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"DELINKING" IS NO ANSWER":
MOVEMENT MUST DEMAND END TO SANCTIONS

By Sara Flounders

As more people understand how U.S. sanctions against Iraq
have devastated that country and killed hundreds of
thousands of its children, they have swelled the opposition
to Washington's policy. They have cracked through the
corporate media's enforced silence about this great
suffering. A grassroots movement to end sanctions is gaining
momentum.

This policy has killed 1.7 million Iraqis since 1990. U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admits this cost and
has said on network television that she believes it is worth
this horrible price. Many people know these things and are
disgusted by the cruel policies coming out of Washington.

The anti-sanctions movement has always had a clear, simple
demand: end the U.S./United Nations sanctions against Iraq.
The Iraqi people are clearly the victims of sanctions--not
to speak of the almost daily bombing raids. The Pentagon and
its British allies are clearly the aggressors and the
perpetrators of murderous violence against the Iraqi people.
Those who want to stop the Iraqis' suffering must direct
their demand at the aggressor and say: "Stop the sanctions--
stop the bombing."

That should be elementary. But some groups have injected a
new campaign into this growing movement. They propose to
"delink" economic and military sanctions. That means
demanding the U.S. stop economic sanctions but at the same
time allowing Washington--through some UN body--to enforce
selective so-called military sanctions. A growing volume of
anti-sanctions literature actually calls for a continued
U.S. commitment to disarm Iraq and tighten military
sanctions.

Many groups that are now for delinking economic and
military sanctions promoted sanctions just before the 1991
Gulf war broke out. Then their slogan was "Sanctions, not
war." This slogan completely covered up the fact that
sanctions are a most brutal form of war against a whole
country's population, especially the children and seniors.

Some people who are genuinely concerned about the
suffering of the Iraqi people may not realize the
implications of this dangerous campaign. Others--especially
among those who had openly supported sanctions for years--
are intentionally introducing this slogan in an attempt to
derail the movement.

The campaign to delink sanctions is indeed dangerous to
our movement. It can divide us. That is why we must examine
this campaign carefully, study the record of those who
propose it, refute its arguments and reject its slogans.

BLAMING THE VICTIM

>From Dec. 20, 1998--after four days of heavy bombing
raids--until the end of September 1999, the U.S. and its
British allies flew 12,157 combat sorties against Iraq. They
dropped 10,000 tons of explosives during that period.

The movement here must ask itself--does Iraq have the
right to defend itself against such attacks? Does it have
the right to lock its radar on hostile planes flying over
its territory? Does it have the right to fire back?

If the movement supports "military sanctions" against
Iraq, then we are taking the side of the aggressor against
the victims. This approach implies that Iraq is somehow more
"evil" than other states and concedes that Washington has
some justice on its side. Iraq has not bombed the U.S. or
Britain or anyone else.

We must not fall in the trap of blaming the victims.

`DUAL-USE' SUBSTANCES AND TECHNOLOGY

Another danger of allowing "military sanctions" is that
Washington can apply the "dual use" argument to stop trade
in items that are absolutely necessary for civilian use.

The U.S. has already justified some of the most harmful
sanctions by calling them necessary to prevent Iraq from
developing any "weapons of mass destruction." For example,
it has banned pencils for school children because these
pencils contain graphite, which is also a lubricant. It has
banned batteries, x-ray machines, and ambulances because
they could be used in battles; computers; and even enriched
powdered milk, which supposedly could be used in germ
warfare.

This targeting of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" has
been a fraud from the beginning. The Iraqis didn't have the
weapons to defend themselves at their hour of greatest peril
in 1991, when more than 110,000 sorties were striking them
from every direction while hardly a plane was shot down.

While the lack of medicines and medical equipment--which
were available in Iraq before 1991--has cost thousands of
lives, most of the 500,000-plus Iraqi children killed by
sanctions have died from diseases carried in impure drinking
water. Before the U.S. bombing 96 percent of Iraqis had
potable drinking water. But the 1991 bombing destroyed the
water supply infrastructure and sanctions have made it
impossible to rebuild it.

Good drinking water needs pipes, pumps, filtration and
chlorine. But Washington defines chlorine as a dual-use
item, as it does the pipes that are used to carry water. The
U.S. government considers these and a thousand other items
as having some possible dual use that could assist Iraqi
militarily. Even if sanctions were "delinked," these
prohibited items could be placed in the dual-use category
under "military sanctions" and denied.

The Iraq Action Coalition web site at http://leb.net/IAC/
has a list of almost 300 banned items, from bicycles and
buses to music CDs, soap and toilet paper.

Under the "Oil-for-Food" program, the U.S. has used the
dual-use military category to stop, halt or postpone for
further study 450 out of 500 contracts already approved by
the UN Sanctions Commission. They have used the vague
category of dual military and civilian use to make many
shipments useless or incomplete.

Then they blame Baghdad for not providing for the
population. Yet every UN agency that monitors food and
medical distribution has reported that Iraq has the best and
least corrupt distribution system in the world for the food
that reaches the country. The malnutrition and disease
continue because Iraq is intentionally denied any of the
necessities of modern life.

In 1995 as the call to end all sanctions and inspections
in Iraq was gaining momentum, many activists mistakenly
thought the Oil-for-Food deal seemed a realistic way to
immediately end the suffering in Iraq. It turned out instead
to be really a campaign to extend and continue the sanctions
indefinitely.

The push for military sanctions says there is some
humanitarian justification to attacks on small, poor
countries by the largest and most ruthless military power in
the world. The Pentagon has more weapons of every type than
the rest of the Security Council nations and the other top
10 military powers. The military corporations of the U.S.
are the largest weapons exporters through trade, aid and
loans in the world.

WHO DECIDES WHAT IRAQ CAN TRADE FOR?

If there are "just" military sanctions, who gets to decide
what Iraq can trade for? Can an outside force determine what
the Iraqi government and Iraqi business can and can't buy?
No matter what outside force is involved, even "military
sanctions" continue to violate the sovereignty of the Iraqi
nation.

The U.S. government continues both the bombing and the
sanctions to keep Iraq impoverished and underdeveloped. It
aims to keep Iraqi oil off the world markets while
undermining the ability of the state sector to provide the
necessities of life.

The stated original goal of the sanctions was to force
Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. This Iraq did in March 1991.
But the sanctions have been killing Iraqis ever since.

Iraq has not been the sole victim of sanctions. Over the
years the U.S. government has imposed sanctions, blockades
or boycotts on developing countries such as Sudan, north
Korea, China, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Iran, Libya,
Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, Panama and a host of other countries.
Each time Washington's goal was to subjugate a developing
country.

As early as 1919, then-U.S. President Woodrow Wilson
explained just how well the imperialists who control all the
economic levers of global trade and finance understand the
power of this weapon against small, developing, vulnerable
countries: "The one who chooses this economic, peaceful,
quiet, lethal remedy will not have to resort to force. It is
a painful remedy. It doesn't take a single human life
outside the country exposed to the boycott, but instead
subjects that country to a pressure that, in my view, no
modern country can withstand."

Even if Wilson hadn't admitted it long ago, around the
world people see now that the big imperialist powers use
sanctions as a weapon against any developing country that
tries to pursue an independent course or to resist the
ruthless process of globalization. For the movement to
support "military sanctions" would help sell the idea that
there could be a reasonable sanctions policy selectively
used by the U.S. government and the other big capitalist
powers.

Now the U.S. government's sanctions policy stands exposed
internationally. Wash ington is on the defensive even in the
Security Council on this issue. So the U.S. State Department
is trying to maintain some form of sanctions and intrusive
spying inspections in Iraq. It is trying to assert
Washington's "right" to strangle a targeted country.

Madeleine Albright, who publicly approved the death of a
half-million Iraqi children, is supposed to be interested
now in pulling back the most onerous economic sanctions in
exchange for maintaining so-called military sanctions and
resuming the intrusive inspections in Iraq. It's this State
Department campaign to make sanctions again palatable that
is reflected by some within the movement.

What is needed is a campaign against all sanctions.

While building the broadest possible unity among all those
genuinely concerned about the Iraqis and other people being
strangled by sanctions, every effort should be made to keep
oriented toward ending all sanctions, all U.S./British
bombings and overflights, all spy teams and inspectors. Let
Iraq live.

[Sara Flounders is a National Coordinator of the
International Action Center.]


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