Genocide and the West. posted by Richard Seymour

As a judicious arbiter of fact and a consensus-builder, I'd like to start with something obvious: Saddam Hussein was a ruthless and cruel man, the quality of whose mercy was, alas, not strained. And about him we could say that he presided over a regime which killed or disappeared, on a widely circulated estimate by Human Rights Watch, up to 300,000 people over 24 years. That includes the toll from the Anfal campaign, successive wars, executions and the suppression of the 1991 uprising. Some of these crimes, particularly Anfal, have been described as genocide, and those that were not external wars ruthlessly crushed internal uprisings and dissent. There is an obvious correlation between Saddam's determination to, as he saw it, preserve the Iraqi nation-state and the crimes that he oversaw. (See for instance Faleh A Jabar, The Shiite Movement in Iraq, 2005, pp 225-6). So, aside from the testimonial and other forms of data accrued by human rights organisations, there is means, motive and ample opportunity. So much is hardly controversial, even if details are disputed.

Before the Iraq war began, and immediately after, there was a great deal of utilitarian-style babble: the war would kill people, lots of people, but possibly not as many as Saddam himself killed. On Question Time, April 10th 2003, Digby Jones of the CBI claimed that Saddam had killed 3 million people and with that declared any cost-benefit analysis of the war conclusively won. He was at least 2,700,000 out: perhaps he was thinking of his share options windfall. Shortly after, on April 17th, Timothy Garton Ash wrote "The cold moral calculus of reckoning victim numbers against each other always feels inhuman: more than 100,000 Kurds killed by Saddam against perhaps as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilian casualties in this war, past v present, actual v potential, gulag v holocaust." He added, as if we had not thought of it already, that "War is always horrible". Andrew Rawnsley wrote: "Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short. The death toll has been nothing like as high as had been widely feared. Thousands have died in this war; millions have died at the hands of Saddam." While Saddam had "killing fields" "millions" of deaths, and "atrocities" to answer for, the West had only a war which was unavoidably "horrible" yet also redeemed by its conclusion. Marr famously concluded that the Prime Minister had proven his critics wrong and miraculously inflated in stature. John Irvine beamed on ITN that the war had ended "three decades of misery" for the Iraqi people. A massive war crime had been committed, yet the hardest journalistic heart could not fail to be moved by the arrival of US troops in Baghdad.

I think it is safe to say that few of the journalists who were so slap-happy to see the troops and so vicariously outraged about Saddam's crimes will ever evince a similar outrage about the mass murder currently being perpetrated in Iraq. As of October 2004, 100,000 on a conservative estimate. Since then, another deadly assault on Fallujah, then Tal Afar, al-Qaim, Haditha and Ramadi. The deliberate targetting of hospitals, the shutting off of water supplies and electricity. The strangling of medical supplies. And the escalation in air strikes which are taking a toll on civilians, the torture, the deployment of death squads with cordless drills. Perhaps, now, as many as 500,000 dead. General Michael Rose is right: Blair should be impeached.

But I want to return to a prior genocide, one that is usually forgotten or mislaid or misrepresented. It is sometimes, craftily enough, deployed as a justification for the present one. The UN imposed sanctions on Iraq throught Resolution 687 after the first Gulf War ended in 1991. The resolution's primary sponsors, of course, were the US and UK. They were aware of the likely consequences of imposing such a regime: a January 22nd 1991 from the Defense Intelligence Agency entitled Iraq's Water Treatment Vulnerabilities describes how Iraq's water treatment system had already been degraded by war and sanctions, and how it would degrade completely if sanctions continued to be imposed. Subsequent documents described the outbreak of diseases due to poor sanitary conditions, the breakdown of ordinary medicine, the destruction of electricity plants and the absence of clean water. (See documents here, here, here and here).

The sanctions were therefore imposed with some foreknowledge of their likely effects. In 1995, researchers for the FAO wrote that as a result of the application of sanctions, 576,000 children had died. It was shortly after this, on CBS's 60 Minutes programme, that Madeleine Albright made her cold statement that "the price, we think, is worth it". This figure may in fact have been an overestimate at the time, but the reaction bears examination: Albright showed no surprise at the figures, and in fact managed to make a rather rapid accomodation to the apparent scale of catastrophe. Subsequent studies by Richard Garfield suggested that between 1990 and 1998, a total of 227,000 Iraqi children perished as a result of the sanctions. Combining his research with that by Mohammed Ali and Iqbal Shah for the Lancet, he calculated that as of 2000, the figure was 350,000 excess deaths among children under five years old. This was a remarkable infanticide. As Garfield notes "the is almost no documented case of rising mortality for children under five years in the modern world".

The sanctions created shortage, decreased access to food, stagnated the economy and made it almost impossible to rebuild what had been, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, "one of the most modern" infrastructures with one of the "highest standards of living" in the Middle East. The war had wrecked flood control and power generation, bombs had hit twenty-eight civilian hospitals and destroyed four of the major water-pumping stations, not to mention destroying the communications system, fertiliser plants, oil facilities, bridges and iron and steel plants. The targeting and subsequent sanctions were designed to render Iraq dependent on the West. (See Abbas Alnasrawi 'Economic devastation, underdevelopment and outlook', in Fran Hazleton (ed), Iraq Since the Gulf War: Prospects for Democracy, Z Books, 1994).

It was argued in the late 1990s and in the run up to war that the sanctions were no longer to blame for any deaths: "oil for food" had fixed everything, and if any more suffering visited the Iraqi people it was entirely Saddam's fault. Blair pushed this line repeatedly, telling a doubtless nodding Kamal Ahmad in 2001: "The truth is Saddam Hussein could perfectly easily give his people the money that they need for food and medicine. He's not doing it because he needs them to believe that the reason why they're starving and have difficulties is because of the United States and Britain." In 2000, Hain claimed that although the oil-for-food programme had been put in place, the Iraqi people had not seen the benefits they should have: the dictator was squandering it on palaces and such. Indeed, when the oil-for-food programme was first introduced, the BBC's Ben Brown was on the case, explaining that malnutrition and mass death had been "a powerful propaganda weapon" for Saddam Hussein that he would now have to "give up".


Powerful propaganda weapons.

However, the UN's humanitarian panel reported in 1999 that "the 'oil for food' system alone would not suffice and massive investment would be required in a number of key sectors, including oil, energy, agriculture and sanitation" in order for Iraq to recover. Oil for food, they said, "can admittedly only meet but a small fraction of the priority needs of the Iraqi people". According to Denis Halliday, who resigned over the continuing effects of sanctions, "it wasn’t designed to work; it’s not funded to work; it’s strangled by the Sanctions Committee of the Security Council". Asked about whether the money should have been enough, Halliday replied: "Of the $20 billion that has been provided through the ‘oil for food’ programme, about a third, or $7 billion, has been spent on UN ’expenses’, reparations to Kuwait and assorted compensation claims. That leaves $13 billion available to the Iraqi government. If you divide that figure by the population of Iraq, which is 22 million, it leave some $190 per head of population per year over 3 years – that is pitifully inadequate". Was the regime diverting most of the money anyway? "There’s no basis for that assertion at all." Two years after Halliday resigned, Hans von Sponeck resigned, asking "For how long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent on all this, be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?"

And, predictably, the deaths continued. In 1999, Denis Halliday wrote: "Even the most conservative, independent estimates hold economic sanctions responsible for a public health catastrophe of epic proportions. The World Health Organization believes at least 5,000 children under the age of 5 die each month from lack of access to food, medicine and clean water. Malnutrition, disease, poverty and premature death now ravage a once relatively prosperous society whose public health system was the envy of the Middle East." In the same year, UNICEF calculated that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions. The reaction was curiously indifferent: hostile even, in some quarters. John Sweeney made a 2003 documentary, "The Mother of All Ironies", claiming on the basis of utterly spurious evidence that Saddam Hussein himself was behind the statistics and that more than enough money had been provided. I asked him why he had said this, and he replied: "On the UNICEF figures, if a government tortures children - and Saddam's does - then is it impossible to imagine that it doesn't torture figures? The raw data came from the Iraqi Ministry of Health." This was a straightforward fabrication. The figures were gathered by UNICEF who went out into Iraqi communities and households and conducted their own tests. They had, inevitably, to seek the cooperation of the Ministry of Health, but the data analysis was theirs and theirs alone. Of course, to accept the extensively documented fact of this genocide is to undermine completely any putative humanitarian logic behind the war. As Scott Ritter put it: "The concept of us trying to save the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein is ludicrous. He is a brutal dictator. He may torture to death 1,800 people a year. That’s terrible and unacceptable. But we kill 6,000 a month. Let’s put that on a scale."

Here's a curious thing, however. According to UNICEF, between 1999 and 2002, there was some mild improvement in child mortality - from 130 per thousand live births to 125 per thousand. However, "since the war, there are several indications that under-five mortality continued to rise". They explained to MediaLens, "Since the war more children in Iraq are malnourished, fewer children are protected from immunisable diseases and there has been an increase in the incidence of diarrhoeal disease." The occupation had renewed the infanticide, despite the ending of sanctions. One mass murder flows into another, and with dreary predictability the media and government apologists find reasons to dismiss the abundant evidence for it, or ignore it. The sheer scale of what has been done to Iraq - the destruction of its economy and infrastructure, the repeated bombings, the sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands, the war that has killed further hundreds of thousands, the escalation that now threatens to kill even more - simply defies superlative. Yet it is borne with utter equanimity by those who profess to have been daily concerned with the freedom and integrity of Iraqis.

If one thing compels itself with brutal clarity, it is that we are not entitled to consider genocide as something pathologically external or alien: it is absolutely part of the rule of capitalism and its system of competing nation-states. The word should haunt the discourse of liberal imperialists, who happily use it to describe the actions of official enemies, yet miss it when it is right in front of them.