WarCriminalsWatch Events

In the past twenty years, the United States has unequivocally reduced the nation of Iraq to ruin, killing untold numbers of people - in excess of two million? - and condemning several million more to permanent exile in the neighboring countries.  For over a decade between the 1991 and 2003 wars, the most punishing economic sanctions ever imposed on a nation were responsible for about half of those casualties.

The stupendous indifference and callous, criminal disregard for the lives of the Iraqi people was on full display in May of 1996 when US Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright (later appointed Secretary of State) was interviewed by Lesley Stahl on "60 minutes."

Stahl asked her "We have heard that half a million children have died.  I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Ambassador Albright replied, "It's a difficult choice, but yes, we think the price is worth it."

Please join me on East 17th Street keeping vigil outside Barnes & Noble, Tuesday, April 24th, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm, as Madame Secretary will be giving a talk inside.  I suggest signs that say, "The Price is Still not Worth It."

Felton Davis
c/o Catholic Worker
(212) 777-9617

For younger people who were not active during those years, below are some excerpts from the record of devastation:

"The United Nations calculates that the price of flour on the free market has risen seventeenfold since the embargo began, the price of lentils more than ninetyfold, the prices of milk and vegetable oil more than eightyfold and the price of tea sixtyfold....  In the world or ordinary Iraqis, schools lack books, pencils or chalk, teeth are extracted without anesthetic, premature babies get stuffed three at a time into any working incubator and many drugs and medicines are barely available.  Orphanages report a steady rise in babies abandoned by families who cannot afford them....  Malnutrition and lack of medicine have led to a sharp deterioration in children`s health, she said.  She cited UNICEF figures showing that infant mortality had quadruped in 1991, to 80 deaths per 1,000 live births."
(``In Iraq, Hunger Wins,`` Paul Lewis, New York Times, July 21, 1993)

"...relief workers and agencies have been warning for many months that Iraq`s eighteen million people face disaster if conditions do not improve soon, and some of Iraq`s assertions [of death and disease] have been corroborated by independent sources.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported last July that Iraq risked vast starvation as the food supply shrinks.  And a 1992 study by the Harvard School of Public Health, commissioned by UNICEF, estimated that tens of thousands more children a year were dying compared to before the gulf war, largely from outbreaks of diarrhea."
(``UN Sanctions Led to 400,000 Deaths, Ministry in Iraq Says,`` New York Times, January 9, 1994

Iraq During  the Sanctions (1990 through 2003)

The official rate of exchange for the Iraqi dinar was one dinar for three American dollars, or one third of a dinar for one dollar.  The black market rate, which was the one everyone really used, was more than thirty times that; depending on the day and dealer, one dollar would buy between nine and twelve dinars.
Doug Broderick, the Catholic Relief Services field director in Baghdad, had made up a chart and hung it on the wall of his office in the Meridien Palestine Hotel.  The chart showed the increases, in real terms and by percentage, of basic food items since the invasion: bread up 2,857 percent, infant formula 2,222 percent, flour 4,531 percent, eggs 350 percent.  ``What you get with prices like this,`` Broderick said professorially, ``is a Darwinian effect.  The rich and the strong survive, the poor and the weak starve.  In any society, the very weakest people are the children, so mostly it is children that die.  The number of child deaths during the fifteen months of sanctions I would put at between sixty thousand and one hundred thousand.  Now, the normal number of deaths would be about thirty thousand in that time period, based on the normal rate here of thirty-nine deaths per ten thousand and the seven hundred and seventy thousand births recorded in this time,  So, in essence, the infant mortality rate has at least doubled and possibly tripled.``

Al Quaddisya General Hospital, a featureless concrete square with 325 adult beds and 130 pediatric beds, serves the 750,000 people who live in the poorest part of Baghdad.  The office of the hospital director was down a long, windowless hallway, and everything in the office -- the carpet, the furniture, the paint on the walls -- was worn and permanently dirty.  ``Really, nowadays most medicine is not available at all,`` he said.  He was a small, round-shouldered man, and he sat humped over his little glass of steaming tea, as if he were trying to draw strength from its fumes.  The lines of his face all drooped exaggeratedly downward, hound-like.  ``There are no antibiotics to speak of, no cough syrups, no bronchial dilators, no blood pressure medicine, no heart medicine, very few anesthetics.  Really, it is very difficult for us.``  He was especially worried about a lack of cannulas, the plastic-and-steel disposable needle rigs that form the business end of the intravenous drips used to carry saline solution, drugs, and anesthesia into the bloodstream.  ``We have reached the point now where we are canceling operations because of the lack of cannulas,`` he said.  ``And because of this lack, too, we are forced to treat all but the most serious cases of malnutrition and diarrhea as outpatient cases.``

Most of those who were dying in Baghdad were very old or very young, and they were dying mostly of starvation and its complications.  Like Broderick, the hospital director had made up a chart to quantify the phenomenon.  Since January 1991, the neat red-and-blue bar graph on the wall opposite his desk showed, more than fifty percent of all the deaths had been caused by malnutrition, up from an average of ten percent a year before.  In February 190, 15 percent of the deaths were due to malnutrition; in February 1991, the figure was 50 percent.  In August 1991, the worst month, 63 percent of all the patients at Al Quaddisya who had died had died of starvation.  In real numbers, this meant the hospital lost between 100 and 150 patients were children.  Very young children, especially infants, starve easily, although it is often the case that some opportunistic infection does the job quicker.

The director took me for a walk through the wards to see the malnutrition cases.  We stopped first at the bed of a boy, Wa`ad Al, forty-four days old.  He was a tiny thing, with calves no wider that the O made by my thumb and forefinger, and arms you could have snapped within that O.  His belly was distended, the skin as taut as a drumhead, and the veins bulged like blue worms up against it.  There was not a gram of fat left on him, so that his head had become almost like a skull, and the flesh on his thighs hung in loose folds.  ``This boy is a typical case.  His mother bought Pelargon for him, but she could not afford enough, so she heavily diluted the milk with water, and of course this is the result.``  A four-hundred-gram can of Pelargon brand powdered milk, which would have sold before the invasion for half a dinar, now cost twenty-two dinars, an increase of more than 4,000 percent.

(Excerpted from Martyr's Day, by Michael Kelly, published by Random House in 1993. Kelly returned to Iraq with US troops and was killed on April 4, 2003)