By Steve Painter
A year after the Gulf War, the United Nations embargo against Iraq remains in place, with Australian warships helping to enforce it. As a result, most Iraqis have spent the past 12 months living amid a catastrophe even worse than the bombing of January-February 1991.
While about 4500 civilians are believed to have died in the bombing, some 90,000 have been killed by disease and food and medical shortages resulting from war damage and the embargo. Even Saddam Hussein's postwar repressions against the Shia and the Kurds did not claim as many casualties as the embargo.
Despite United Nations claims that it has approved food sales to Iraq, very little has reached the country because Iraq can't pay for it. The embargo prevents all but a trickle of the oil sales vital to the Iraqi economy. An Australian grain deal collapsed because Iraq couldn't raise the cash, either for the deal or for past debts.
Other consequences of the embargo include an extreme shortage of medical supplies and prices of some staples such as rice running at more than 1000% of their August 1990 level. As well, due to war damage 15 million gallons of raw sewage an hour pours into the Tigris at Baghdad, typhoid rages in some areas, and infant mortality has more than doubled in a middle-class quarter of Baghdad and is much higher in poorer areas.
"Iraq was not bombed back into the stone age", writes Doug Lummis of the English-language Japanese magazine Ampo, a recent visitor to Iraq with a fact-finding Citizens' Task Force. "It was bombed, and is being embargoed, back into the Third World. Deep, deep back into the Third World, which it had the audacity to raise itself out from with oil money. Oil money was used to provide the country with an advanced technological and industrial infrastructure. This is precisely what the smart bombs were programmed to pulverise. Oil money was used to provide the people with a relatively high minimum standard of living. This is precisely what the embargo is driving down. Oil money had brought the Iraqi people a relative sense of self-sufficiency. This is precisely what must be got rid of to bring Iraq into George Bush's new world order ...
"The society is not in a state of disaster, but it stands at the edge of disaster. Machinery that has been barely put back into operation by resourceful mechanics and engineers is bound to break down again soon. Families feeding themselves by selling their household goods will soon run out of things to sell — if they do not run out of buyers first. Presumably the government will not be able to maintain even its minimum ration system indefinitely. When all these temporary expedients have been exhausted the society will fall not into general starvation, but selective starvation. The poor will starve and the rich will, as the rich always do, find ways to make money out of the poor's starvation. The free/black market will boom, and prosperous disaster relief and aid experts will crowd Baghdad's five-star hotels. Iraq, in short, will be returned to the state of full-fledged Third World dependent economy." Bill Arkin, a Greenpeace USA military expert, also visited Iraq recently with a team from the Harvard/International Study Group. He estimates that as many as 90,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war and its aftermath. "Most of the civilians died after the shooting had stopped", says Greenpeace's Jean McSorley.
It seems the war and its aftermath have claimed more civilian than military casualties. While estimates of the number of military deaths vary wildly, David Evans, military correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, wrote recently that the military estimates of "100,000-200,000 Iraqi military dead" seem to be complete guesswork and a figure of 25,000 is more likely.
Bill Arkin confirmed earlier reports that 90% of Iraq's electrical power generation capacity was destroyed by the bombing, causing severe disruption to clean water supplies, refrigeration and public sanitation. As late as August 1991, only half the prewar power supply was available. Disruption of transportation and communications had also contributed to shortages of food and medical supplies.
Meanwhile, the US-UN forces have beaten up Iraq's supposed nuclear capacity into a propaganda campaign to help justify the continuing embargo. Confrontations with Iraqi officials appear to have been manufactured. Alexander Cockburn, writing for the US magazine, The Nation, reports one such incident last September:
"David Kay, head of a UN team of inspectors, investigating Iraq's nuclear secrets, had a standoff with Iraqi security people in a parking lot in Baghdad. The image successfully conveyed was of Steve Squarejaw facing down the mendacious wog. But British and American journalists in Baghdad later confided that on the relevant day, Kay's PR man summoned TV crews to the top floor of a hotel and directed them to point their cameras at an adjacent parking lot. Three quarters of an hour later their patience was rewarded when Kay and his men came scuttling out of the ministry where they had been photocopying documents and began the much-advertised confrontation. Non-US inspectors on the team said they were a bit astonished at Kay's action because the Iraqis had been placing no impediment in their path. In other words the whole affair was carefully staged, allowing the tractable US media to bellow that at last Saddam's nuclear plans had been torn from their secret hiding places. This must have been the fiftieth time that the 'proofs' of these plans were triumphantly disclosed."
Some myths about the war itself have also taken a beating in the past year. In the January 10 New Statesman/Society, Cockburn writes: "The high-tech nature of the war was much exaggerated. The Patriot anti-missile missiles performed very poorly. An Israeli intelligence general has claimed that not a single Iraqi Scud missile emplacement was destroyed through air attack ... and officers involved in the ground assault reckoned that as little as 15% of the hulks of Iraqi weaponry had been destroyed from the air."
Meanwhile, more than 40 members of the US military are still in jail for refusing to serve in the Gulf. Some have received sentences of up to five years; others have suffered beatings, official persecution and assignment to humiliating work details. One young objector in Pennsylvania suffered serious razor cuts to his head while being held down by several Marines who were supposedly giving him a regulation
Amnesty International has adopted 29 of the imprisoned personnel as prisoners of conscience, including Marine lance corporal Eric Larsen, who initially faced a possible death sentence, captain Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, who addressed many antiwar protests, and Enrique Gonzales, one of Amnesty's worldwide prisoners of the month last October.
While the military authorities say they are simply enforcing military discipline with no political motives, military personnel who went absent for personal reasons during the Gulf War have received minimal punishment. The most severe penalties have been imposed on personnel based in Germany, where possibilities for mobilising public support are more limited.