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by Derek R. Burrows '00 Recently I had the great opportunity to travel to Iraq. In my two short weeks there I saw and experienced so much. I saw under-equipped and unsanitary hospitals. I saw people dying of easily preventable diseases. I saw bombed-out bridges. I saw war memorials. I saw ornate 1000-year-old mosques and even places like Ur and Babylon, which go back several thousands of years. I saw an entire nation of people that are being held-hostage by the United States. The people of Iraq have suffered greatly in recent years. Most of them have spent their entire lives under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, a military dictator who has been responsible for thousands of deaths of those who've shown the slightest opposition. In the 1980s, the Iraqis fought a bloody war with Iran. The two countries are said to have lost 2 million people between them. Soon after the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq invaded Kuwait following some minor provocations. Most of us know what happened then, the 1991 Gulf War. After being bombed back into the Stone Age in the most high-tech war in history, Iraq experienced an uprising inspired by the U.S., which was brutally put-down, and thousands were killed. For a people who have had all these things happen to them, the Iraqis are suffering more today than ever before. The present-day suffering is largely from the UN sanctions. The UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Iraq on August 6, 1990 in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Their resolution called for comprehensive sanctions on Iraq in order to restore the authority of the legitimate government of Kuwait. Now in 1999, eight years after the US-led coalition forced Iraq out of Kuwait, the sanctions remain because the U.S. threatens to veto any attempt to lift the sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in control. And what are these sanctions? These sanctions have been called the most comprehensive blockade in history. They include agricultural equipment, pesticides and fertilizers, medical equipment, medicines, spare parts for virtually any machinery, paper, pencils, all academic and scientific journals, shoes, chlorine for water purification, and even toys. What are more, the few items that Iraq is able to import, it cannot bring enough because its economy is in ruins. And because of these sanctions people are dying every day. In the last 24 hours 250 people have died in Iraq because of the sanctions. This is over 90,000 deaths yearly. These aren't numbers from the Iraqi government. These are numbers from independent sources such as UNICEF. Most of those who die are children. Most of these deaths are from preventable diseases such as diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition. But they are dying because there are no medicines available. And how are they getting sick in the first place? Most are simply not getting enough food. Nearly one-third of all children under five are malnourished. The water is unsafe to drink. Iraq, which once served 90% of its population with clean, safe running water no longer has that luxury. Water systems were heavily damaged during the 1991 war as well as the U.S. bombings in December 1998 and they have been unable to repair their systems due to the sanctions on spare parts. Since chlorine is banned from importation and the US bombed the one site in Iraq that produced chlorine, there is very little available for the water systems. Chlorine is absolutely imperative if you want to have sanitized water systems. Iraqi doctors have estimated that 90% of their hospital cases can be traced to the unsafe water. We are told that we must protect the world from weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is no where near being able to build a nuclear warhead. As for chemical and biological weapons, we will never be certain, but Iraq does not have the ability to deliver any such weapons. All but two of the missiles Iraq had that were capable of delivering such weapons have been accounted for and dismantled by the UN weapons inspectors. What's more, the United States itself has the largest arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons in the world. The US's ally Israel also threatens the region with nuclear weapons. Iraq has never threatened to use weapons of mass destruction against its neighbors. The U.S. makes no secret of its nuclear "first-strike" policy and has even hinted at using nuclear weapons against Iraq. It was the United States and Britain that used depleted uranium munitions against Iraq that many have linked to higher rates of cancer, still births and birth defects. (The same weapons were used against Yugoslavia.) The Security Council resolution that calls for the disarming of Iraq does so in the context of reducing arms throughout the Middle East, yet the United States continues to sell our best military technology, including dozens of fighter jets, to our allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel and Turkey. We claim that we need to protect Iraqi minorities such as the Kurds in the north who are being repressed, although our government praised Saddam Hussein when he used chemical weapons against the Kurds in the 1980s (which Iraq bought from the U.S.). We also continue to militarily support Turkey, who continues to slaughter Kurds in its country and even occasionally crosses over into Iraq to kill the Kurds there. What is not as bad as the sanctions, but still part of the policy to keep the Iraqi people in their place are the bombings. Few Americans know that we are dropping bombs in Iraq on an almost daily basis. The U.S. has been flying over northern and southern Iraq since it established the "No-fly Zones" with Britain after the 1991 war. The No-fly Zones are illegal under international law and are unrecognized by Iraq and the UN. Since our massive bombing of Iraq in December 1998, Iraq has begun challenging the No-fly Zones by tracking U.S. and British planes, and occasionally firing anti-aircraft guns at them. Of course, Iraq's destroyed military presents no real threat to the U.S., but we still defend our planes by bombing the guns and radar sites. How long will we allow this killing of innocent people to continue?
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