Socialist Action /September 2000
Stop All Sanctions on Iraq!
By CAROLE SELIGMAN
It was reported last month that global arms sales
have expanded to some $30 billion a year, two-thirds of which are sold to
poor countries. According to the Congressional Research Service, cited in
The New York Times (Aug. 21, 2000), the United States has "solidified
its position as the world's biggest arms dealer."
The biggest buyers are countries whose governments
serve as proxies for U.S. imperialist domination in the Middle East. For
example, Saudi Arabia, the biggest buyer, provides a platform for the continued
bombing raids against Iraq, enforcing a strict military and economic blockade
on that country. This has prohibited Iraq from recovering from the one-sided
war waged against it by the United States and the UN in 1991.
Seymour Hersch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
who reported on the My Lai massacre of civilians (including children) by
U.S. forces in Vietnam, wrote a piece entitled "Overwhelming Force:
What Happened in the Final Days of the Gulf War?" in the May 22 issue
of The New Yorker. His article exposes the role of Gen. Barry McCaffrey
(current Clinton cabinet drug czar and main architect for the escalating
U.S. role in Colombia's civil war), and U.S. policy in general, in the commission
of war crimes during the Gulf War.
A few years ago, Seymour Hersch conducted a book
tour revealing the information he had gathered on Gulf War syndrome. I heard
him speak at the War Memorial building in San Francisco, where he promised
veterans to pursue the unresolved story of the dreadful illnesses American
Gulf War veterans were suffering without medical help from the Veterans
Administration.
I was disappointed that during the question and
answer period Hersch avoided any broad critique of the U.S./UN war itself,
limiting his critique to the plight and treatment of the U.S. veterans.
But his article in The New Yorker (hopefully, part of a new book) provides
a devastating critique of the "all-out attack" led by Gen. McCaffrey
after the Feb. 28, 1991 U.S. declaration of a cessation of hostilities and
call for peace talks.
Hersch writes, "Apache attack helicopters,
Bradley fighting vehicles, and artillery units from the 24th Division pummeled
the five-mile-long Iraqi column for hours, destroying some 700 Iraqi tanks,
armored cars, and trucks, and killing not only Iraqi soldiers but civilians
and children as well."
Hersch quotes McCaffrey describing the carnage
as "one of the most astounding scenes of destruction I have ever participated
in" and cites the fact that there were no serious American casualties.
The Hersch article is a full investigation of this
"all-out attack," with interviews with many of the participants
in it. While Hersch never says it outright, the culminating effect of such
objective journalism is a damning critique of U.S. conduct in its war on
Iraq, as well as on the Army general who was awarded a post in the U.S.
cabinet for his role in that war and who has been able to continue his oil-profit
war-making in Colombia.
The effect of such journalism should lead honest
readers to link the continuing economic blockade of Iraq (which the U.S.
government forces all the countries of the world to carry out) with the
war itself. On the occasion of the visit to Iraq of Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez, during his tour of member nations of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries, The New York Times reported that last year UNICEF reported
that "in many areas of Iraq, the mortality rate for children under
five had more than doubled in 10 years."
The same article (Aug. 7, 2000) concludes with
the statement that world leaders, though abiding by the UN efforts to isolate
Saddam Hussein, have increased calls for easing the strict sanctions that
are seen as the cause for such suffering. As if to underscore their cruel
economic sanctions, however, new U.S. bombing attacks followed on Aug. 12
and 13, shortly after Chavez's visit with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Iraqis say that civilians were killed and a food warehouse was hit in these
two days of air strikes.
All these elements (the 1991 Gulf war and the continuing
military attack, the U.S. arms sales, and the new U.S. military interventions
in oil-producing countries) provide the context in which opponents of U.S.
military and global economic policies should look at a recent effort by
the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) to oppose the economic sanctions
on Iraq.
The FOR describes itself as "the largest,
oldest, interfaith peace organization in the U.S." It recently placed
a quarter-page advertisement in The New York Times headlined, "Are
the Children of Iraq Our Enemies?"
The short text of the ad says: "Ten years
ago, on Aug. 6, 1990, the U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Since
then, over one million Iraqis, mostly children under five, have died. Ten
years is enough! The military sanctions on Iraq should continue, but the
economic sanctions not only do not work, they are killing innocent Iraqi
children. We say, the time has come to stop killing Iraqi children. Lift
the economic sanctions on Iraq now!"
The ad is signed by 41 prominent individuals, including
Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Sr. Helen Prejean,
the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, several Nobel Laureates,
and accomplished actors.
While it is important to organize opposition to
the economic sanctions that are responsible for the deaths and illnesses
of so many Iraqi children, it is wrong for the FOR to link this opposition
to support for the military sanctions on Iraq. Why? Because the unspoken
message in such a position is trust in the U.S. government's military policy.
Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator. His attacks
on the Kurdish population are terrible crimes. But neither the Kurdish and
the Iraqi people nor the U.S. people can pin their hopes for justice for
the Kurds on U.S. military might.
With what justification can a U.S. peace group
call on the most brutal practitioner of military might against peoples of
the world (Vietnam, Iraq, Panama, Yugoslavia), and the biggest supplier
of weaponry, to carry out military sanctions on any other country? This
is a misguided, contradictory, and insupportable position to take.
We must applaud the efforts of all who work against
the economic sanctions on Iraq and all who work for social justice. But
we must criticize those compromises that lend support for U.S. military
policy, even in the guise of peace.
Socialist Action /September 2000 |