Room for a View > Special Report
Stranglehold
Twelve years later, sanctions targeting Saddam strike civilians

by Greg Barrett; edited by Lorna Tychostup
Photos by Alan Pogue

During a two-week tour of Iraq in July, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations Hans von Sponeck saw what should have been a wellspring of hope near rural Mosul. On farmland north of Baghdad were massive irrigation systems stretched like tentacles in fields planted with wheat and barley.

Ideally, von Sponeck thought to himself, Iraq should now see some progress. And where better than in the breadbasket region of a nation with nearly a quarter of its children suffering chronic malnutrition?
Looking closer, however, he discovered the spigots were turned off. Although the high-tech sprinkler systems had survived the exhaustive vetting of UN trade sanctions, water pumps had not.

“The danger is these pumps could be used by the [Iraqi] military for other purposes,” said von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran of the United Nations who resigned two years ago in protest over the sanctions on Iraq. “Anything that has a sophisticated pumping mechanism can be used for propelling weapons of mass destruction, I guess.”
So the sprinklers sit lifeless today in the fields they were intended to nourish. Expendable even by the new “smart sanctions” employed this summer by the UN Security Council in a promise to make things easier for Iraqi civilians.

Such is life in Iraq one dozen years after the international trade sanctions of August 6, 1990 attempted to peacefully push Saddam Hussein back from Kuwait, and 11 years after the allied forces of the Persian Gulf War unveiled the devastating precision of modern warfare—and its imprecise, lingering aftermath.

The ongoing collateral damage of the war and sanctions on Iraqi civilians has totaled more than 1 million deaths, half of which are children under the age of five, according to UNICEF and World Health Organization reports. As US lawmakers debate whether the military should again strike at the regime of Hussein or just tighten the sanctions, Iraqi civilians fret over the inevitable crossfire of which they are intimately familiar. In 1991 more than 700 targets—bridges, roads, and electrical grids that powered 1,410 water-treatment plants for Iraq’s 22 million people—were bombed in a rush to cripple Hussein.
Coupled with the UN sanctions that blocked or rationed dual-use imports such as the water pumps, electric generators, and chlorine—which can also be used in the making of mustard gas—epidemics ensued. Iraqi children died from dehydration and miserable waterborne illnesses such as cholera, diarrhea, and other intestinal diseases.

Today, at the freshly painted Al-Mansour Children’s Hospital in Baghdad, pediatrician Qusay Al-Rahim has seen much progress in the past decade. For a nation that was among the most industrialized in the Middle East two decades ago, civilians such as Al-Rahim are happy now over simple things. Electricity is again reliable. More than half of the pharmaceutical drugs most hospitals need are available. Al-Mansour’s elevators work and colostomy bags no longer have to be washed and reused.

But, Al-Rahim said, infants and children still die from a lack of common equipment and supplies that were readily available prior to Hussein’s stubborn stand against the West.

“For example we have a shortage of Vitamin K,” he said of the coagulant used to prevent hemorrhaging in newborns.

Whether sanctions or war or the dictator is to blame, who’s to know? It’s probably a combination of all three. But this much Al-Rahim does know: There was no such shortage 12 years ago.

War’s Collateral Damage
In an independent study published 19 months after the completion of the six-week Gulf War, the New England Journal of Medicine reported a trend that foretold Iraq’s sorry future. During the first eight months of 1991, about 46,900 children more than usual had died in Iraq, and Iraq’s infant and child mortality rates had more than doubled to 92.7 and 128.5 per 1,000 live births, respectively.

More recent studies, such as the benchmark published by UNICEF in 1999, show that the lethal fallout of war was more of a trend in Iraq than an isolated incident. In 1998, the infant and child mortality rates were 103 and 125 per 1,000, respectively.

Yet, as of July 30, 2002, more than 1,450 import contracts worth $4.6 billion in humanitarian supplies for Iraq were being held up in the UN Oil-for-Food program, the five-year-old plan that was intended to generate a sense of normalcy for Iraqis. A UN pledge in May to regenerate and expedite the contracts through the new “smart sanctions” program has so far produced a trickle of change—14 humanitarian supply contracts worth $7.6 million.

The United States, meanwhile, concerned with Hussein’s potential for chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, is responsible for roughly 90 percent of the blocks on humanitarian supplies by the UN Security Council.

In Amman, Jordan this summer, Jordanian Minister of Water Munther Haddadin addressed the plight of Iraqi children, who, for example, suffered almost a fourfold increase in low birth weights (4.5 percent to 21.1 percent) between 1990 and 1994. It remains steady today at about 25 percent.

“You wonder why there are terrorists?” Haddadin asked, according to writer Jane McBee, who toured the Middle East with members of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. “What do you think these children will be in 10 years? Do you think they’ll join the Peace Corps?”

Less than a month after the Gulf War, then-UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar had described for the UN Security Council a conflict that had “wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society.” In a letter to the council dated March 20, 1991, de Cuellar said media reports about the war had not prepared him for the devastation he witnessed.

“Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age,” he said, “but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.”

Degrading of Iraq’s Water Supply
It was a result predicted by the United States even as allied forces rained bombs on Baghdad’s infrastructure.

In a January 1991 document entitled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” the US Defense Intelligence Agency said that the bombing of Iraq coupled with an embargo of chemicals and supplies would fully degrade Iraq’s civilian water supply.

“Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur,” declassified portions of the report read.

George Washington University professor Thomas Nagy stumbled across the document in 1998 during online research about depleted uranium. The subject line of the Pentagon paper read: “Effects of bombing on Disease Occurrence in Baghdad.”

Its analysis, as Nagy said, was blunt. “Increased incidence of diseases will be attributable to degradation of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water purification/distribution, electricity, and decreased ability to control disease outbreaks.”

Nagy, 58, a World War II baby hastily baptized in a hospital basement during an allied bombing of Eastern Hungary, gets tearful discussing the document. He immigrated to America in 1949 and considers it his savior. To think that it could intentionally wreak havoc and death on hundreds of thousands of children chokes him with emotion.

“Switch the nouns,” he said. “Imagine if the document had read, ‘US Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,’” and it described in detail how to spread epidemic to the US civilian population.

“It would be called terrorism,” he said. “Or worse. Genocide."

The Pentagon dismisses the document today. Defense Intelligence Agency spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Jim Brooks called it an assessment written for US policymakers, but he said he didn’t know who had requested it or for what purpose.

“It’s too long ago,” Brooks said. “If you have this report, the best thing to do is to then look at what policies went into place.... There are no sanctions that prevent [Hussein] from sustaining the water treatment program” and caring for his people.

Security at What Price?
But Hussein has delivered on his part of the UN Oil-for-Food program, according to the UN, which has 158 observers in Iraq monitoring the movement of supplies. Since the relief effort began in 1997, Hussein has never been cited for diverting or hoarding supplies, said Hasmik Egian, a UN spokeswoman for the Oil-for-Food program.

Meanwhile, Ohio Democrat Rep. Tony Hall complained in the spring of 2000 about US efforts to block crucial water and sanitation supplies. Following a five-day tour of hospitals, schools, clinics, and water-treatment plants from Baghdad to Babylon, Hall wrote to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

“Holds on contracts for the water and sanitation sector are a prime reason for the increases in sickness and death,” he said, citing 19 supply contracts for dual-use items such as water purification chemicals, chlorinators, chemical dosing pumps, and water tankers.
The US, he said, was responsible for blocking 18 of these contracts.
In 1996, when Albright was the US ambassador to the United Nations, Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” asked her about the sanctions and the deaths of Iraqi children. Albright said it was America’s responsibility to make sure the Gulf War did not have to be fought again.

“I think it is a very hard choice,” she told Stahl, referring specifically to the deaths of Iraq’s children, “but the price, we think the price is worth it.”

Would Do It All Over Again
When US Air Force Col. John A. Warden III devised the pinpoint strategy for toppling Hussein in 1991, he said he didn’t know his plan would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. To this day, he said, he has never heard of the Defense Intelligence Agency document outlining Iraq’s water treatment vulnerabilities.

Yet Warden, like much of the United States, takes pride in the swift routing of Iraq. He does not accept blame for civilian suffering. That falls on Hussein.

“Here is an evil guy…who was willing to stand around and see that kind of thing happen,” he said. “If you put someone in a hopeless position and keep grinding your heel into them, that is one thing. But we did not do that. The blame, 100 percent, goes to a guy named Saddam Hussein.”

The architect of the Desert Storm Air Campaign is retired now, living in Georgia, and has written two books, The Air Campaign and Winning in Fast Time. Warden, 58, believes another strike at Iraq would—or should—follow his Gulf War blueprint.

“When we went to war our objective was to reduce Iraq’s capability to be strategic,” he said. “In order to make that happen, the last thing you want to do is focus your efforts solely on the military¾that is where you get your least results.... We shut down the electrical system within the first hours of war.... We shut down the internal flow of oil by knocking out the refineries. We also knocked out the communications.

“In my view, it was extraordinarily successful.... Wars are devastating on civilians. Always have been.”

It is for that reason that Hans von Sponeck, 62—a man born near Hamburg, Germany 10 days before the start of World War II and the son of a German SS officer executed by the Nazis for resisting Hitler—is thinking today about putting his life on the line.

Fifty activists spurred on by the Chicago-based anti-sanctions group called Voices in the Wilderness have pledged to serve as human shields in Iraq in anticipation of a US air raid on Baghdad. Von Sponeck has been asked to go along.

“It’s a difficult decision,” he said. “It’s not that I lack courage. I have a family. I have three children.”

Greg Barrett is a freelance writer working in Washington, DC, and a full-time national correspondent for Gannett News Service.