Ills caused by sanctions don't make war wrong
Dan Lindley
assistant professor of political science
Peter Quaranto's Nov. 14 letter to the editor is to be appreciated for its concern for the Iraqi people and for peace in general. Moreover, debates about the costs, benefits, effectiveness and morality of U.S. foreign policy, and here especially the sanctions on Iraq, are to be welcomed. However, the letter contains a number of errors.
First, Quaranto states that the sanctions killed Iraqis. Indeed they did. But Saddam Hussein chose sanctions and his Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs over no sanctions and no WMD programs. The oil for food program was offered in 1991, and Iraq refused it until 1996. Saddam is primarily responsible for killing his own people. The closest analogy for the sanctions I can come up with is this: we gave Saddam the gun (the sanctions) and he pulled the trigger. Keep in mind he also started two wars that killed 1.3 million combatants and an unknown number of civilians. In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein killed up to 180,000 Kurds, razed 4,000 villages and killed 3,000-5,000 Kurds in the village of Halajba using chemical weapons. Some 60-200 other Kurdish villages were attacked with chemical weapons.
Second, claims that Iraq has WMD are not "unsubstantiated." For example, thanks to defector's information, Iraq itself admitted to production of 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 8,500 liters of anthrax and 2,200 liters of aflatoxin and weaponization involving the fitting of 157 or 166 aerial bombs and 25 scud missile warheads with biological warfare agents. UNSCOM destroyed much of these weapons, but suspected production of two to four times these massive amounts.
Third, Quaranto states that more bombs were dropped on Iraq in 1991 than in all of WWII. In fact, we dropped between 66,000 and 89,000 tons of aerial ordinance in the Gulf War, and this compares to over 2.1 million tons in WWII (and over 6 million in Vietnam; they lasted 1.5, 45 and 140 months, respectively).
Fourth, Quaranto makes the absurd claim that the sanctions are a deliberate act of genocide by the U.S. on the Iraqi people. Genocide is the "the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political or ethnic group." Saddam has killed more of his people than the sanctions he chose, and the sanctions have killed at most 2.5 percent of the population. Quaranto should apologize to the Armenians, Rwandans and Jews, and stop devaluing the meaning of the word genocide.
Letters such as this hurt the cause of the peace groups. In addition to the errors above and the general tone of the letter, there is a fundamental flaw in the logic of the letter: that the ills caused by the sanctions make a war against Iraq wrong. I fail to see the connection. Same for bomb tonnage. War is horrible, but unless one is pacifist therein does not a policy prescription make.
A more fruitful line of inquiry might examine the threat posed the Iraqi regime, how it compares to other threats, assess the relative costs and benefits of addressing those threats, and the morality and wisdom of conducting what is at best a preventive and not pre-emptive war. When I do this, I come out about 60-40 or maybe 70-30 against the war.
Dan Lindley
assistant professor of political science
Nov. 14
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, November 18, 2002
