WAR ON IRAK

Progressive.org: Now They Cite the Toll of Sanctions

At the Bush-Blair press conference on March 27, I heard an increasingly common and absolutely shameful justification for this Iraq war.


Tony Blair was the one who uttered it. To illustrate the brutality of Saddam's regime, Blair said, "Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, preventively, but died because of the nature of the regime under which they are living."


But that's not exactly right. All those children died, in large part, because the United Nations--at the behest of Britain and the United States--insisted upon maintaining economic sanctions on Iraq. These sanctions prevented basic items from getting to Iraq, items like chlorine to purify the water supply there. And, yes, Saddam is partially responsible, as well. If he had obeyed U.N. Security Council resolutions, those sanctions might have been lifted.


This is the bottom of the barrel of immorality. During the Clinton Administration, Madeleine Albright notoriously told Lesley Stahl of Sixty Minutes that this civilian death toll was "worth it." Albright understood and acknowledged U.S. complicity in those deaths, but accepted them anyway. That was bad enough.


Now Blair and Bush have finally discovered the sanctions issue themselves, but they refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for those deaths and instead seize upon them simply to justify their war of aggression.