Gonsalves

I’ve

been duped! But thanks to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, there’s hope

for me yet. “America has lost the propaganda war with Saddam. Period,” he wrote

back in February.

This

happened for many reasons, Friedman explained. “For one, Saddam totally

out-foxed Washington in the propaganda war. All you hear and read in the media

here is that the sanctions are starving the Iraqi people – which is true. But

the U.S. counter-arguments that by complying with U.N. resolutions Saddam could

get those sanctions lifted at any time are never heard,” he wrote.

The

amazing thing is: I wasn’t duped by Saddam and his ministers of propaganda. I

was hoodwinked by American and other Western sources of extraordinary integrity.

Following the war, Col. John Warden explained how military planners targeted

Iraq’s civilian infrastructure to provide “long-term leverage,” in full

knowledge that it “could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of

disease.”

Then

in March 1991, the New York Times ran a front-page article on a U.N. report

de-tailing how the war against Iraq had caused “near apocalyptic damage,” and

also “famines and epidemics.” The report called for “massive life-supporting

aid,” warning that “time was short.”

The

story summarized the U.S. position on the sanctions – “…by making life

uncom-fortable for the Iraqi people it will eventually encourage them to remove

President Sad-dam Hussein from power.”

With

a little digging, I discovered that “uncomfortable” meant no electricity, no

water, no sewage treatment systems, and epidemics caused by water-borne diseases

for the Iraqi people, which led a Harvard study team to (under)estimate 10 years

ago that 170,000 Iraqi children would die because of the sanctions.

What

really washed my brains was a 1992 survey published in the New England Jour-nal

of Medicine. Doctors from Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Oxford went to Iraq to

study the sanctions’ effect. They reported that due to the destruction of Iraq’s

infrastructure, 46,900 Iraqi children under the age of 5 died in the first eight

months of 1991.

At

that point, I was well on my way to dupe-dom – no doubt because “U.S.

counter-arguments…are never heard.” That being the unmitigated truth, ordinary

Americans must be extremely obtuse because U.S. counter-arguments have been

played like a bro-ken record all over the news media, with U.S. officials

blaming only Saddam.

“If

he wants a different relationship…all he has to do is change his behavior,”

according to former President Clinton.

The

well-read opinion pages of the “liberal” New York Times clarified the sanctions

rationale. “The purpose of worldwide sanctions is to induce the overthrow of

Saddam’s genocidal regime,” wrote William Safire. “If you squeeze Iraq long

enough, the Iraqi people will oust Saddam,” said Friedman, who candidly

explained the “logic of the sanctions.”

Until

Friedman woke me from my dogmatic slumber, I was foolishly asking: how are we

not at all responsible for the intended consequences of the sanctions we

imposed? If the sanctions are to “squeeze Iraq long enough” so that “the Iraqi

people will oust Sad-dam,” how come the Security Council resolutions imposing

the sanctions say nothing about such a goal?

And,

if the majority of Iraqis are forced to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence, how

are they supposed to summon the fortitude to oust a dictator?

I

find comfort in the knowledge I wasn’t the only one duped. Denis Halliday,

former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, and his successor Hans von Sponeck

both re-signed in protest of the sanctions, calling them genocide. Add to that

list Scott Ritter, chief UNSCOM inspector in Iraq, the pope and 53 U.S. Catholic

bishops.

Maybe

the biggest casualty of “the war Saddam won” is The Economist. “If, year in,

year out, the U.N. were systematically killing Iraqi children by air strikes,

Western gov-ernments would declare it intolerable, no matter how noble the

intention. They should find their existing policy just as unacceptable. In

democracies, the end does not justify the means,” the conservative Economist

opined last year.

On

July 3, the UN Security Council is scheduled to vote on what the Bush

administra-tion is calling “new, smart sanctions.”

“Sitting on the world’s second-largest oil reserves, Iraq was once, politics

aside, an ad-vanced country. Now its living standards are on par with

Ethiopia’s; UNICEF confirms a 160 percent rise in Iraq’s infant mortality rate

since 1991; and the middle classes have disappeared,” the Economist reported

last month.

Help

us Mr. Friedman. We’re being duped!

“Iraq

needs massive investment to rebuild its industry, its power grids and its

schools, and needs cash in hand to pay its engineers, doctors and teachers. None

of this looks likely to happen under smart sanctions,” the Economist concluded.

Is

there no relief for the victims of Saddam’s minions?

Now,

for those who agree with the British diplomat and writer Arthur Ponsonby that

“when war is declared, Truth is the first casualty,” it’s a good idea to

actually examine the Bush administration proposal for “new, smart sanctions”

against Iraq. That they’re being called “smart sanctions” is in implicit

recognition the current sanc-tions regime is, well, dumb.

Among

those critics are two former senior UN officials of impeccable integrity – Denis

Halliday and Hans von Sponeck who resigned their posts in protest, calling the

sanctions “genocide.” That’s the word used by even the conservative Scott

Ritter, a career military man and former UNSCOM chief inspector in Iraq.

The

main change with the “smart sanctions” is that a list will be drawn up, laying

out what military or “dual-use” items will be prohibited, instead of the current

policy in which imports are allowed into Iraq only if they are on the list of

allowable goods.

Proponents argue that the new plan will increase the amount of goods that flow

into Iraq so that the general civilian population will not unduly suffer as they

have over the past decade, while tightening the controls on any imports that

could be used for military purposes.

The

current sanctions call for 100 percent, quantitative disarmament of Iraq’s

Weap-ons of Mass Destruction program. When UNSCOM was pulled out of Iraq in

1998, Iraq’s WMD program had been qualitatively dismantled, according to Ritter.

Unfortunately, Ritter adds, the 100 percent benchmark is not only impossible to

reach, it’s being used to justify the sanctions indefinitely, giving Iraq no

incentive to comply; to say nothing of the likelihood that Iraq will never be

able to pay off the war reparations claims, totaling $320 billion as of October

2000.

Analyzing statements of US officials, it appears the motivation behind the

“smart sanctions” is to shift public opinion away from blaming the sanctions for

the humanitar-ian crisis in Iraq.

In an

excellent analysis of the new proposal by the director of Inter-Church Action, a

coalition of Canadian churches and agencies working on issues of “development,

relief and justice” in Africa, the Asian-Pacific and Latin America, Dale

Hildebrand quotes a US official who says: “In reality, this is a change in

perceptions. Most people think Iraqis are starving because the evil West is

keeping medicines away…We’re taking the tool of sanctions as propaganda away

from Saddam.”

The

list prohibiting explicit military hardware is a no-brainer, given Saddam’s

heinous human rights record. However, the list of banned “dual-use” items

requires close scru-tiny. For example, given the centrality of computer

technology to any modern economy, how will the smart sanctions determine what

components are for civilian purposes and which are likely to be used for

military purposes?

“An

American official involved in drawing up the new lists of banned items said that

the new plan is designed to prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass

destruction, missiles, and the technologies to build them,” Hildebrand points

out.

“The

concept of dual-use, when applied not only to specific physical goods but also

to capabilities and technologies, can quickly become a pretext for blocking

development of large segments of the civilian economy,” he writes.

Another key component of the sanctions is the Oil-For-Food program, which US

plan-ners point to as evidence of our humanitarian concern. Tragically, the

operation of the program is grossly misunderstood by most Americans who would

otherwise likely be in opposition to its current set-up.

Hans

von Sponeck, who ran the UN program until he resigned in protest, explains that

the $2 billion in oil that Iraq is allowed to sell every six months translates

into $182.70 per person, per year. That’s $15.23 a month. The Security Council

deems those provisions sufficient for all the needs of Iraqi citizens, even

though von Sponeck has explained in detail, on numerous occasions, the

deficiencies of a system that controls Iraq’s entire economy from Security

Council offices. (Interesting that free-market cheerleaders aren’t decrying the

evils of that command economy).

Hidlebrand’s conclusions are worth pondering. “While the proposed changes may

lead to some improvements for the people in Iraq – it is apparent that they do

not equate to the radical changes in policy….that are needed to address one of

the most serious hu-manitarian and political crises in recent history.”

As

former US federal attorney Kate Pflaumer reminded us in her op-ed piece two

weeks ago, it’s difficult to take seriously “the rule of law” when the leaders

of the free world bomb civilian infrastructure in violation of the Geneva

Convention and violate the US federal statue on terrorism by creating and

maintaining life-threatening conditions to coerce a sovereign nation and its

civilian population.