Edited By Anthony Arnove
Publisher: South End Press, 2002
ISBN: 0-89608-697-6
Pages: 264

This month, US policy will kill 4,500 Iraqi children under the age of five, according to the United Nations, just as it did last month and the month before that all the way back to 1991.

- Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and others

We think the price is worth it.

- Madeleine Albright

Edited by Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege was published by South End Press in October 2002, thereby providing us with an opportunity to review the build-up towards the war and the prophecies then made for the future of Iraq and compare them with what we witnessed over the past few months. This is an updated version from the edition published in 2000, but sadly world events were moving too swiftly for any book published during this period to be truly up-to-date. Only six chapters were re-written because the authors felt a sense of urgency in getting this book out in time, in the hope that it would influence public debate on Iraq. This shows that this is essentially an activist book, and indeed the final part of the book, “Activist Responses,” is a call to join the anti-sanctions and anti-war movement.

The authors of the chapters have all been involved in opposing the war against Iraq: Robert Fisk with his valiant investigative reporting, Kathy Kelly as part of the “Voices in the Wilderness” group who took medication and toys into Iraq in violation of the sanctions, Noam Chomsky by constantly exposing the fallacies of official rhetoric and joining others in publishing in the New York Times the “call to action” to end the sanctions, and Dennis Halliday by resigning  from his post as UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq and becoming an active campaigner against sanctions.

Here is the tale of Iraq told by people who spent time there, who know the political forces at play, and who saw the human reality behind the statistics that shocked us.  Their perspectives bring alive the story of Iraq. After having been bombarded with months of grotesque propaganda in the American media, it is a welcome relief to go through this book, reading the writing of insightful authors, each addressing different facets of the tragedy in Iraq. They are voices of reason that can be trusted in the midst of all the fanatical warmongering of Bush-proponents.

The structure of the book is very user-friendly and well edited; all the parts complement each other, telling the story from different aspects and through different eyes. In the introduction, Anthony Arnove writes of the dire consequences of an invasion: it would “embolden other states seeking to emulate Bush’s pre-emptive strike doctrine” and “would represent an even further expansion of US hegemony in the Middle East and in the world.  Its aim would not be to bring about democracy, but to control the balance of power in a geopolitically critical region and to ‘maintain stability,’ a euphemism for ordering the world capitalist system to maximize the power and profits flowing to the US empire.”

In retrospect, the drive towards the March 2003 war was unstoppable, although Iraq Under Siege reminds us that what happened in March-April 2003 was the final chapter of a 12 year war on Iraq, with US and UK planes bombing on a regular basis and the sanctions causing as much hardship as weapons of mass destruction would. 

Part II challenges the myths that were and are propagated by the US media and which have been widely accepted and reiterated by the US public in general – a critical task since we have witnessed a war concocted out of cleverly crafted propaganda. These myths include the effectiveness of the sanctions in weakening the regime of Saddam Hussein while causing minimal hardship to the population, and the stockpiling of food and medicine by the Iraqi government to increase the suffering and win the battle politically.

In Chapter 5, “Voices in the Wilderness" draws upon UN reports such as the 1999 UNICEF report, WHO reports and testimonies of the individuals who worked in humanitarian assistance in Iraq, such as Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, to expose the lie in this assertion.

It is important to challenge these myths individually, since they appear again and again in public rhetoric. Media spin dehumanises the conflict, with concepts such as “precision bombing” giving a warped conception of modern warfare as somehow not harming civilians, which is one of the reasons why the experience of seeing American POWs was so traumatic for the general American public: they simply didn’t realize that bad things happen to people just like them in wars.

The US media played along with their government by promoting the official line and ignoring the devastating humanitarian effects on the population, as shown in Chapter 6: “The Media’s Deadly Spin on Iraq.” Abunimah and Masri’s statistics are frightening: in the week of December 15-22 the term “civilian casualties” was mentioned in only 10% of 1000 newspaper stories available on the Lexis Nexis database, a manifestation of the media’s strategy of ignoring and discrediting accounts of civilian harm from the Anglo-American bombings and as a result of the sanctions.

The chapter ends with a list of strategies for media activism: become an analyst, armed with facts, monitor specific sources and then communicate your objections or alternative information effectively and develop a network.

Another issue that has been conveniently obliterated from public memory is the harm caused by remains of depleted uranium. As Robert Fisk writes in Chapter 7 “The Hidden War,” there has been a fourfold increase in cancer among children in the south, where thousands of depleted uranium shells were fired by the allies in 1991. The effects of DU are also being suffered by war veterans, who have developed illnesses collectively referred to as “Gulf War Syndrome.”

The sanctions are often totally ignored by official rhetoric, or relegated to the list of Iraqi non-compliances with the rules set down by the international community. The 1999 UNICEF report found that there were 5000 excess deaths per year among children and 22% of children were chronically malnourished. The official US position remains what was expressed by Madeline Albright in her now infamous statement on 60 Minutes in 1996, when, in response to a question about whether the death of 500,000 children as a result of sanctions could be justified, she said that “this was a very hard choice” but “we think the price is worth it.” This callous statement is quoted by at least 3 of the writers because it is representative of the state department’s attitude towards the victims of the sanctions. They are merely more unfortunate “collateral damage,” while the “inhumanity and criminal vindictiveness of the sanctions” as John Pilger puts it, is a reality the US administration has no wish to be acquainted with.  

Even for people in the Middle East who are used to hearing of the suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of the sanctions, the facts and statistics in this book are horrifying. Its effect on anyone who has never had access to this perspective will therefore be very powerful. For Dennis Halliday the case is clear-cut: “the sanctions are a form of warfare - slow, painful, and murderous. Economic sanctions, like war itself, are a form of state terrorism.” The resignation of Halliday and von Sponeck attest to the hopelessness of the task of providing “humanitarian assistance” under the oil-for-food program. In an interview in Chapter 2, Dennis Halliday insists that the Iraqi government cooperated with the UN and was effective in its distribution under the oil-for-food program, but the experience of the past decade left Iraqis feeling that whatever they did would not be enough. Phyllis Bennis also makes the important argument that while Saddam Hussein consistently violated civil and political rights over the past 20 years, economic and social rights were well provided for, whereas under the sanctions the latter rights were being violated on a massive scale.

Part III tells the story of life under sanctions through the eyes of people who knew and loved victims of the sanctions. Chapter 9: “Raising Voices” is a personal account by Kathy Kelly of her experience as a member of the Gulf Peace Team and then of Voices in the Wilderness, who took medicine to Iraq in violation of the sanctions, which she considers weapons of mass destruction. The personal tragedies are brought to life through the story of Hebba, of Shaima dying of cancer, and of Nasra and her husband Mustafa, who had just died of a heart attack - an intellectual couple who refused to leave Iraq because it is their home.

It is the description of the hospitals in Iraq which epitomizes the extent of the crime of sanctions: when spare parts, surgical supplies and basic medicines cannot be obtained, we must conclude, as Barbara Nimri Aziz argues in Chapter 10, that the Iraqi people were not victims but targets of the sanctions.

The final part of the book, “Activist Responses,” reprints the statement “Sanctions are Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which was published in the New York Times, signed by 1500 activists calling for an end to sanctions. This call to action was promoted by Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Edward Herman and others, with the aim of building a movement against the sanctions equivalent to that against the war in Vietnam.

This is a book with a mission: its stated goal is to contribute towards the removal of sanctions, and as such it addresses criticisms to the US, the UK and the UN. The focus of the book is therefore on the sanctions regime and the dire consequences it caused, and it does not address the wider issues involved, such as Saddam Hussein’s regime. Yet, a more critical examination of the role of the Iraqi government in complying with the UNSCOM team and how sanctions affected the Iraqi power structure and internal political dynamics would have been useful. Furthermore, a discussion of the sanctions regime from the perspective of international law is missing and should have been included, since there is a good argument to be made that the United Nations is bound by international human rights and humanitarian law, and that the sanctions regime was a violation thereof. 

This book provides activists with documentation to wage their campaigns against aggressive US policy both domestically and internationally. As Eduardo Galeano puts it, “this book gives us a key to understand the New World Order, and warns about how Iraq’s tragedy may be a model for global bullying and global impunity in coming times.” In the afterward Halliday calls upon Western governments to accept responsibility for their perpetuation of the sanctions that have killed so many, and concludes by warning “unless we organize to prevent it, another American war in the Middle East may lead to total catastrophe for all peoples living in the region.” The struggle of activists to stop the war may have failed, but their work in this book stands as an exposure of the reality of what was happening in Iraq over the past 10 years. Iraq Under Siege is an important testimony to the horrifically destructive effects of sanctions on a civilian population, as well as to their failure to punish the state, since they produce an increase in patriotism. As such it could play an important role in preventing similar tragedies from occurring in the future as a result of Security Council-imposed sanctions. Iraq must become another “never again.”

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