Letters

Wither Iraqi Sanctions?

I was impressed with Matt Welch's "The Politics of Dead Children" (March). It convincingly demonstrated the real impact of sanctions and deserves to set the tone for all coverage going forward. However, it also left me with some unanswered questions. For instance, I am not persuaded that we should lift sanctions on Iraq.

Don't get me wrong. I am glad we are "engaging" China. I think we should lift the sanctions on Fidel Castro too, and let markets render him irrelevant. But is it fair to argue, as Welch seems to, that sanctions never work?

Those who advocated sanctions on South Africa were apparently vindicated when the apartheid regime was overturned. If I had been involved in the debate, I probably would have argued then that we should "engage" South Africa (as reason did), but I'm a results-oriented guy. If I'm honest, I have to acknowledge that sanctions seemed to work in that case.

But there's another point to consider. What impact -- if any -- do sanctions have on Saddam Hussein's ability to build weapons of mass destruction and threaten America? If sanctions kill Iraqi babies but save American ones, I'll bet most Americans would accept the trade. It's a cruel but indisputable truth. Ask just about any American. They'd say: Better their dead babies than ours.

Of course, one could argue that there is no connection between sanctions and military affairs. In fact, you could argue that sanctions make rogue nations more hostile and more dangerous. But observe what happened when the Soviets realized that their "self-imposed economic sanctions" -- which is one way of looking at the autarkic economic system they had created -- were undermining their ability to keep up with America's technological sophistication. They allowed the Berlin Wall to fall.

Yes, the embargo has certainly been a propaganda bonanza for Saddam and America's enemies. But has it truly been "ineffective"? I am not convinced.

Britton Manasco
Austin, TX

Matt Welch writes, "There have been no weapons inspectors in Iraq since 1998. As a result it is exceptionally difficult to know with precision what nuclear or biological weapons Saddam has on hand or in development."

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which polices the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has just returned from its annual inspection of Iraq. It said there has been no change in the status of the fissile material Iraq had acquired for use in its nuclear power plant. There has been no evidence Iraq has acquired additional amounts. If it had a nuclear weapons program, it would be identifiable by spy satellite, as it requires enormous amounts of electrical power to run the cyclotrons.

Welch is right about chemical-biological warfare, but as Rumsfeld himself acknowledges, chem-bio can be produced in such small, undetectable places that it was always foolish to think U.N. inspectors could find them if they did exist. All weapons "found" by the United Nations were identified by November 1991, and the Iraqi government took the inspectors to the places where they had been destroyed.

In any case, the number of Iraqi civilians who have died since the Gulf War, under 5 or over 5 years of age, is enormous. U.S. policy intends to make the Iraqi people suffer so much that they overthrow Saddam Hussein. Our political establishment and the major media that do its bidding have known and supported this evil policy all along. There's your story, but don't bother trying to get it published where anyone will see it.

The exact number of dead children is unimportant when set against Madeleine Albright's stupid remark about it being worth the deaths of 500,000 children to contain Saddam. Since that went into global circulation, it has been a waste of time for reporters to fuss about the exact number. The reporting on Iraq by our press corps has been scandalous, and 9/11 is the price we have paid. So far.

Jude Wanniski
Polyconomics.com

First, it should be noted that I voted for George Bush, the Elder -- once. I also voted for his son. As a veteran of five years of service with the 1st Cavalry Division, the 7th Infantry Division, and the XVIII Airborne Corps, I am no peacenik. That said, the establishment's manic efforts to whip up war hysteria are nauseating, and Welch's attempt to minimize the impact of U.S. policy on Iraqi civilians is disingenuous.

The fact is that George Herbert Walker Bush manufactured Desert Storm in a doomed attempt to rescue his administration from the political consequences of his tax flip-flop. Bush failed. Now his son is attempting to impose a state of permanent war on America, all the while laying down the foundation of a police state.

Whether American policies have led to the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi children or 600,000 is immaterial. It is time for Imperial America to withdraw its legions and dismantle its empire.

Frank Brady
Via e-mail

Who deserves to be dealt with most harshly: criminals who murder hundreds of thousands of children, people who absolve the criminals of any wrongdoing and applaud them for their actions, or people who exaggerate the number of victims?

Judging from Matt Welch's piece, his answer would be number three. He refers to the "anti-sanctions rabble" as "loonies" who have made "hysterical" claims about the impact of the sanctions.

As for the people who aggressively advocate policies that kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, he writes, "Sanctions proponents, if they are not careful, run the risk of aping the foolish debate tactics of the critics they condemn." Boy, that's telling them. Too bad he used up all his venom on the "rabble."

To "loonies" like me a much more appropriate statement would be, "Sanctions proponents are accomplices to mass murder." That is what we would say of people who advocated policies that killed hundreds of thousands of American children. Such policies could be justified only if an overwhelmingly strong case was made that more lives would be lost if they weren't implemented and that no other options were available. If such a case exists Welch certainly hasn't presented it, nor has anyone else.

Welch quibbles that the deaths are not due just to the sanctions but also to the impact of the war. Yet who bombed Iraq back to the Stone Age? Weren't most of the "rabble" he ridicules opposing that war while mainstream pundits were raving about smart bombs? Moreover, sanctions opponents have pointed out that people are dying due to both the sanctions and the destruction of the Gulf War.

The most accurate and careful estimate of the number of victims doesn't help anyone if people are too cowardly to call murderers what they are. I hope Welch will one day find the courage to do so. Until then he won't be of much use at all to innocent Iraqis. They are much better served by the "rabble."

Joe Emersberger
Via e-mail

Matt Welch's "The Politics of Dead Children" compelled me to write. I just wanted to compliment him on a nice job. I am used to the attitude that the truth need not get in the way of a good political position, so I really appreciate that he's taken time to defuse the inaccuracies, exaggerations, and ignorance of people unwilling to sift through the information that's there and make an assessment that recognizes both the facts and the accompanying uncertainty that is inherent in figures such as the ones Welch describes.

I hold a master's degree in critical and creative thinking. I'm embarrassed but not surprised that Robert Jensen, the professor who says he teaches the subject, is a zealous practitioner of "weak-sense" critical thinking. That's the practice of finding evidence to support already-formed opinions and ideas, as opposed to collecting information that might either confirm or not confirm an idea or opinion held as a hypothesis. My experience is that the former practice predominates.

Brian Keegan
Attleboro, MA

Matt Welch's article as a whole was well reasoned and well presented. But I didn't see how his numbers added up.

The highest total mortality rate he quotes is 130.6 per 100,000 births. This is roughly 1 in 1,000 mortality. In order to get 100,000 children dead, then, one would need 100 million children to be born.

The entire population of Iraq is estimated at 24 million, which would imply a birth rate of just over a quarter of a million persons per year (very roughly). In seven years I would expect roughly 2 million or so children to be born, and 2,000 or so of these children to die (from all causes), using the mortality rate listed above. Am I miscalculating, or is there a mistake?

Dr. Thomas Cunningham
Pasadena, CA

Matt Welch replies: Thanks to Thomas Cunningham for correctly pointing out my embarrassing error in presenting UNICEF's estimated under-5 mortality rate for 1994-1998 in the Saddam Hussein-controlled regions of Iraq. It was indeed 130.6 per 1,000 births, not 100,000.

Joe Emersberger, Jude Wanniski, and Frank Brady would have preferred I write a different article, preferably one focused on condemning U.S. policy. I respect their disappointment and would like only to suggest that the article they were hoping for has been written thousands of times before, including in reason.

That doesn't mean those articles were wrong (though many passed along falsehoods), just that I chose to write about a less-covered aspect of the story: how and why partisans and the press bend and invent facts to support their political aims, thereby making it harder for the rest of us to gather the basic information required to form an intelligent opinion.

Also, I cannot agree with Emersberger's contention that "the most accurate and careful estimate of the number of victims doesn't help," or Wanniski's that "the exact number of dead children is unimportant," or Brady's that "whether American policies have led to the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi children or 600,000 is immaterial." It is my belief that truth actually matters, and distortion of truth -- whether by the U.S. government or its critics -- is inevitably counter-productive.

I think Britton Manasco is right to suggest that sanctions sometimes might work, and that Saddam Hussein's military buildup should not be ignored. I described the current sanctions regime as "ineffective" precisely because the crucial weapons inspection component has been absent since 1998, while the Iraqi population continues to suffer (though responsibility for that suffering under the oil-for-food regime -- which provides more value per capita than perhaps any other single-country humanitarian program in the world -- is probably now more due to the Iraqi government than to the sanctions).

It is hard to see what policy goals the current U.N. setup advances, unless there is a desire to inflict general degradation on a population and its leaders, and to give Saddam Hussein and his undemocratic neighbors a propaganda tool of uncommon resonance.

Correction: In "Speaking Lies to Power" (May), Ralph Nader's book

Crashing the Party was misidentified.