Sunday, July 13, 2008
Opinion
The real link between Iraq and Sept. 11
I do not want my government to plant any more crops like the one Clinton planted in Iraq in the ’90s, one that we reaped on Sept. 11, 2001 and continue to reap to this day.
An Iraqi child (left) looks on at a playground next to a highway overpass in Baghdad.
ALI YUSSEF/AFP/Getty Images
By Stephanie Ramage
As violence in Iraq reaches its lowest level in four years, according to a recent Pentagon report, and we quite admirably vow “no more war,” it’s important that we learn from the mistakes of the past.
It is well established that the United States put Saddam Hussein in place. Furthermore, beginning in 1990, a lengthy series of lackadaisical motions and resolutions passed in the United Nations shows a world content to sit by and allow Hussein to commit horrific crimes against his own people. Then, in an act of good intent that had devastating consequences, President Bill Clinton, with the guidance of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, led the U.N. in placing harsh economic sanctions against Iraq.
There are a few things to know about such sanctions: First, they have no effect whatsoever on the rich and powerful. The U.S. has levied sanctions against Cuba since the ’60s, but Fidel Castro never missed a meal, a vaccination or a tank of gas. Anywhere one goes in the world, regardless of a country’s religious character or type of government, the wealthy and powerful will always be able to get the things they want and will never do without the things they need.
The poor, on the other hand, go hungry. They contract diseases as a result of malnutrition. They do not have access to vaccines or even, in some cases, the most basic medical supplies. And as they suffer, their empty bellies groaning with the ache of hunger, and as they watch the light in their children’s eyes go out, their government officials, fat with black market goods, feed them a steady diet of propaganda. They are given a steaming platter of excuses, all implicating the policies of the U.S. And so a generation grows up on this poison, believing that we are the Great Satan.
By 1995, a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report showed that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5 had died as a result of the U.S.-led sanctions.
On May 12, 1996, on “60 Minutes,” Lesley Stahl asked U.S. Secretary of State Albright, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
And Albright famously replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”
The “we” was herself and President Clinton.
After Sept. 11, 2001, with President George W. Bush having been sworn into office in January of that year, Americans didn’t want to talk about the sanctions. As noted in a December 2001 article published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR, not to be confused with the anti-immigration group of the same acronym): “a Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources since September 11 turns up only one reference to the [Albright] quote—an op-ed in the Orange Country Register (9/16/01). This omission is striking, given the major role that Iraq sanctions play in the ideology of archenemy Osama bin Laden; his recruitment video features pictures of Iraqi babies wasting away from malnutrition and lack of medicine.”
Much of Iraq’s water treatment system was destroyed in the Persian Gulf War. Shortly after that, Clinton—and his U.N. allies—placed restrictions on chlorine to Iraq. As the reporting accuracy group wrote, “Combine this with harsh and arbitrary restrictions on medicines, the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities, and the fact that, until this summer, vaccines for common infectious diseases were on the so-called ‘1051 list’ of substances in practice banned from entering Iraq. Deliberately creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment is little different morally from deliberately introducing a disease-causing organism like anthrax, but no major U.S. paper seems to have editorialized against the U.S. engaging in biological warfare …”
To mention any of that in the wake of Sept. 11 was to seem un-American.
What was the link between Iraq and Sept. 11? In the American-led U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq, President Bill Clinton handed Osama Bin Laden a flawless recruiting tool. How could anyone defend intentionally starving children or denying them medicine? And yet Albright, with the authority given her by Clinton, did exactly that.
Many Americans—Democrats and Republicans, soldiers, aid workers, teachers, diplomats and others—have put themselves at great risk in Iraq to fulfill our obligation to help that country recover from the wrongs we inflicted on it beginning more than 16 years ago. Thousands of those Americans have given their lives in fulfilling their duties.
And yet, even now, as Iraq is beginning to regain its health, and unrest threatens to unravel fragile peace in other areas of the world, many of the anti-war crowd talk glowingly of economic sanctions, as though governments going to war against children is more moral than soldiers going to war against insurgents or armies. Such economic sanctions plant bitter crops that later generations reap. I do not want my government to plant anymore crops like the one Clinton planted in Iraq in the ’90s, one that we reaped on Sept. 11, 2001 and continue to reap to this day. SP