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 web site 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

International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889