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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (53909)	10/22/2002 12:12:56 PM
From: zonder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Re: US complicity in starvation and disease in Iraq Make no mistake about it. There was starvation and disease in Iraq due to the too-heavy sanctions that prevented even quite mainstream drugs and chemicals from being imported into Iraq. Anyone who has every lived in the Middle East can tell you this.

To: LindyBill who wrote (53909)	10/22/2002 12:24:03 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

That is the Euro and left line, John. I have difficulty with that concept when Saddam is controlling where things go in Iraq. He has all the money he needs for anything he wants to spend it on. You are precisely the sort of person who should read it. The author offers a great deal of detail from closed UN committee meetings regarding our votes. There seems to be little doubt the US voted as it did. There could be two lines of defense I can imagine. First, just after the Gulf War, the US counted on a popular uprising in Iraq. Sanctions, it could be argued, clearly perceived to be caused by Saddam's actions, might help produce that. Of course, that did not happen. Second, after that, the US could argue they needed these sanctions to undermine Saddam's regime but, in so far as possible, not inflict too much harm on the Iraqi people. But that soon, perhaps two or three years, became an obviously ineffective argument. At that point, it seems obvious the US should have moved to reinvent the sanction so they were less harmful to the general population and more directed at the regime. Apparently, they did not. The votes in the UN appear to be factual. It's the arguments US policy makers, principally from the Clinton administration, though carried forward into the Bush administration, that would help fill out the picture. That's why Pollack's arguments would be helpful.