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Issues
Effect of Sanctions "4,500 children under the age of 5 are dying each month from hunger and disease... Many are living on the very margin of survival." UNICEF, October 1996 "More than one million Iraqis have died - 567,000 of them children - as a direct consequence of economic sanctions... As many as 12 percent of the children surveyed in Baghdad are wasted, 28 percent stunted, and 29 percent underweight." United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), December 1995 "Sanctions have taken the lives of well over one million persons, 60% of whom are children under five years of age. The 1991 bombing campaign destroyed electric, water and sewage plants, as well as agricultural, food, and medical production facilities. All of these structures continue to be inoperative, or function at sub-minimal levels, because the sanctions have made it impossible to buy spare parts for their repair. This bombing campaign, together with the total embargo in place since August 1990 was, and is, an attack against the civilian population of Iraq." "U.S Bishops' Statement on Iraq," January 1998 (Signed by 53 Catholic Bishops) Lesley Stahl: "We have heard that half a million children have died. That is more than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price - we think the price is worth it." An exchange on CBS's 60 Minutes, May 1996 "The conditions in Iraq today under the UN economic sanctions and the Oil-For-Food programme constitute famine conditions. The average birth weight of a child in Iraq today is less than five pounds. That is an indicator of famine. The Oil-For-Food programme is something that the UN should be ashamed of. It is a continuation of the genocide that the economic embargo has placed on Iraq. I say genocide because it is an intentional programme to destroy a culture, a people, a country - economic sanctions are known to do that [Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright herself acknowledged half a million dead children back in 1996. Yet the member states - the United States and United Kingdom in particular - have continued the economic embargo despite their knowledge of the death rate of Iraqi children. That is genocide." Dennis Halliday, Ex-UN Assistant Secretary-General Heading the UNHumanitarian Mission in Iraq, interviewed in Al-Ahram Weekly, (Cairo, Egypt, July 19, 2000) How Dangerous is Iraq? "When you ask the question, 'Does Iraq possess militarily viable biological or chemical weapons?' the answer is a resounding 'NO!' 'Can Iraq produce today chemical weapons on a meaningful scale?' 'NO!' 'Can Iraq produce biological weapons on a meaningful scale?' 'NO!' 'Ballistic missiles?' 'NO!' It is 'no' across the board. So from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has been disarmed. Scott Ritter, UNSCOM Weapons Inspector "My judgment would be that the probability of him [Hussein] initiating an attack - let me put a time frame on it - in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low." Declassified dialogue from a closed Oct. 2, 2002 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, in which a senior intelligence witness was asked what Saddam would do if he felt threatened "The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest." Hans Von Sponeck, Former UN Humanitarian Aid Coordinator for Iraq, The Guardian, July 22, 2002. Question of Depleted Uranium Depleted Uranium was used for the first time in history by the US Military in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. It constitutes the first introduction of a nuclear weapon into the "conventional battlefield," and is a technical breach of all the non-proliferation treaties that the US has signed. An estimated 300 to 500 tons of depleted uranium were dropped on Iraq in 1991, the remains of which are there on the ground, in the air and in the water. The President wants to send in 250,000 American troops. How many of these young servicemen and women will be poisoned? The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military Industrial Complex, by Dr. Helen Caldicott. The New Press, New York, NY, 2002. Reviewed by Bill Griffin. All told, anywhere from 40 to 300 tons of radioactive uranium were left littering the battlefields of the Gulf war, several times the 25 tons that a report by Britain's Atomic Energy Authority concluded could cause "500,000 potential deaths." Army Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI) "Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium Use in the U.S. Army," June 1995
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