In the last decade of the 20th century, a nation often hailed (not least by itself) as the “world’s greatest democracy” directed a program of
savage economic warfare against a broken, defenseless country. This
blockade, carried out with an exacting bureaucratic coldness, killed, by
very conservative estimate, at least one million innocent people. More
than half of these victims were young children.

Dead children. Thousands of dead children. Tens of thousands of dead children, Hundreds of thousands of dead children. Mountains of dead children. Vast pestiferous slagheaps of dead children. This is what the
world’s greatest democracy created, deliberately, coldly, as a matter of
carefully considered national policy.

The blockade was carried out for one reason only: to force out the broken country’s recalcitrant leader, who had once been an ally and client of the world’s greatest democracy but was no longer considered
acquiescent enough to be allowed to govern his strategically placed land
and its vast energy resources. The leadership of both of the dominant
power factions in the world’s greatest democracy agreed that the
deliberate murder of innocent people — more people than were killed in
the coterminous genocide in Rwanda — was an acceptable price to pay for
this geopolitical objective. To them, the game — that is, the
augmentation of their already stupendous, world-shadowing wealth and
power — was worth the candle — that is, the death spasms of a child in
the final agonies of gastroenteritis, or cholera, or some other easily
preventable affliction.

It is, by any measure, one of the most remarkable — and horrific — stories of the last half of the 20th century, outstripped in that period only by China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ and by the millions killed in the
conflicts in Indochina in which the world’s greatest democracy played
such an instrumental role. Yet it remains an “invisible war,” as Joy
Gordon calls it in the title of her new book
on the United States and the Iraq sanctions. Not only that, the
perpetrators of this Rwanda-surpassing genocide walk among us today,
safely, serenely, in honor, comfort and privilege. Some of them still
hold powerful positions in government. If their savage war was
invisible, then so is the innocent blood that smears them from head to
foot.

Andrew Cockburn has written an excellent — and greatly detailed — review of Gordon’s work in the latest London Review of Books, drawing upon his own extensive experience in Iraq as well as the extensive evidence of the book. The
review is worth excerpting at length, although there is still much more
in the original piece, which you should read as well.

Cockburn writes:

… The multiple disasters inflicted on Iraq since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion have tended to overshadow the lethally effective ‘invisible
war’ waged against Iraqi civilians between August 1990 and May 2003 with
the full authority of the United Nations and the tireless attention of
the US and British governments. …Even at the time, the sanctions against
Iraq drew only sporadic public comment, and even less attention was
paid to the bureaucratic manoeuvres in Washington, always with the
dutiful assistance of London, which ensured the deaths of half a million
children, among other consequences. In her excellent book Joy Gordon
charts these in horrifying detail….

The sanctions were originally imposed on Iraq after Saddam — who had been given the famous “green light” by the envoy of the American president — invaded Kuwait. The sanctions were said to be a measure short of war, to force him to withdraw; later
they became a tool of war when the fighting started. And afterward they
became an extension of the war by other means. But in all cases, as
Gordon and Cockburn note, they were above all a weapon to destroy the
civilian infrastructure and economy of Iraq. Cockburn writes:

… The war, when it came, was directed as much against Iraq’s economy as against its army in Kuwait.
Key features of the bombing campaign were designed – as its principal
planner, Colonel John Warden of the US air force, explained to me
afterwards – to destroy the ‘critical nodes’ that enabled Iraq to
function as a modern industrial society. The air force had dreamed of
being able to do this sort of thing since before the Second World War,
and Warden thought the introduction of precision-guided ‘smart bombs’
now made it a practical proposition. Iraq’s electrical power plants,
telecommunications centres, oil refineries, sewage plants and other key
infrastructure were destroyed or badly damaged. Warden, I recall, was
piqued that bombing in addition to his original scheme had obscured the
impact of his surgical assault on the pillars supporting modern Iraqi
society….

…The first intimation that the blockade would continue even though Iraq had been evicted from Kuwait came in an offhand remark by Bush at a press briefing on 16 April 1991.
There would be no normal relations with Iraq, he said, until ‘Saddam
Hussein is out of there’: ‘We will continue the economic sanctions.’
Officially, the US was on record as pledging that sanctions would be
lifted once Kuwait had been compensated for the damage wrought during
six months of occupation and once it was confirmed that Iraq no longer
possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or the capacity to make them. A
special UN inspection organisation, Unscom, was created, headed by the
Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, a veteran of arms control negotiations. But
in case anyone had missed the point of Bush’s statement, his deputy
national security adviser, Robert Gates (now Obama’s secretary of
defence), spelled it out a few weeks later: ‘Saddam is discredited and
cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world
community. Therefore,’ Gates continued, ‘Iraqis will pay the price while
he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he
is gone.’

This is the blood-and-iron voice of the man retained by the Progressive Peace Laureate in the White House to run
his war machine as it churns through human bodies around the world, in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Colombia
and dozens of other countries: a war machine of official armies, secret
militias, death squads, robots and mercenaries. Back to Cockburn:

Despite this explicit confirmation that the official justification for sanctions was irrelevant, Saddam’s supposed refusal to turn over his
deadly arsenal would be brandished by the sanctioneers whenever the
price being paid by Iraqis attracted attention from the outside world.
And although Bush and Gates claimed that Saddam, not his weapons, was
the real object of the sanctions, I was assured at the time by officials
at CIA headquarters in Langley that an overthrow of the dictator by a
population rendered desperate by sanctions was ‘the least likely
alternative’. The impoverishment of Iraq – not to mention the exclusion
of its oil from the global market to the benefit of oil prices – was not
a means to an end: it was the end.

We are of course seeing this same dynamic at work today, as Gates and a new temporary emperor work the same scheme, with the same aim, on yet
another recalcitrant nation unfortunately possessed of a strategic
location and vast energy resources. Even the same sham justification is
being used: the non-existent threat of non-existent weapons of mass
destruction. But why not? As long as the rubes keep falling for this
shtick, the masters of war will keep using it. Cockburn continues:

Visiting Iraq in that first summer of postwar sanctions I found a population stunned by the disaster that was reducing them to a Third World standard
of living. … Doctors, most of them trained in Britain, displayed their
empty dispensaries. Everywhere, people asked when sanctions would be
lifted, assuming that it could only be a matter of months at the most (a
belief initially shared by Saddam). The notion that they would still be
in force a decade later was unimaginable.

The doctors should not have had anything to worry about. Resolution 661 prohibited the sale or supply of any goods to Iraq … with the explicit exception of ‘supplies intended
strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances,
foodstuffs’. However, every single item Iraq sought to import, including
food and medicine, had to be approved by the ’661 Committee’, created
for this purpose and staffed by diplomats from the 15 members of the
Security Council. The committee met in secret and published scarcely any
record of its proceedings. Thanks to the demise of the Soviet Union,
the US now dominated the UN, using it to provide a cloak of legitimacy
for its unilateral actions.

The 661 Committee’s stated purpose was to review and authorise exceptions to the sanctions, but as Gordon explains, its actual function was to deny the import of even the
most innocuous items on the grounds that they might, conceivably, be
used in the production of weapons of mass destruction. An ingenious
provision allowed any committee member to put any item for which
clearance had been requested on hold. So, while other members, even a
majority, might wish to speed goods to Iraq, the US and its ever willing
British partner could and did block whatever they chose on the
flimsiest of excuses. … Thus in the early 1990s the United States
blocked, among other items, salt, water pipes, children’s bikes,
materials used to make nappies, equipment to process powdered milk and
fabric to make clothes. The list would later be expanded to include
switches, sockets, window frames, ceramic tiles and paint.

In 1991 American representatives forcefully argued against permitting Iraq to import powdered milk on the grounds that it did not fulfil a humanitarian need. Later, the
diplomats dutifully argued that an order for child vaccines, deemed
‘suspicious’ by weapons experts in Washington, should be denied.

Throughout the period of sanctions, the United States frustrated Iraq’s attempts to import pumps needed in the plants treating water from the Tigris, which had become an
open sewer thanks to the destruction of treatment plants. Chlorine,
vital for treating a contaminated water supply, was banned on the
grounds that it could be used as a chemical weapon. The consequences of
all this were visible in paediatric wards. Every year the number of
children who died before they reached their first birthday rose, from
one in 30 in 1990 to one in eight seven years later. Health specialists
agreed that contaminated water was responsible: children were especially
susceptible to the gastroenteritis and cholera caused by dirty water.

All very terrible, of course. But what about the UN “Oil for Food” program that was eventually set up to provide a trickle of goods into
Iraq in exchange for some of those coveted energy resources? As Cockburn
notes, while the “invisible war” of sanctions that killed half a
million children is now simply a non-event in the American
consciousness, the Oil for Food “scandal” — Saddam gaming the system to
enrich himself while his people suffered — still looms large for the
apologists for the 2003 war of aggression. This, they say, was the real scandal, not all those dead babies. Cockburn:

Under the terms of the programme, much of the money was immediately siphoned off [by the US-led blockaders] to settle what critics called Kuwait’s
‘implausibly high’ claims for compensation for damage from the 1990
invasion and to pay for the Unscom inspections and other UN
administrative costs in Iraq. Although the arrangement did permit some
improvement in living standards, there was no fundamental change: the UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan reported in November 1997 that despite the
programme, 31 per cent of children under five still suffered from
malnutrition, supplies of safe water and medicine were ‘grossly
inadequate’ and the health infrastructure suffered from ‘exceptionally
serious deterioration’.

It was possible for the Iraqis to wring some pecuniary advantage from the Oil for Food programme by extracting kickbacks from the oil traders whom it favoured with
allocations, as well as from companies, such as wheat traders, from
which it bought supplies. In 2004, as Iraq disintegrated, the ‘Oil for
Food scandal’ was ballyhooed in the US press as ‘the largest rip-off in
history’. Congress, which had maintained a near total silence during the
years of sanctions, now erupted with denunciations of the fallen
dictator’s fraud and deception, which, with alleged UN complicity, had
supposedly been the direct cause of so many deaths.

Gordon puts all this in context. ‘Under the Oil for Food programme, the Iraqi government skimmed about 10 per cent from import contracts and for a brief time received illicit
payments from oil sales. The two combined amounted to about $2 billion …
By contrast, in [the first] 14 months of occupation [after the 2003
invasion], the US-led occupation authority depleted $18 billion in
funds’ – money earned from the sale of oil, most of which disappeared
with little or no accounting and no discernible return to the Iraqi
people. Saddam may have lavished millions on marble palaces (largely
jerry-built, as their subsequent US military occupants discovered) but
his greed paled in comparison to that of his successors.

As we have noted here often before, the Americans and British leaders who imposed the killing sanctions knew very well, for many years, that
Iraq had no WMD at all — or even any WMD development programs.
They knew that by the time of the 2003 invasion, these WMD programmes
(which had once been supported with secret cash, credits and “dual-use
technology” by none other than George Herbert Walker Bush) had been mothballed for 12 years. I was talking about this, in print, back in 2003 — even Newsweek was reporting on it,
just weeks before the war! — but, merely being the truth, there was
really no place for the story in the American political mind, or the
national memory. So Cockburn and Gordon do us good service by detailing
the story again. They also add one of the most damning aspects of the
story: the frantic efforts by Bill Clinton — yes, the good old “Big Dawg” of our modern progressives — to suppress the truth and keep the murderous sanctions, and the drive toward war, going strong:

The economic strangulation of Iraq was justified on the basis of Saddam’s supposed possession of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Year
after year, UN inspectors combed Iraq in search of evidence that these
WMD existed. But after 1991, the first year of inspections, when the
infrastructure of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme was detected and
destroyed, along with missiles and an extensive arsenal of chemical
weapons, nothing more was ever found. Given Saddam’s record of denying
the existence of his nuclear project (his chemical arsenal was well
known; he had used it extensively in the Iran-Iraq war, with US
approval) the inspectors had strong grounds for suspicion, at least
until August 1995. That was when Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and
the former overseer of his weapons programmes, suddenly defected to
Jordan, where he was debriefed by the CIA, MI6 and Unscom. In those
interviews he made it perfectly clear that the entire stock of WMD had
been destroyed in 1991, a confession that his interlocutors, including
the UN inspectors, took great pains to conceal from the outside world.

Nevertheless, by early 1997 Rolf Ekeus had concluded, as he told me many years later, that he must report to the Security Council that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction
and was therefore in compliance with the Council’s resolutions, barring a
few points. He felt bound to recommend that the sanctions should be
lifted. Reports of his intentions threw the Clinton administration into a
panic. The end of sanctions would lay Clinton open to Republican
attacks for letting Saddam off the hook. The problem was solved, Ekeus
explained to me, by getting Madeleine Albright, newly installed as
secretary of state, to declare in a public address on 26 March 1997 that
‘we do not agree with the nations who argue that, if Iraq complies with
its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions
should be lifted.’ The predictable result was that Saddam saw little
further point in co-operating with the inspectors. This provoked an
escalating series of confrontations between the Unscom team and Iraqi
security officials, ending in the expulsion of the inspectors, claims
that Saddam was ‘refusing to disarm’, and, ultimately, war.

There you have it. Clinton did not want the sanctions to end; he did not want to stop throwing the bodies of dead children on the stinking slagheap. As
always, when one supposed “benchmark” has been met — in this case, the
elimination of WMD and WMD programs — the rules are simply changed. We
see this too with Iran. Obama puts forth what is purported to be a major
“diplomatic” solution to have Iran ship its nuclear fuel to Brazil and
Turkey for processing. This was, of course, a hollow gesture, meant to
show how intransigent and untrustworthy Iran really is; the nuke-hungry
mullahs would naturally reject the deal. But when Iran made an
agreement with Brazil to do exactly what Obama requested,
this was immediately denounced — by Obama — as …. a demonstration of
how intransigent and untrustworthy Iran really is. Meet a benchmark, and
the masters simply change the rules. That’s how it works until they get
what they want: regime change in strategic lands laden with natural
resources.

Cockburn points out another effect of sanctions that is almost always overlooked:

Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq who resigned in 1998 in protest at what he called the ‘genocidal’ sanctions regime,
described at that time its more insidious effects on Iraqi society. An
entire generation of young people had grown up in isolation from the
outside world. He compared them, ominously, to the orphans of the
Russian war in Afghanistan who later formed the Taliban. ‘What should be
of concern is the possibility at least of more fundamentalist Islamic
thinking developing,’ Halliday warned. ‘It is not well understood as a
possible spin-off of the sanctions regime. We are pushing people to take
extreme positions.’ This was the society US and British armies
confronted in 2003: impoverished, extremist and angry. As they count the
losses they have sustained from roadside bombs and suicide attacks, the
West should think carefully before once again deploying the ‘perfect
instrument’ of a blockade.

But of course, as we’ve often noted here, this seems to be exactly what they want: a steady supply of extremists who can be relied upon to keep
stoking the profitable fires of Terror War: flames which in turn feed
the monstrous engines of the War Machine and its Security offshoot –
both of which long ago devoured the remnants of the American republic,
and are now metastasizing with dizzying speed, almost beyond human
comprehension.

Dead children. Thousands of dead children. The mountain, the slagheap gets higher and higher. And still the people sleep ….

This article originally appeared on Empire Burlesque..