SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Joy Gordon, what effect did the sanctions have on things like mortality, on public health, on education?
JOY GORDON: The sanctions--again, this is in combination with this initial devastation of all of Iraq's infrastructure--the impact was enormous. Child mortality spiked, increased by 250 percent. A country that had had negligible levels of things like cholera and typhoid, those were off the charts. There were epidemics of waterborne diseases that never really came down....
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the estimates that at least half-a-million children were killed as a result of these sanctions?
JOY GORDON: It's called the excess child mortality figure, which is-which means, really, how many children under five died during sanctions who would not have died without the sanctions. And that number is highly contested. The Iraqi government claimed one thing for a while; other groups claimed things for a while. But in the end, if you look at the best data and the most reliable data, it seems that it must in fact be over half-a-million children under five were dead as a result of sanctions.
Obama kept a major campaign promise, but didn't get much for his efforts. That seems to have been a fairly common theme from the Chris Matthews precincts of Versailles. To see just how myopic this narrative was, you only needed to tune in to Democracy Now! yesterday, which had two excellent pieces on the sham "end" of the Iraq War.
First was an interview with Nir Rosen, "Iraq Is a Shattered Country", dealing with the ignored reality on the ground that President Obama made no mention of whatsoever. Second was an interview with Joy Gordon, "Invisible War: How Thirteen Years of US-Imposed Economic Sanctions Devastated Iraq Before the 2003 Invasion", which has a great deal to say about how the Clinton Administration killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi childrens and infants. This is the true face of the Democratic Party foreign policy--almost indistinguishable from its Republican counterpart when it comes to the impact on dark-skinned people around the globe.
First, the beginning of the interview with Nir Rosen:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: For more, I'm joined on the line from Baghdad by independent journalist Nir Rosen. He's been covering the Iraq war since 2003. He's now a fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security. His forthcoming book is called Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.
Nir Rosen, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you respond to what President Obama said last night in his Oval Office address and what you're seeing on the ground in Iraq right now?
NIR ROSEN: Well, I was offended by it. He spoke mostly about American soldiers and their suffering and their sacrifice, and the only time he came even close to mentioning that Iraqis had a hard time these last seven years is when he mentioned their resilience. He said that the US has paid a high price, a huge price. Not as huge as the Iraqis have paid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who were rendered in American detention, their lives ruined for years, children who didn't know where their fathers were. A couple of million displaced internally and abroad. Iraq is a shattered country. He said we persevered because we share a vision with the Iraqi people. Most of the Iraqi people, their vision has been, for the last seven years, that the Americans would withdraw.
Now, really, nothing has changed, obviously, from one day to the next. You have 50,000 troops who remain here. When Iraq occupied Kuwait, the Americans said that as long as there's one Iraqi soldier left in Kuwait, Kuwait remains occupied. So the presence of 50,000 troops in Iraq forecloses many options, precludes many options for the Iraqis, with the implied threat. At the same time, the Iraqi security forces, I think, would like to have a continued relationship. And while Iraq is sort of occupied, it's also sort of sovereign. You don't see--you haven't seen really for the last year in most parts of the country American soldiers on the ground. So, nothing changed today. The big change, you could say, was a year ago, when the Americans withdrew from cities and mainly stayed on bases. And we've had a test since then of the Iraqi security forces in their ability to handle the situation. And I'd say they, more or less, can handle it. It's not very pretty....
But the broader view has to encompass a much longer time-frame:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: The US invasion and occupation of Iraq over the past seven years has inflicted multiple disasters on the country. But many argue that the US war against Iraq really began more than twenty years ago. In August 1990, the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq in response to its invasion of Kuwait. The United States was instrumental in imposing and keeping the sanctions in place until May 2003. While they had a devastating impact on Iraq and its people, the sanctions are often overshadowed by the 2003 US invasion when pundits examine US policy on Iraq.
Our next guest writes of the sanctions, quote, "U.S. policymakers effectively turned a program of international governance into a legitimized act of mass slaughter." Joy Gordon is a professor of philosophy at Fairfield University and author of the new book Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions. She joins me now from Fairfield University in Connecticut.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Joy Gordon. Can you take us back to 1990, how these sanctions were put in place, and what effect they had on Iraq over the thirteen years that they were held there?
JOY GORDON: Sure. The sanctions were imposed in August of 1990, so almost exactly twenty years ago, after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. The sanctions were almost completely comprehensive. They precluded Iraq from any imports and any exports, with very limited exceptions. They allowed medicine, and they allowed food, quote, "in humanitarian circumstances." But that phrase wasn't defined.
In fact, what happened for the first eight months is that within the Security Council committee that maintained the sanctions-it was called the 661 Committee, after the resolution. Each country had veto power. It operated by consensus. And for the first eight months, the US, accompanied by a couple of others, but absolutely the US, would not even allow Iraq to import food. This is a country that had been importing two-thirds of its food. There was a fight, for example, that went on for weeks and weeks over whether or not Iraq could import a shipment of powdered milk, and the US opposed that just intransigently.
After March of 1991, after the bombing of the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was allowed to import food without restriction, but the real problem was infrastructure, because in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the US-led allied forces bombed all of Iraq's infrastructure-water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, telecommunications towers, roads, bridges. The country was reduced to a dysfunctional country in every regard almost overnight. UN envoys going into Iraq reported that Iraq has been reduced to a preindustrial country. One described the situation as "near apocalyptic." And it was that combination of things, the massive bombing of all infrastructure combined then with the sanctions, that made it impossible for Iraq to ever recover. It was reduced a level of development from a sophisticated country with a very high standard of living to a country that was, in the words of the envoy again, a "preindustrialized country."
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Joy Gordon, what effect did the sanctions have on things like mortality, on public health, on education?
JOY GORDON: The sanctions--again, this is in combination with this initial devastation of all of Iraq's infrastructure--the impact was enormous. Child mortality spiked, increased by 250 percent. A country that had had negligible levels of things like cholera and typhoid, those were off the charts. There were epidemics of waterborne diseases that never really came down....
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the estimates that at least half-a-million children were killed as a result of these sanctions?
JOY GORDON: It's called the excess child mortality figure, which is-which means, really, how many children under five died during sanctions who would not have died without the sanctions. And that number is highly contested. The Iraqi government claimed one thing for a while; other groups claimed things for a while. But in the end, if you look at the best data and the most reliable data, it seems that it must in fact be over half-a-million children under five were dead as a result of sanctions.
And our new "counterinsurgency" strategy is supposed to win the "war on terror" by winning people's "hearts and minds"???
Obama promised "change we can believe in." But he actually delivered more of the same old same old than we could have possibly imagined. This is not a matter for Versailles debate. It's a matter of cold, hard lived reality in the desolate streets of Iraq, Afghanistan, and--increasingly--the United States of America.
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