Shortly after the illegal Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations Security Council, with strong support from the United States, imposed strict sanctions on Saddam Hussein's regime in order to weaken the country's economic ability to wage further wars and to threaten the region.
During the course of the sanctions, which ended with the onset of the 2003 Coalition invasion of Iraq, most sources estimate that over 1 million Iraqi civilians were killed.
Many humanitarian organizations have claimed that the deadly effects of the Iraqi sanctions constituted a murderous crime perpetrated by the United States. The argument they give is that the deaths of Iraqis during the sanctions period occurred due to the harshness of the measures imposed through U.S. influence. At critical times, the U.S. used its power to impede the flow of humanitarian aid and equipment, increasing the deadly effects of the measures. Recently, University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, Osama bin Laden and many of their supporters proposed that the U.S. role in Iraqi sanctions warranted the Sept. 11 attacks. After all, they allege, one cannot play a role in the mass murder of 1 million people and expect to get away with it without consequence.
The sanctions on Iraq undoubtedly led to a massive loss of civilian life and were a failed policy on this account, despite succeeding in securing the region from Iraqi dominance. The United States, at times, did increase the suffering of civilians by withholding critical humanitarian supplies from Iraq. I am of the opinion that many U.S. positions on sanctions were mistaken and detrimental. This aside, I must also add that I am absolutely appalled by Churchill and his ilk, which consistently ignores both Hussein's aggressive strength during his bid for regional dominance and his willingness to sacrifice his own people for his personal power. I find it similar to blaming the allies for civilian casualties during the Berlin bombing raids, while completely failing to mention that Hitler started the war.
After Iraq was driven from Kuwait in the Gulf War I, Hussein agreed to the terms of the cease-fire offered him under U.N. Security Council resolution 687. The resolution stressed that the lifting of wartime sanctions was contingent on his disclosure of all information pertaining to his weapons programs. Once the allies left Iraq, Hussein immediately reneged on this responsibility. He constantly hindered the work of weapons inspectors until 1998, when he kicked them out of the country altogether. The sanctions were in full force through this period and their deadly effects began to represent a major black mark on U.S.-U.N. policy. It quickly became clear that Hussein was playing a game of brinkmanship with the United States, opting to maintain his weapons programs while sacrificing the Iraqi populace. The world witnessed the effects of the deadly contest in abject horror and the United States began to feel the heat.
Unsurprisingly, it was not the first time Hussein had adopted this brutal strategy. Just before the Gulf War I, Hussein held a young British boy named Stuart hostage. Hussein aired the shaking child on international television, and patted his head while manipulatively informing him "your presence here, and in other places, is meant to prevent the scourge of war." As the lone boy couldn't be in all those "other places" at once, Hussein saw to it that an additional 800 Western, Japanese and Kuwaiti civilians were held as human shields, strapping them to strategic targets in an attempt to deter an Allied attack. The Allies' policy then, as with the sanctions, was that the use and deaths of Hussein's civilian shields would constitute an additional crime on his own head, not on the forces intending to liberate Kuwait and the region from his military thuggery.
Hussein gained no sympathy with his threatened use of foreign hostages and he let them go. The sanctions however, were a hostage situation which began to win him anti-U.S. support within factions of his country and internationally.The humanitarian catastrophe and the subsequent international outrage prompted the U.N. to implement the "Oil-for-Food" program to relieve the civilian effects of sanctions. The program stabilized the level of disease and starvation in Iraq, though it was ineffective in eliminating them. What we are now realizing is that rampant corruption at the highest levels of the U.N. undermined the civilian assistance program and instead strengthened the dictator. Hussein was allowed to personally siphon billions of dollars through the sale of illegal oil vouchers with the help of complicit U.N. officials.
In a demonstration of blatant scorn for his civilians, Hussein used his assets to pursue his own comforts and to strengthen his regime, rather than spend a cent helping his desperate people. A 1999 State Department study reported that Hussein's regime had spent $2.2 billion building about 48 personal palaces since the Gulf War. These extravagances were pursued at a time when hundreds of thousands of his civilians were dying from lack of basic necessities such as electricity and clean water.
In even more disgusting displays of malice, Hussein often used his wealth to intentionally accelerate the suffering of his people. In the well-documented case of the draining of the Southern marshes, from 1990 to 2000, Hussein systematically rendered a massive area of his country's farmland completely worthless. Over 200,000 Shiites were stripped of their livelihood and forced to migrate. The elimination of the marshes' valuable grain and rice supplies in a time of such dire circumstances did nothing but drive the country into a darker period of plague and need.
No matter what tortures the Iraqi people endured, Hussein sought to worsen their situation, holding them hostage and sacrificing them at will in order to further his sadistic desire for regional control. Despite the humanitarian aid intended to directly help his starving masses, Hussein stole it for himself in order to live luxuriously and powerfully while everything else around him crumbled. The lives of hundreds of thousands constitute nothing more than expendable pawns in the games of such tyrants.
It is time the Churchill and bin Laden propaganda is put into perspective and that the real tyrant in the sanctions debacle is exposed for what he did. Hussein was poison to the Iraqi people. In failing to even mention his regime as complicit in the deaths of over 1 million innocent Iraqis, we are intellectually acquitting him of mass murder.