. It had crippling effects on the Iraqi economy. More than 90 percent of imports and 97 percent of exports were cut off.2 Iraq's financial assets abroad were seized, and food prices sharply inflated.3 It is hard to imagine any blockade as thorough as this one.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 4, 1990, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Webster, stated that "at current rates of depletion, we estimate that Iraq will have nearly drained its available foreign exchange reserves by next spring."4 All the evidence suggested that sanctions were choking off the Iraqi economy and that the embargo was having its intended effect. The Bush administration, however, showed no interest in the embargo and began to pursue the war option. The United States then began to aggressively lobby various members of the United Nations Security Council for their support of the war option. On November 29, 1990, the U.S. had managed to obtain UN Security Council Resolution 678 authorizing UN members to "use all necessary means" to bring about Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait by January 15, 1991.
This was in marked contrast to the previous history of the UN where the U.S. had frequently opposed the UN playing an active role in peacemaking. When the UN attempted to play such a role in the past, the U.S. in most cases obstructed UN resolutions. The cases of Turkey's invasion of Northern Cyprus in 1974, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Golan Heights—in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 242—not to mention the U.S. invasion of Grenada and Panama, are just a few examples illustrating the hypocritical role of the United States in manipulating the United Nations.5 The United States managed to obtain the necessary votes to escalate the conflict with Iraq through intimidation and bribery. Congressman Henry Gonzalez cites many examples as manipulations of the United Nations by the United States, immediately after the November 29 vote in the UN authorizing force in Iraq, the U.S. administration released $140 million from the World Bank to China and agreed to meet with Chinese government officials, despite a congressional ban on such loans in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square uprising. The former Soviet Union was promised $7 billion in aid from various countries and shipments of food from the U.S. Zaire was promised forgiveness of part of its debt and military assistance. A $7 billion loan to Egypt was forgiven. Yemen was threatened with termination of financial aid by the U.S.6
Having obtained the vote for its war option, and presumably to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, the United States led its allies to war against Iraq on January 17, 1991. But Iraq as a country (and not just Iraqi forces in Kuwait) became the target of the most relentless aerial bombardment in history. More than 100,000 sorties were flown, and 89,000 tons of explosives were dropped over Iraq.7 Iraq was bombed into the Stone Age, with bridges, water purification plants, power grids, and sewage systems destroyed. In the aftermath of the war, a report issued by the United Nations mission, upon visiting Iraq in March 1991, described war-ravaged Iraq in these words: "Nothing that we had seen or read prepared us for this particular form of devastation that has now befallen the country." The United Nations report concluded with these chilling remarks:
Allied bombing has wrought near apocalyptic results upon the economical infrastructure of what had been, prior to this war, a highly urbanized society. Now most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has for some years to come been relegated to a preindustrial age, but with all the disabilities of postindustrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.8
This U.S.-led war against Iraq achieved its stated objective of forcing Iraq out of Kuwait. But in the process, the war resulted in a further destabilizetion of the Gulf region by destroying the balance of power, thus making future conflict not only possible but inevitable. Having successfully achieved its stated objective by forcing the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the United States then shifted its goals to unilateral disarmament of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. The latter goal was not mandated by United Nations resolutions. In pursuit of its new goals, the Bush administration announced that the economic sanctions against Iraq would not be lifted until Saddam Hussein was removed from office. Ironically, before the war the Bush administration showed no interest in allowing the embargo to work, while after the war the United States found new merits in the embargo as an instrument of policy.
Because of this change, Iraq was not only subjected to the devastating treatments of war, but to the continued strangulation of the sanctions. The embargo has been maintained even though Iraqi forces were no longer in Kuwait, its military capabilities were decimated, and the disarmament of its weapons of mass destruction was nearly completed.9 The economic sanctions continued to strangle the people of Iraq, and the country has been pushed to the verge of collapse, placing the life of its civilian population in great peril. Those whose lives have been spared from allied bombing have been faced with imminent danger from starvation and the lack of safe water, sanitation, and basic medical care. In this human tragedy, the innocent people of Iraq have been held hostage by both the U.S. policy of collective punishment and by Saddam Hussein's regime. The United States has insisted that Saddam Hussein must be removed from office before the sanctions can be lifted, while Saddam Hussein has vowed to stay in power at any cost. Several questions are raised by this dilemma. Where does the United Nations stand regarding the confrontation between the United States and Iraq? Are U.S. objectives compatible with those of the United Nations, in whose name the United States waged war?
However desirable that goal may be, no legal basis has been established linking the lifting of economic sanctions to the removal of Saddam Hussein. Moreover, in this goal the United States has pursued an agenda of its own which has nothing to do with the United Nations or international law. To the contrary, Article 54 of the Geneva Convention of 1977 states that "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited." During the early months of the embargo, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross warned that a total blockade of Iraq would be contrary to international law.10
Let us examine the logic of the U.S. policy. It seems that U.S. strategy has been based on the faulty assumption that if one maintains the economic sanctions long enough to cause enough hardship and suffering, people will revolt against their ruler. In other words, the aim is to starve the civilian population into revolution. Besides imposing sanctions, the United Nations imposed a series of punitive resolutions, at the bequest of the United States, that punish Iraq and its future generations for the behavior of a leader they did not elect. This policy has backfired by failing to draw a distinction between Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people. The United Nations has played into Saddam Hussein's hands by making Iraq and the people of Iraq the targets of a hostile policy. This is despite repeated contentions by President Bush that the U.S. quarrel is not with the Iraqi people, but with Saddam only. But many Iraqis perceived that it was they, and not Saddam, who were the victims of the most severe food and medicine shortages.
Let us review a few examples of how sanctions have hurt the Iraqis and not Saddam Hussein and his regime. According to Dr. Eric Hoskins, a medical coordinator for the Gulf Peace Team and a member of the Harvard Study Team that visited Iraq five times, "it is likely that sanctions have resulted in more suffering and death of the civilian population of Iraq than the war itself." Dr. Hoskins stated that "we must decide whom the coalition forces fought this war against. We must also decide whether it is worth sacrificing the lives of thousands more innocent victims to achieve the removal of Saddam Hussein."11 Another member of the Gulf Peace Team, Ann Montgomery, provided insight on the condition of children. Ms. Montgomery reported that forty babies were dying each day, not from any extraordinaiy illnesses, but because of a lack of milk and simple medications. She conveyed the angry plea of a doctor by stating, "please tell them not to make war on children."12
After visiting Iraq in April 1991, the Harvard Medical Team reported epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and gastroenteritis.13 A study published by the New England Journal of Medicine entitled, "Effects of the Gulf War on Infant and Child Mortality in Iraq," concluded by stating that "these results provide strong evidence that the Gulf War and the trade sanctions caused a three-fold increase in mortality among Iraqi children under five years of age. We estimate that an excess of more than 46,000 children died between January and August 1991."14
The United Nations mission that visited Iraq in March 1991 recommended that the sanctions affecting food and medicine should be immediately lifted. The report of the UN mission stated,
Sanctions in respect of food supplies should be immediately removed, as should those relating to the import of agricultural equipment and supplies. The urgent supply of basic commodities to safeguard the vulnerable groups is strongly recommended and the provision of major quantities of the following staples for the general population, such as, milk, wheat, flour, rice, sugar, vegetables, oil, and tea.15
It was partly in response to this report that the UN Security Council approved Resolutions 706 and 712 in August and September 1991 permitting limited oil sales from Iraq for the purchase of humanitarian supplies and for the expenses of UN missions in Iraq. Saddam Hussein has refused to accept the conditions attached to these resolutions.
Sanctions induced hyperinflation, and the prices of basic staple goods skyrocketed, placing most Iraqis outside the food market. For example, the price of bread increased by 2,857 percent, infant formula rose by 2,222 percent, flour went up by 4,531 percent, and eggs increased by 350 percent.16 In addition to these massive increases in food prices, the purchasing power of most Iraqis was drastically reduced through inflation and loss of jobs. The Iraqi dinar depreciated. For instance, in 1980 one Iraqi dinar was equivalent to three U.S. dollars while in 1990, just before the latest war, four Iraqi dinars were equal to one U.S. dollar. By 1993 the Iraqi dinar had drastically depreciated, with thirty-five Iraqi dinars equaling one U.S. dollar. To illustrate the decline in the purchasing power of Iraqis, consider as an example the annual income of the average Iraqi physician (physicians being the highest paid professionals). As measured by U.S. dollars, in an analysis by Dr. Faik Al-Bazaz, M.D., University of Illinois Medical Center, the annual salary of an Iraqi physician has been radically reduced from $14,400 in 1980 to $1,400 in 1990 and to $270 in 1992.17
Economically and socially, the crippling impact of the continued sanctions produced, among other things, a situation where survival has been only for the fittest. Doug Broderic, the field director of Catholic Relief Services in Baghdad, commented, "What you get with prices like this is a Darwinian effect. The rich and the strong survive, the poor and the weak starve. In any society, the... weakest people are the children, so mostly it is the children that die."18
As a further illustration of the devastating impact of sanctions, New York Times correspondent Michael Kelly interviewed an Iraqi woman who said that while whole families are starving in Iraq, Saddam and his loyalists have been sheltered from the effects of the embargo: "Of course the people in the government do not live the way we live. They can get whatever they want. They have millions and they want to make millions more."19
Instead of achieving its intended objective of weakening Saddam Hussein's grip on power, the policy of economic strangulation has backfired. While most Iraqis oppose the regime of Saddam Hussein, they harbor a strong resentment toward the U.S. for destroying their country and starving its people. The sentiment voiced by the same Iraqi woman reflects the feelings of most people in Iraq. She expressed these sentiments by stating,
Saddam Hussein and George Bush have tried to defeat us, each in his own way. George Bush could have serit his army to Baghdad and killed this bastard Saddam, and he did not. It is as if both sides, the Americans and criminals of Saddam, are using us to work out their experiments, and they are interesting experiments. It is fascinating to see what it takes to bring about the total degradation of a people.20
There have been endless examples of the crippling effects of the continued economic sanctions on the people of Iraq. In contrast, there has been no evidence that the sanctions have weakened Saddam Hussein's grip on power. In effect, Saddam Hussein has used the embargo to keep the Iraqi people preoccupied with a constant search for something to eat instead of planning to overthrow him.
Economic sanctions have targeted the wrong party in Iraq, i.e., the poor, the helpless, and the children. Most Iraqis question the logic of this policy by wondering how it is possible for a helpless nation to overthrow one of the world's most ruthless dictators, when the U.S. and its allies could not, or would not, remove Saddam from power during the war. How much suffering must innocent Iraqis endure before the UN ends its strangulation policy or before Saddam is removed? Is the world willing to stand by and watch a whole nation being starved and strangled? To continue the present policy is analogous to blowing up an aircraft with all passengers aboard to kill the hijacker. In this standoff, eighteen million Iraqis are the passengers.
1. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of any organization or agency with which he is affiliated.
2. See William H. Webster's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, "Sanctions in the Persian Gulf, Iraq: The Domestic Impact of Sanctions, December 4, 1990," in Congressional Record, January 10,1991, pp. SI23-24.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. The United Nations record shows that since its inception, Israel has been condemned 66 times by the Security Council, and in addition, the United States used its veto power 29 times on behalf of Israel in obstruction of the United Nations role. See "Quatsch Watch" column, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Vol. XI, No. 8, March 1993, p. 60.
6. Michael Ratner, "International Law and War Crimes," in War Crimes, ed. Ramsey Clark and others (Washington D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1992), p. 42.
7. Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.) and Rep. William Dickinson (R-AL), Defense for a New Era, Lessons of the Persian Gulf War (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992), p. 7.
8. UN Security Council, Report to the Secretary General on Humanitarian Needs in Kuwait and Iraq in the Immediate Post-Crisis Environment by a Mission to the Area Led by Mr. Martti Ahtisaari, Under Secretary General for Administration and Management, 20 March 1991, p.5.
9. Rolf Ekeus, head of the United Nations Commission charged with eliminating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, stated during a press conference on July 27,1992, "We have, I think, with great success covered most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability and missile area. We have, I think, successfully identified existing weapons and destroyed them. There may be a couple or a few left, but fundamentally all of them—most of them have been found and destroyed" "Excerpts from Remarks by Envoy and Bush," The New York Times, July 27, 1992, p. 6.
10. D.L. Bethlehem, ed., The Kuwait Crisis: Sanctions and their Economic Consequences (Cambridge: Grotius Publications Limited, 1991), p. 798.
11. Eric Hoskins, 'The Truth Behind Economic Sanctions: A Report on the Embargo of Food and Medicines to Iraq," in War Crimes, ed. Ramsey Clark and others (Washington D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1992), p. 167.
12. Ann Montgomery, "The Impact of Sanctions on Baghdad's Children's Hospital," in War Crimes, ed. Ramsey Clark and others (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1992), p. 100.
13. The Harvard Study Team, "Special Report: The Effect of the Gulf Crisis on the Children of Iraq," New England Journal of Medicine,Vol. 325, No. 13, September 26, 1991, pp. 977-80.
14. Alberto Ascherio, et al., "Effect of the Gulf War on Infant and Child Mortality in Iraq," New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 327, No. 13, p. 931.
15. UN Security Council, Report on Humanitarian Needs in Kuwait and Iraq, by M. Ahtisaari, p. 5.
16. Michael Kelly, "Mob Town," in The New York Times Magazine, February 14, 1993, Section 6, p. 18.
17. Al-Bazaz, Faik, "The Effects of the Gulf War on Iraqi Physicians," (unpublished).
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 40.
20. Ibid., p. 50.