Which Way for the Anti-Sanctions Movement?

[Lexington Area Muslim Network]

From: InfoTimes <infotimes@rcn.com>

http://www.iacenter.org/anti_sanc.htm

Which Way for the Anti-Sanctions Movement?

By Brian Becker

It's no surprise that there is increasing worldwide opposition
to the U.S.-imposed economic sanctions against Iraq. Five
thousand perfectly blameless infants and children perish each
month in Iraq because they are unable to get clean drinking
water, adequate food and even the most basic medicines.

There is now a worldwide movement demanding an end to sanctions.
Unfortunately, one sector of this growing movement has injected
a new demand into its slogans: calling for the continuation of
"military sanctions"  against Iraq.

Some of these same groups actually raised the slogan "sanctions
not war" back in 1990.

The International Action Center (IAC), which has campaigned
relentlessly for the last 10 years against sanctions, has issued
a powerful statement explaining the disastrous effects of
adopting a demand that sanctions be reshaped instead of
immediately terminated (on the World Wide Web at:
http://www.iacenter.org/delink.htm ).

Unless this slogan is repudiated it could seriously weaken and
derail the movement.

"Those who want to stop the Iraqi people's suffering must direct
their demand at the aggressors, at the U.S. and Britain whose
war planes bomb Iraq routinely, almost daily, who have dropped
thousands of bombs on Iraq in the last year," says Sara
Flounders, Co-Director of the IAC.

The United States and Britain are bombing Iraq. Iraq has never
bombed the cities of the United States. The progressive movement
must ask itself: Does Iraq have the right to defend itself
against such attacks? Shouldn't anti-war forces in the United
States call for demilitarizing the Pentagon instead of
demilitarizing the victims of U.S. aggression?

A Tactic in a Larger War

Why does the United States maintain the sanctions and blockade
of Iraq?

Is it just a mistaken policy by U.S. political leaders that
needs some "humanitarian" fine-tuning? Or should sanctions be
understood as a tactic in a larger multi-pronged war to return
Iraq to the status of semi-colonial slavery?

Should the progressive movement oppose sanctions because that
tactic causes undue harm to civilians? Or should it also reject
the imperialist goals and objectives that are the real
motivation for a destabilization strategy that includes economic
sanctions, routine bombings of the country, CIA covert
operations, plans to assassinate the Iraqi leadership, creating
no-flight zones over most of the country, and placing tens of
thousands of U.S. troops, warships, aircraft and advanced
missiles on the outer perimeters of Iraq?

The sanctions against Iraq began 10 years ago, in August 1990.
The Bush administration bullied the United Nations into imposing
economic sanctions as a prelude to the full-scale 1991 air war
against Iraq.

The sanctions were initially put into place to help evict Iraqi
troops from Kuwait, according to the propaganda of the Bush
Administration. Iraq had invaded Kuwait, an oil-rich territory
under the domination of an U.S.-backed monarchy, in August 1990,
after a protracted and complicated dispute between the two
countries.

The original pretext for the economic sanctions was a lie. It
was purely for public consumption. If the sanctions were meant
only to drive Iraqi troops from Kuwait then why, nearly a decade
after the last Iraqis left, does the United States still  impose
the "most complete embargo of any  country  in modern times," in
the words of Samuel  Berger, U.S. President Bill Clinton's
National Security Adviser?

Two Blockades: Iraq and Cuba

The unstated but fairly obvious reason that Washington carries
out the economic blockade of Iraq is that it wants to
destabilize the country, overthrow the government of Saddam
Hussein and replace it with a pro-U.S. regime. The United States
has tried the same thing against socialist Cuba.

The political leaderships in Iraq and Cuba are very different.
Cuba's leadership is Communist and the Iraqi Government is
anti-Communist. But both governments have one thing in common.
Iraq and Cuba both suffered the impoverishment and humiliation
of colonialism and neo-colonialism imposed by U.S. and British
imperialism.

Both countries had far-reaching revolutions within a year of
each other-1958 and-1959. Both revolutions immediately came
under direct aggression from the imperialist overlords who had
colonized or enslaved their countries.

The Iraqi Revolution in 1958 prompted Britain to rush thousands
of troops to fortify its hold on tiny but oil-rich Kuwait. As it
had with Hong Kong in China, British colonialism sliced the key
port area of Kuwait out of Iraq and declared it a British
protectorate. While British troops secured Kuwait in 1958, U.S.
President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched 10,000 U.S. marines to
Lebanon the very next day to shore up Washington's own
interests.

In the case of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Eisenhower ordered
the CIA to begin planning the assassination of Fidel Castro. Two
years later, under John F. Kennedy, the U.S. Government
organized a mercenary invasion of Cuba by CIA- trained
counter-revolutionaries.

Cuba used socialist economic methods to bring literacy, full
employment and free universal health care to its people. It was
able to free itself of economic neocolonial enslavement by
integrating into the trading bloc with the Soviet Union, East
Germany and the other socialist countries.

Although Iraq nationalized its oil industry and other economic
sectors, its revolution never went beyond the boundaries of
capitalist property rights. But because of its vast oil wealth
and the nationalist development model adopted by the leadership,
Iraq too was able to effect rapid social and economic progress
for the mass of the population after the 1958 revolution.

Official U.S. policy has been hostile to both Iraq and Cuba
since their revolutions. The "hostility" was remarkably
consistent regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat
occupied the White House.

The only exception to the policy of unmitigated hostility was
during the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988. The United
States supplied weapons to Iraq and encouraged Iraq's initial
military actions against Iran in 1980. But this should be
understood for what it was: a cynical ploy to weaken and exhaust
the 1979 Iranian mass revolution that had swept out the dynastic
rule of the Shah-whose Army had served as proxy and gendarme for
the Pentagon and CIA in the Persian Gulf.

The United States armed Iraq to fight Iran in the early
1980s-but it also sent arms to Iran, as was revealed during the
1986 Iran-Contra hearings in the U.S. Congress. In the words of
former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: "We wanted them
to kill each other."

Once Washington had accomplished its objective of weakening the
Iranian Revolution through the war between Iran and Iraq,
Pentagon war doctrine was reconfigured to target Iraq as the
next "potential enemy." Plans and complex war games for a U.S.
war  with Iraq were drafted in 1988, immediately after the close
of the Iran-Iraq war and two years  before Iraq fatefully sent
its troops against the Kuwaiti monarchy in August 1990.  ("The
Fire This Time," Ramsey Clark,  Thundersmouth Press, 1992).

Slogans Should be Consistently Anti-Imperialist

The U.S. Government represents the interests of Big Oil and the
biggest imperialist banks. It seeks to dominate the Middle East
not to bring "human rights" and "democracy" but to possess and
profit from the fabulous oil wealth under the soil.

Iraq has 10 percent of the world's known oil reserves. Combined
with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran, this region contains the
largest share of oil on the planet.

Effective sanctions of any type, be they for economic or
military commodities, require the sanctioning countries to
position military forces around the targeted country so that
ships, trucks and airplanes can be interdicted and searched.
Thus, calling for the United States or UN to maintain military
sanctions on Iraq provides a political and even "legal"
justification for the continued military occupation of the Gulf
region by U.S. military forces.

>From a practical point of view, if the demand for U.S./UN
economic sanctions to be replaced by "military sanctions" were
realized, it would still have a devastating impact on Iraq's
civilian population. The United States would claim that almost
anything that the civilian economy imports could also be used
for military applications.

Referring to these items as "dual use" commodities, the United
States has already halted or postponed 450 out of every 500
contracts that were approved by the UN Sanctions Committee under
the much touted Oil-for-Food program.

Washington will use the category of "military sanctions" as a
technical method to prevent Iraq from acquiring commodities that
are essential for sustaining civilian economy and human life.
For example, the United States has banned pencils for
schoolchildren because these pencils contain graphite, which is
also a lubricant. It has banned batteries, X-ray machines and
ambulances because they could be used in military conflicts.

Iraq is now barred from importing adequate supplies of chlorine
to purify its water. Why chlorine? It could be used as a
component in a chemical weapon.

Computers too have potential military uses. So importing
computers has been prohibited for 10 years.

It can only miseducate the broad public about the real issues in
the Middle East if the progressive movement supports the
imperialist powers in demanding the demilitarization of Iraq.
The movement cannot be consistently progressive without
thoroughly exposing the true dynamics of imperialist military
and political strategy that tries to re-colonize the Arab
people.

==========

De-Linking Sanctions: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

As more people understand how sanctions against Iraq have
devastated that country and killed hundreds of thousands of its
children, they have swelled the opposition to this policy. They
have cracked through the corporate media's enforced silence
about this great suffering. A grassroots movement to end
sanctions is gaining momentum.

They know this policy has killed 1.7 million Iraqis since 1990.
They know U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admits this
cost and has said on network television that she believes it is
worth this horrible price. They are disgusted by the cruel
policies coming out of Washington.

The anti-sanctions movement has always had a clear, simple
demand: end the U.S./United Nations sanctions against Iraq. The
Iraqis are clearly the victims of sanctions--not to speak of
almost daily bombing raids. The Pentagon and its British allies
are clearly the aggressors and the perpetrators of murderous
violence against the Iraqi people. Those who want to stop the
Iraqi's suffering must direct their demand at the aggressor and
say: "Stop the sanctions--stop the bombing.

That should be elementary. But some groups have injected a new
campaign into this growing movement. They propose to de-link
economic and military sanctions. That means they would demand
the U.S. stop economic sanctions. And at the same time they
would allow Washington--through some UN body-- to enforce
selective so-called military sanctions. A growing volume of
anti- sanctions literature actually calls for a continued U.S.
commitment to disarm Iraq and tighten military sanctions.

Many groups that are now for de-linking economic and military
sanctions promoted sanctions just before the 1991 Gulf war broke
out. Then their popular slogan was "Sanctions, not war." This
slogan completely covered up the view that sanctions are a most
brutal form of war against a whole country's population,
especially the children and seniors.

Some people who are genuinely concerned about the suffering of
the Iraqi people may not realize the implications of this
dangerous campaign. Others-- especially among those who had
openly supported sanctions for years--are intentionally
introducing slogans in an attempt to derail the movement.

This campaign to de-link sanctions is indeed dangerous to our
movement. It can divide us. That is why we must examine this
campaign carefully, study the record of those who propose it,
refute its arguments and reject its slogans.

Blaming the Victim

>From Dec. 20, 1998--after four days of heavy bombing
raids--until the end of September 1999, the U.S. and its British
allies flew 12,157 combat sorties against Iraq. They dropped
10,000 tons of explosives during that period.

The movement here must ask itself--does Iraq have the right to
defend itself against such attacks? Does it have the right to
lock its radar on hostile planes flying over its territory? Does
it have the right to fire back?

If the movement supports "military sanctions" against Iraq, then
we are taking the side of the aggressor against the victims.
This approach implies that Iraq is somehow more "evil" than
other states and concedes that Washington has some justice on
its side. Iraq has not bombed the U.S. or Britain or anyone
else. We must not fall in the trap of blaming the victims.

'Dual-Use' Substances and Technology

Another danger of allowing "military sanctions" is that
Washington can apply the "dual-use" argument to stop trade in
items that are absolutely necessary for civilian use.

The U.S. has already justified some of the most harmful
sanctions by calling them necessary to prevent Iraq from
developing any "weapons of mass destruction." For example, it
has banned pencils for school children because these pencils
contain graphite, which is also a lubricant. It has banned
batteries, X-ray machines, ambulances because they could be used
in battles, computers, and even enriched powdered milk, which
supposedly could be used in germ warfare.

This targeting of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" has been a
fraud from the beginning. Iraq didn't have the weapons to defend
themselves at their hour of greatest peril in 1991, when more
than 110,000 sorties were striking them from every direction and
hardly a plane was shot down.

While the lack of medicines and medical equipment--which were
available in Iraq before 1991--has cost thousands of lives, most
of the 500,000-plus Iraqi children killed by sanctions have died
from diseases carried in impure drinking water. Before the U.S.
bombing 96 percent of Iraqis had potable drinking water. But the
1991 bombing destroyed the water supply infrastructure and
sanctions have made it impossible to rebuild it.

Good drinking water needs pipes, pumps, filtration and chlorine.
But Washington defines chlorine as a dual-use item, as it does
the pipes that would be used to carry water. The U.S. government
considers these and a thousand other items as having some
possible dual use that could be to assist Iraqi military. Even
if sanctions were 'de-linked' these prohibited items would have
been placed in the dual-use category under 'military sanctions'
and denied.

For more detail on how "dual-use" is manipulated, see the Iraq
Action Coalition website at http://leb.net/IAC and you can find
a list of almost 300 items from bicycles and busses to music
CDs, soap and toilet paper that are banned.

Under the "Oil for Food" program, the U.S. has used the dual-use
military category to stop, halt or postpone for further study
450 out of 500 contracts already approved by UN Sanctions
Commission. They have used the vague category of dual military
and civilian use to make many shipments useless or incomplete.

Then they blame Baghdad for not providing for the population.
Yet every UN agency that monitors food and medical distribution
has reported that Iraq has the best and least corrupt
distribution system in the world for the food that reaches the
country. The malnutrition and disease continue because Iraq is
intentionally denied any of the necessities of modern life.

In 1995 as the call to end all sanctions and inspections in Iraq
was gaining momentum, many activists mistakenly saw the
Oil-for-Food deal seemed a realistic way to immediately end the
suffering in Iraq. It turned out instead to be really a campaign
to extend and continue the sanctions indefinitely.

The push for military sanctions says there is some humanitarian
justification to attacks on small, poor countries by the largest
and most ruthless military power in the world. The Pentagon has
more weapons of every type than the rest of the Security Council
nations and the other top ten military powers. The military
corporations of the U.S. are the largest weapons exporters
through trade, aid and loans in the world.

Who decides what Iraq can trade for?

If there are "just" military sanctions, who gets to decide what
Iraq can trade for? Can an outside force get to determine what
the Iraqi government and Iraqi business can and can't buy?
Whatever outside force is involved, even "military sanctions"
continues to violate the sovereignty of the Iraqi nation.

The U.S. government continues both the bombing and the sanctions
to keep Iraq impoverished and underdeveloped. It aims to keep
Iraqi oil off the world markets while undermining the ability of
the state sector to provide the necessities of life.

The stated original goal of sanctions was to force Iraq to
withdraw from Kuwait. This Iraq did in March 1991. But the
sanctions have been killing Iraqis since.

Iraq has not been the sole victim of sanctions. Over the years
the U.S. government has imposed sanctions, blockades or boycotts
on developing countries such as Sudan, Korea, China, Vietnam,
Angola, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, Panama and a
host of other countries. Each time Washington's goal was to
subjugate a developing country.

As early as 1919, then-U.S. President Woodrow Wilson explained
just how well the imperialists who control all the economic
levers of global trade and finance understand the power of this
weapon against small, developing, vulnerable countries: "The one
who chooses this economic, peaceful, quiet, lethal remedy will
not have to resort to force. It is a painful remedy. It doesn't
take a single human life outside the country exposed to the
boycott, but instead subjects that country to a pressure that,
in my view, no modern country can withstand."

Even if Wilson hadn't admitted it long ago, around the world
people see now that the big imperialist powers use sanctions as
a weapon against any developing country that tries to pursue an
independent course or to resist the ruthless process of
globalization. For the movement to support "military sanctions"
would help sell the idea that there could be a reasonable
sanctions policy selectively used by the U.S. government and the
other big capitalist powers.

Now the U.S. government's sanctions policy stands exposed
internationally. Washington is on the defensive even in the
Security Council on this issue. So the U.S. State Department is
trying to maintain some form of sanctions and intrusive spying
inspections in Iraq. It is trying to assert Washington's "right"
to strangle a targeted country.

Madeleine Albright, who publicly approved the death of a
half-million Iraqi children, is supposed to be interested now in
pulling back the most onerous economic sanctions in exchange to
maintaining so-called military sanctions and resuming the
intrusive inspections in Iraq. It's just this State-Department
campaign to make sanctions again palatable that is reflected by
some within the movement to end all sanctions.

What is needed is a campaign against all sanctions.

While building the broadest possible unity among all those who
are genuinely concerned about the Iraqi people and other people
who are also being strangled by sanctions, every effort should
be made to keep orientated toward ending all sanctions, all
U.S./British bombings and overflights, all spy teams and
inspectors.

Let Iraq Live!
Sara Flounders
Co-Director, International Action Center (IAC)

International Action Center (IAC)
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011 U.S.A.
E-Mail: iacenter@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
Phone: 212 633-6646
Fax: 212 633-2889

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