Stable messes? I suppose a situation where a brutal tyrant ruthlessly monopolizes terror to cowl a population that would be stable.
Was Saddam really stable though? As I mentioned in some previous post, Saddam came to power in 1979, invaded Iran in 1980. When that war ended in 1988, he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Since then he refrained from starting any wars only because we kept troops on his border and enforced an embargo on him. He still was as brutal on the Iraqi people as ever.
Re. the sanctions:
I think only some on the left (who bought the line about all the babies dying from the sanctions- which i don't believe either) said that
I think "many on the left" would be most accurate. Personally, I believe Iraq did suffer a humanitarian crisis during the sanctions regime. But I blame that on Saddam who deliberately diverted funds to such causes as building new Presidential palaces, knowing that he could use the suffering of ordinary Iraqis, including the deaths of Iraqi children, as anti-sanctions propaganda. He was pretty successful.
Here is a site (one of very many - this was simply the first one which came up on a search screen) which alleges 500,000 child deaths due to sanctions based on UNICEF statistics:
globalpolicy.org
Here is the World Health Organization saying the Iraqi health system is collapsing due to sanctions (NGO's were major critics of sanctions:
Iraqi Health System Close to Collapse
World Health Organization
Press Release WHO/16
27 February 1997
IRAQI HEALTH SYSTEM CLOSE TO COLLAPSE SAYS WHO DIRECTOR-GENERAL
globalpolicy.org
Here is a group of (some) prominent leftists using the suffering of Iraqis as anti-American propaganda:
A Call To Action on Sanctions and the US War
Against the People of Iraq
Signers Include: Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn
Spring 1999
....
This month U.S. policy will kill 4,500 children under the age of 5 in Iraq, according to UN studies, just as it did last month and the month before that, all the way back to 1991.
.....
globalpolicy.org |
