January 5, 2007
By Bert Sacks
Bert Sacks has visited Iraq 9 times since 1996. Below are two recent op-eds by Bert.
“Imagine if a U.S. cruise missile were to land on a kindergarten and kill 165 children. Imagine now that it was launched knowing it would hit that kindergarten, and further, that one of these missiles was launched at a different kindergarten every day for a month. That’s 5,000 children.
“To kill that many children as a matter of state policy would be unspeakable. The American commander in chief would be condemned as a barbarian. And yet, that is what the economic embargo of Iraq has done.”
This is from a Seattle Times editorial six years ago. For ten years I have wanted to ask one very basic question: Not were the sanctions barbaric. But were the sanctions legal? Could the U.S cause the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children every month for years and do so legally?
I will finally get a chance to ask this of the U.S. Supreme Court in a petition I’ll file this month.
I need to show what deaths occurred and why: UNICEF reported “there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five [in Iraq] during the eight year period 1991 to 1998.” The New England Journal of Medicine explained: “The [Gulf War] destruction of the country’s power plants had brought its entire system of water purification and distribution to a halt, leading to epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, and gastroenteritis, particularly among children.”
In 2004, Robert Fisk (British International Journalist of the Year seven times) put it this way: “In other words, the United States and Britain … were well aware that the principal result of the bombing campaign—and of sanctions—would be the physical degradation and sickening and deaths of Iraqi civilians. Biological warfare might prove to be a better description. The ultimate nature of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraqi civilians now became clear. Bomb now: die later.”
Did U.S. officials intend this or understand it’d occur as a result of U.S. policies? In 1991, USAF Colonel Warden (called the architect of the Gulf Air War) said we bombed Iraq’s electrical plants for “long-term leverage.” Another Pentagon bombing planner stated more candidly: “People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.’ Well, what were we trying to do with [UN economic] sanctions – help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of sanctions.”
In 1998, Senator Craig of Idaho testified in a Senate hearing on Iraq sanctions: “The use of food as a weapon is wrong. Starving populations into submission is poor foreign policy.” In 1996, Madeleine Albright famously said on national TV that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth the price”—but that no child would have died if Saddam just complied with the UN. But she contradicted her own position and Secretary of State Baker in 1991 when he informed Congress, “UN sanctions [would stay] in place so long as Saddam remains in power.”
No one can say that our government officials didn’t know what their policies were doing.
In 1997, I traveled to Iraq to deliver medicine to desperately needy civilians. In response, the U.S. government fined me $10,000. I announced I’d refuse to pay the fine. Several Seattle attorneys offered pro bono support. Our case began in district court and then to appeals court.
Despite widespread notions to the contrary, it was not hard to show that U.S. policies lethally targeted civilians, using famine and epidemic as tools of coercion, violating international law.
But the courts declined to invalidate the U.S. embargo. According to the trial court, provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child didn’t count because the U.S. (along with Somalia) hasn’t ratified it. The Geneva Convention is not “self-executing” so it doesn’t help me! And the Genocide Convention, which was partially ratified, created no “substantive or procedural right enforceable by law by any party in any proceeding.” Finally, the court ruled, if Congress wants to violate customary international law it may do so and the U.S. courts are powerless to stop it.
I hope the Supreme Court will decide otherwise. The issue is simple: there are certain norms of international behavior—often called ‘jus cogens’—that are so fundamental to the rule of law that no nation may violate them. Genocide, wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are among them. So is the killing of 500,000 children to coerce a foreign government.
Bert Sacks, who lives in Seattle, has been fined $10,000 by the U.S. government after going to Iraq to distribute medicine; Sacks has refused to pay any fines. More of his writings are at: bertoniraq.blogspot.com.
Can You Imagine
by Bert Sacks
“Can you imagine …”
With these words, Israeli author Amos Oz offers the beginning of an answer to his query, “How to cure a fanatic” (the title of his newest book).
“I can’t help thinking,” he writes, “that with a slight twist of my genes, or of my parents’ circumstances, I could be him or her, I could be a Jewish West Bank settler, I could be an ultra-orthodox extremist, I could be an oriental Jew from a Third World country; I could be anyone. I could be one of my enemies.”
“Imagining the other is a moral imperative.” Maybe it’s the hardest work we can do.
With the recent power outages around Seattle, we’ve been given a chance to do just that. In a very small way we might begin to imagine being an Iraqi over the past 16 years.
During my nine trips to Iraq, there were always electrical outages. On my first trip in 1996 we slept in a hotel with no electricity and kerosene lamps.
L. Paul Bremer said Iraq’s electricity problems were caused by 30 years of neglect. This might make us feel good, but it is not the truth. In 1990 Iraq had a modern electrical grid.
The Washington Post told us about Iraq after the Gulf War: “The worst civilian suffering, senior [American] officers say, has resulted not from bombs that went astray but from precision-guided weapons that hit exactly where they were aimed – at electrical plants …. Now nearly four months after the war’s end, Iraq’s electrical generation has reached only 20 to 25 percent of its prewar capacity of 9,000 to 9,500 megawatts. Pentagon analysts calculate that the country has roughly the generating capacity it had in 1920 – before reliance on refrigeration and sewage treatment became widespread.”
Can you imagine you are an Iraqi? One family told me they had no electricity for six months in 1991. Years later they still suffered power brownouts for hours every day.
I experienced this one summer in Basra in 2000, where the temperature was around 120 degrees. We sat around the living room floor in a poor family’s home. At six o’clock it was their turn to get electricity and the ceiling fan began to turn. One of the Iraqis looked up and said, sarcastically, “Thank you, George Bush!”
Of course their refrigerator was of no use under those conditions.
Why did we attack Iraq’s electricity? The architect of the air war, USAF Colonel John Warden, said it gave us “long-term leverage”! He also said, “we hold direct attacks on civilians to be morally reprehensible.” So, he said, we should attack civilians indirectly.
USAF Colonel Kenneth Rizer explained the indirect attacks: “destruction of these [electrical] facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths.” He concluded this was a smart and legal strategy because it “targeted civilian morale” – but did so “indirectly.”
According to reports in New England Journal of Medicine and UNICEF, Colonel Rizer’s estimate of civilian deaths is ten times too low. But his reasons for the deaths are correct: no electricity means no way to process water or sewage; no way to refrigerate medicine and food; no way to power hospitals or incubators; no way even to communicate needs.
Colonel Warden wrote, “We are struck by the fact that the physical side of the enemy is, in theory, perfectly knowable and predictable. Conversely, the morale side — the human side — is beyond the realm of the predictable in a particular situation because humans are so different from each other.”
But are we really?! How would anyone in any country feel to be denied electricity for years as a tool of coercion? If we can’t imagine ourselves as Iraqis, what will happen?
Almost 40 years ago in his Riverside Church address, Dr. King said, “Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese …. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat.”
Although we still do not realize it, we laid the groundwork for our defeat in Iraq by bombing Iraq’s electrical plants and re-imposing sanctions in 1991. It was a failure to practice Amos Oz’ advice: to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the other, of the Iraqis.
Bert Sacks, who lives in Seattle, has been fined $10,000 by the U.S. government after going to Iraq to distribute medicine; Sacks has refused to pay any fines. More of his writings are at: bertoniraq.blogspot.com.
