It's the Policy [, Stupid]

"We have literally caused the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of innocent Iraqis in the name of supporting
U.N. resolutions, while we have never applied any
pressure whatsoever on Israel to comply with U.N.
resolutions. I think any fair-minded American can see
that the Arab public has a point. Our support of Israel
makes liars out of us when we talk about international
law or human rights, for Israel is in flagrant violation of
international law and has committed massive
human-rights abuses of the Palestinians."

Saddam in the Sanctions?

Ever hear of humanitarian relief?

Where did all the money go?

Despite the severe inadequacy of the permitted oil revenue to meet the minimum needs of the Iraqi people, 30 cents (now 25) of each dollar that Iraqi oil earned from 1996 to 2000 were diverted by the UN security council, at the behest of the UK and US governments, to compensate outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. If this money had been made available to Iraqis, it could have saved many lives.

The uncomfortable truth is that the west is holding the Iraqi people hostage, in order to secure Saddam Hussein's compliance to ever-shifting demands. The UN secretary-general, who would like to be a mediator, has repeatedly been prevented from taking this role by the US and the UK governments.

The imprecision of UN resolutions on Iraq - "constructive ambiguity" as the US and UK define it - is seen by those governments as a useful tool when dealing with this kind of conflict. The US and UK dismiss criticism by pointing out that the Iraqi people are being punished by Baghdad. If this is true, why do we punish them further?

The most recent report of the UN secretary-general, in October 2001, says that the US and UK governments' blocking of $4bn of humanitarian supplies [meaning they paid for it but we refused to send them what they payed for] is by far the greatest constraint on the implementation of the oil-for-food program The report says that, in contrast, the Iraqi government's distribution of humanitarian supplies is fully satisfactory (as it was when we headed this program). The death of some 5-6,000 children a month is mostly due to contaminated water, lack of medicines and malnutrition. The US and UK governments' delayed clearance of equipment and materials is responsible for this tragedy, not Baghdad.

-- Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday; both of them were senior UN officials who resigned from the UN in protest over policies they considered and publicly called GENOCIDE against Iraqi civilians.

Actually, it's OUR complicity because our government is doing this in my name, your name, and all Americans' names...

You may not know about it, because our media tries to keep us in the dark, but believe me, people around the world see the images of dying Iraqi children and Palestinians under the boot of Israelis and blame us for it -- with much justification.

A CALL TO ACTION ON SANCTIONS AND THE U.S.
WAR AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ

Signers Include: Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman,
Edward Said, and Howard Zinn

At the end of 1998, the United States once again rained bombs on the people of Iraq. But even when the bombs stop falling, the U.S. war against the people of Iraq continues through the harsh economic sanctions. This is a call to action to end all the war.

This month U.S. policy will kill 4,500 children under the age of 5 in Iraq, according to UN studies, just as it did last month and the month before that, all the way back to 1991. Since the end of the Gulf War, at least hundreds of thousands -- maybe more than 1 million -- Iraqis have died as a direct result of the UN sanctions on Iraq, which are a direct result of U.S. policy.

This is not foreign policy -- it is sanctioned mass-murder that is nearing holocaust proportions. If we remain silent, we are condoning a genocide that is being perpetrated in the name of peace in the Middle East, a mass slaughter that is being perpetrated in our name.

The time has come for a call to action to people of conscience. We are past the point where silence is passive consent -- when a crime reaches these proportions, silence is complicity. There are several tasks ahead of us.

First, we must organize and make this issue a priority, just as Americans organized to stop the war in Vietnam, and to protest U.S. policies in Central America and South Africa. We need a national campaign to lift the sanctions.

This kind of work has already begun, and those efforts need our help. For the past several years, individuals and groups have been delivering medicine and other supplies to Iraq in defiance of the U.S. blockade. Now, members of one of those groups, Voices in the Wilderness in Chicago, have been threatened with massive fines by the federal government for "exportation of donated goods, including medical supplies and toys, to Iraq absent specific prior authorization." Our government is harassing a peace group that takes medicine and toys to dying children; we owe these courageous activists our support.

Such a campaign is not equivalent to support for the regime of Saddam Hussein. To oppose the sanctions is to support the Iraqi people. The people are suffering because of the actions of both the Iraqi and U.S. governments, but our moral responsibility lies here in the United States, to counter the hypocrisy and inhumanity of our leaders.

Also, there has been a virtual embargo on news of the effects of the sanctions in the mainstream media. For the most part, the American people do not know what evil is being carried out in our name. We must continue to apply pressure on journalists at all levels -- from our local papers to the network news -- to cover this tragedy. We should overwhelm the major press with letters to the editor and put pressure on journalists to cover the story.

And we must realize this could be a long struggle. Preparations should begin for all the possible strategies, including civil disobedience once a sufficient number of people are committed. Direct action that forces a moral accounting likely is going to be necessary.

Whatever else we are doing, we should treat this as an emergency and put it at the top of our agenda. Existing groups can work on the issue, new groups may need to be formed, and national networks need to be built. A good central source of information exists on the web at http://leb.net/IAC/.

Without action by us, the horrors will go on, the children will continue to die. We must appeal to the natural sympathies of the American people, who will respond if they know what is happening. We must therefore bring this issue, in every way we can, to national attention. The only way to avoid complicity in this crime is to do everything we can, and much more than we have been doing, to end the sanctions on Iraq. This issue must be discussed in every household and every public forum across the country.

The New Republic's Peter Beinart does a nice job debunking the notion that a prospective war in Iraq is "about oil":

If all the Bush administration wanted from Iraq were those six million daily barrels of crude--if all its talk about nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons was merely a smoke screen--why wouldn't the United States simply lift sanctions? Attacking Saddam, after all, entails huge financial costs, risks American lives, and could prompt civil war in precisely those parts of Iraq where oil companies want to drill. Lifting sanctions would far more easily produce the same result--since it is sanctions that have partially prevented Iraq from importing the equipment that it needs to boost oil production. Saddam has made it clear that he'd love to pump more oil--if the world would let him use the revenue to buy palaces and Scuds. In 1995, for instance, Baghdad announced that if sanctions were lifted it would enter into agreements with foreign oil companies aimed at boosting production to between six and seven million barrels per day--roughly the same amount analysts envision under a post-Saddam regime.

http://www.tnr.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20021007&s=trb100702

National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg shoots down more antiwar arguments, including "We helped Saddam in the 1980s," "The Arab street will be mad at us," and "We have to solve the Israel-Palestine problem first. His rebuttals are familiar enough, but it's handy to have them all in one place.

http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg100102.asp

It's not that the US wants the oil itself. The US wants to control the oil, because in doing so they have leverage over all industrialized economies.

it's about Saddam bin Laden's Islamo-Fascist minions and their hatred for freedom! Anybody who suggests oil plays a part in the war on terror, is an insane and potentially dangerous conspiracy theorist, and should be reported to the Homeland Security's Mental Hygiene Task Force so they can be evaluated and treated before they harm themselves or others.