‘Smart Sanctions’
Gut Iraq

BY PHYLLIS BENNIS
_________________

U.S. economic sanctions, in place since 1990, have devastated the people of Iraq while leaving Saddam Hussein in power. Washington’s “smart sanctions” proposal recently passed by theUN Security Council won’t do much to help the existing disastrous situation.

In 1998 the UN reported that about 5,000 children under five were dying every month from the effects of sanctions—water-borne diseases, insufficient medicine, inadequate food. Smart sanctions or dumb, that staggering figure has not changed.
Under the sanctions-based oil for food program, the Iraqi economy remains stalled. Unemployment in some areas is over 70 percent. Iraq can export oil, but all payments are sent to a UN-controlled escrow account. For Iraq to purchase any of the thousands of items on the special “review list” (including such things as cargo trucks), contracts must be approved by a UN committee.

Within that committee, the U.S. has veto power over every contract. By the spring of 2002 over $5 billion worth of contracts were being held up, almost all of them by U.S. decision.
The biggest problem with the economic sanctions is insufficient money to meet the needs of the Iraqi people.

Under the sanctions, only $21 billion worth of goods arrived in Iraq during the first five years of the oil for food program. This is less than $200 per Iraqi per year; not enough to provide food, clothing, roads, schools, hospitals, street cleaning and electricity.
Iraq cannot pump more oil because its drilling infrastructure was destroyed in the war and only partially rebuilt. Without massive investment, prohibited by the sanctions, there is simply no money to rebuild the oil equipment, let alone the water treatment, sewage, electrical generators and other components of once-modern Iraq.

So as before, Washington’s “smarter” sanctions will continue to punish the innocent of Iraq, kill children and the aged, and deny the people their fundamental economic and social human rights.
—PB

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