The Ongoing War Against Iraq's Civilians

By Colman McCarthy, Washington Post, 30 January 1996

Media attention was paid earlier this month to the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War. Some of the reporting was time-wasting journalism, as on one CNN broadcast that replayed familiar footage of tracer bombs lighting the night sky over Baghdad and tapes of reporters describing the high-tech action.

NBC asked Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf to reminisce, which he did in his usual self-congratulatory, wasn't-I-something-else manner. CBS marked the anniversary by dispatching Dan Rather and production crews to Iraq and Kuwait for an hour-long special report.

As in coverage of the war in 1991, the U.S. News media, if CNN, NBC and CBS are typical, focused this time around mostly on questions of strategy: Did then-President George Bush end the war too soon? Should Iraqi President Saddam Hussein have been killed? Military analysts accused the Pentagon of failing to totally wipe out Iraqi forces and finish the job.

Rather's script mentioned the terrible cost of the war—the 147 U.S. soldiers killed. How many Iraqi troops lost their lives? No word. An estimate of Iraqi civilians killed by American bombing raids was ignored also, as were the postwar deaths caused by diseases due to the effect of the bombing on water, sanitation and electric plants.

As is customary in these kinds of anniversary look-backs, the emphasis is on then, not now - as if the end of the war in 1991 meant also the end of enmity. The major story now is that U.N. economic sanctions against the Iraqi people continue. The rationale is that if Saddam Hussein is socked with enough pain, he will obey the demands of the United Nations to dismantle his programs in nuclear, biological and chemical weapons production. By an embargo of trade, the U.N. pressure is exerted mostly by the United States and its allies, including Britain and France, which in the 1980s were among the major arms selling profiteering off Saddam.

It is a pleasing fiction that the economic sanctions on Iraq mean that its sadistic dictator is living on bread and water and running out of aspirin. He is not. No evidence exists that Saddam is personally hurting, while facts continue to surface that Iraqi citizens are being devastated by this economic war as they were five years ago by the bombing war.

Last month, two independent social scientists, one from the Harvard School of Public Health, surveyed Iraq for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. They reported that as many as 567,000 Iraqi children have died since August 1990 as a result of economic sanctions. During the war and its immediate aftermath, early childhood mortality rates tripled. Now they have increased fivefold. Diarrheal deaths have tripled among children.

As a consequence of the economic war waged against the Iraqi people, the U.N. authors write: Food prices are high, purchasing power is low, water and sanitation systems have deteriorated, hospitals are functioning at 40 percent capacity and the population is largely sustained by government rations which provide 1,000 calories per person a day.

Iraqis are trapped as much by the boycotts of other governments as by the despotism of their own. Iraqi families aren't totally without friends in the outside world. In mid-January, a group of about 50 Americans—many of them leaders in the religious, pacifist and social work communities—informed the Justice Department that they plan to violate U.S. law, as found in Treasury Department regulations, by soliciting and transporting medical supplies to the people of Iraq.

The Chicago-based organization—called Voices in the Wilderness -- is in the best tradition of conscientious objection to unjust laws. Its members are ready of the consequences of fines and jail.

The U.S. law that prohibits breaking the embargo ensures death and suffering to a people who have already had too much of it. The sooner that law is broken, and broken defiantly, the greater the chance that people-to-people reconciliation between Americans and Iraqis can begin.