Constructive Genocides
1 . THE IRAQ SANCTIONS -
REGIME KILLINGS
In terms of the number of human lives taken and the
awareness among policymakers that this was the likely consequence of their
policies, perhaps the largest genocidal action of the last thirty years was the
economic sanctions imposed upon Iraq following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in
August 1990. First adopted by Security Council Resolution 661 to compel Iraq’s
withdrawal from Kuwait, the U.S. and British victors in the 1991 war on Iraq pressed
the Council to adopt a new Resolution 687, following Iraq’s defeat, that
demanded the destruction of Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons
programs, as well as its ballistic missiles; a Special Commission was created
to supervise Iraq’s compliance. (37) In this way, a mechanism was established
that enabled the United States and Britain, by denying that Iraq was in
compliance with UN 687, to compel the Special Commission and Security Council
to find that Iraq was not in compliance, thereby preventing the lifting of the
sanctions.
Enforced chiefly by the U.S. and British governments,
UN 687’s devastating sanctions prevented Iraq from repairing its water,
sanitation, and electrical systems, all of which were deliber-ately destroyed
during the massive bombing attacks of the war. A postwar assessment by the New
York Times of the “Bush Administration’s internal findings” on the damage
inflicted by the U.S. bombing campaign reported that “Iraq has, for some time
to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities
of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.”
One confidential source, who “played a central role in the air campaign,” even
admitted to the Washington Post that so-called “Strategic bombing ... strikes
[were aimed] against ‘all those things that allow a nation to sustain itself’”
(38)—all those things “indispensable to the survival of [Iraq’s] civilian
population,” to use the phrasing of the 1979 Protocol Additional to the Geneva
Conventions. (39)
Over the next thirteen years, none of these systems
was returned to their pre-war state. Thomas Nagy observes that as early as
January 22, 1991, just days into the bombing phase of the war, the U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency predicted that as Iraq depends on the importation of
“specialized equipment and some chemicals” to supply its people with clean
water, the failure to “secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure
drinking water for much of the population,” and lead to “increased incidences,
if not epidemics, of disease.” Based on this and subsequent U.S. planning
documents, Nagy concludes that the “United States knew sanctions had the
capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the
consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child
mortality.... The United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying
the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives.”
(40)
The sanctions and the Sanctions Committee’s power to
dispense or to withhold repair projects led Denis Halliday, the first UN
Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs in Iraq, to resign his post in 1998,
calling the impact of the sanctions “genocide.” His successor, Hans von
Sponeck, quickly reached the same conclu-sion and resigned as well. A UN
assessment in 1999 found “continuing degradation of the Iraqi economy with an
acute deterioration in the living conditions of the Iraqi population and severe
strains on its social fabric.... [T]he Iraqi people would not be undergoing
such deprivations in the absence of the prolonged measures adopted by the
Security Council and the effects of war.” (41) A mortality survey carried out
jointly that same year by UNICEF and the World Health Organization estimated
that “children under five are dying at twice the rate they were [in 1989],” and
that had this not been the case, half-a-million more children would have been
alive at the end of the decade. (42)
This phase of the great Iraqi bloodbath “was not
accidental nor the result of ignorance,” von Sponeck writes. “While [the
U.S.–U.K. representatives on the Sanctions Committee] would painstakingly
scrutinize Iraq Government orders for electricity spare parts and replacement
equipment and would, phase by phase, block significant numbers of purchase
requests for areas under Baghdad’s jurisdiction, the Sanctions Committee
approved, with rare exceptions, all orders for Kurdistan.” (43) The same
pattern was repeated for all infrastructure repair requests, as “almost 100 percent
of all items put on hold by the sanctions committee of the UN Security Council
during the oil-for-food programme period (1996–2003) was due to the U.S. and
U.K. governments.” The sanctions regime “indiscriminately punished the Iraqi
population as a whole,” von Sponeck writes elsewhere, and was judged
“unequivocally illegal under existing international humanitarian law and human
rights law” by the UN Economic and Social Council. (44) Indeed, this murderous
economic warfare was labeled “sanctions of mass destruction” by John Mueller
and Karl Mueller in 1999; they estimated that the sanctions had “been a
necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by
all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.” (45)
The normalization of this deliberate U.S. mass
killing of civilians was starkly revealed in May 1996, when CBS TV’s Lesley
Stahl asked UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright whether she believed the “price”
of a reported half-a-million Iraqi children deaths was “worth it.”
Lesley Stahl: We have heard that a half a million
children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And,
you know, is the price worth it?
Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard
choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it. (46)
Of course, the sanctions-regime never brought about
the removal of Saddam Hussein, and was probably never intended to remove his
regime; it did, however, fulfill the U.S. (George Bush I, Bill Clinton, and
George Bush II) and U.K. (John Major and Tony Blair) policy of reversing the
material and political gains of the once rapidly modernizing country of Iraq as
a leading power in the Middle East, while weakening it in advance of an
invasionoccupation that began in 2003.
We may note that Lesley Stahl didn’t question
Albright’s response, much less criticize her for it; nor for that matter did a
single one of the “humanitarian” war and “responsibility to protect”
intellectuals with whose work we are familiar. This thirteenyear-long mass
killing was Constructive; Iraq’s hundreds-of-thousands of victims were unworthy
of official notice and therefore of no interest to the establishment media and
intellectuals. The deaths inflicted by the “sanctions of mass destruction” are
thus not mentioned in establishment accounts as a U.S. “failure” to respond to
the crime of genocide in this “age of genocide.” Nor, with the United States a
perpetrator rather than a bystander, is the question of accountability ever
raised.
This deep bias can be seen in the media treatment
shown in Table 1, which tabulates the newspapers’ usage of the word “genocide”
for the Iraq sanctions regime (and the later Iraq inva-sion and occupation),
among other cases of mass killings. (47) The table shows that there were only
eighty references to “genocide” stemming from the sanctions regime, whereas for
Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Darfur, four Nefarious cases, the usage ran to 481,
323, 3,199, and 1,172, respectively, despite the much greater toll from the
Iraq sanctions in all but the Rwanda case; and for the Congo, a Benign case,
usage was a mere seventeen.
TABLE 1: Differential
attributions of “genocide” to different theaters of atrocities [A]
|
Theater:
Perpetrator
or Cause
|
Estimated
Deaths per
Theater
|
Print Media
Use of
‘Genocide’
per Theater
|
Ratio of
‘Genocide’
Usage (80,
Iraq Sanctions
as Base [B]
|
Ratio of
Deaths to
‘Genocide’
Usage [C]
|
|
Iraqi
Population:
Economic
Sanctions
|
800,000
|
80
|
1
|
10,000 to 1
|
|
Iraqi
Population:
The U.S.-U.K.
War and
Occupation
|
1,000,000
|
13 [D]
|
0.2
|
76,923 to 1
|
|
Bosnian
Muslims
|
33,000
|
13 [D]
|
6
|
69 to 1
|
|
Kosovo
Albanians
|
4,000
|
323
|
4
|
12 to 1
|
|
Rwanda
|
800,000
|
3,199
|
40
|
250 to 1
|
|
Dem. Rep.
of Congo
|
5,400,000
|
17
|
0.2
|
317,647 to 1
|
|
Darfur
|
300,000
|
1,172
|
15
|
256 to 1
|
[A] Factiva database searches carried out under the Newspapers:
All” category in January 2009. The exact search parameters are described in
note 47. We used the database operators w/5 and * to capture all variations of
the word “genocide” (e.g., genocidal, genocidaires) occurring anywhere in the
title or text within five words of the other primary search term; and we used
the limiter not to exclude all items that also mentioned any one or more of the
other search terms.
[B] This table adopts the number 80 (Row 1, Col. 3)
as its base for all subsequent calculations; the totals in Col. 4 result from
the totals in Col. 3 divided by 80.
[C] The totals in Col. 5 result from the totals in
Col. 2 divided by the totals in Col. 3.
[D] See Table 2, below.
If we use the Iraq Economic Sanctions period as our
base period for comparison, setting the eighty instances of media use of
“genocide” to describe this period equal to the number 1, we see in Column 4 of
Table 1 the extent of media bias. The bare ratios for usage of these six cases
of mass killings are 0.2 for the 2003–2009 war (“genocide” was used to describe
this period onefifth as often as the Sanctions period), 6 for Bosnia (six times
as often), 4 for Kosovo, 40 for Rwanda, 15 for Darfur, and only 0.2 for the
Congo (unlike the Sanctions period and the Iraq war, this is a Benign case).
Adjusting these for the actual numbers killed, the ratios of death-tolls to
usage of “genocide” flies out of sight for Iraq and especially for the Congo
(see Column 5), where the victims are very numerous but unworthy, in contrast with
the victims of Western targets. As we will see, the bias is maintained for
other bloodbaths based on their political status.
2 . THE IRAQ INVASION - OCCUPATION
It is notorious that the U.S. media, some by their
own belated admission, (48) served as virtual government press agents during
the eighteen-month run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Although the
devastating effects of the ongoing U.S. war and occupation have been harder to
ignore than were the effects of the thirteen-year-long sanctions regime
(largely because U.S. troops have been on the scene and suffering significant
casualties, though only a small percentage of the total), the major political,
media, and intellectual sectors of the U.S. establishment still have proven remarkably
able to downplay the suffering and human losses of Iraq’s civilian population.
When serious studies estimated Iraqi deaths since the
start of the war in March 2003 at 98,000, then climbing to 655,000, and then
again to more than one million, with the overwhelming majority of these deaths
attributed to violent causes, (49) the media and intellectuals rarely treated
Iraqi deaths as a consequence— direct or indirect—of the invasion-occupation,
let alone as a deliberately imposed bloodbath, crime against humanity, or
“genocide.” Readers may be sure that in the context of Iraq coverage, the media
never quoted Nuremberg’s Judgment or alluded to the U.S. war as a “supreme
international crime” and to its statement that the “accumulated evil of the
whole”—hence, responsibility as well—flows from the central act of aggression. (50)
Also notable is the fact that in this case where their government was the
aggressor, clearly violating the UN Charter by invading another country, the
establishment media and intellectuals almost uniformly ignored questions about
its compatibility with the rule of law. In their study of the New York Times’
coverage of war, Howard Friel and Richard Falk found that, “despite the fact
that an invasion of one country by another implicated the most fundamental
aspects of the UN Charter and international law, the New York Times’s editorial
page never mentioned the words ‘UN Charter’ or ‘international law’ in any of
its seventy editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003.” (51)
The media also failed to grant knowledgeable critics of this planned act of
aggression the time and space to express their beliefs and to call for
accountability for the responsible political leaders, though they have welcomed
commentators eager to dismiss such concerns.
The same holds true (if to a lesser degree of
exclusion) for the general humanitarian disaster in Iraq, including a
displacement crisis that remains one of the world’s gravest, with at one time
well over four million Iraqis having been driven from their homes, roughly half
of them fleeing to neighboring countries. (52) Only modest attention was given
to the destruction and looting of Iraq’s archaeological heritage, perhaps the
most valuable in the entire world. The assault started with the first Gulf War
in 1991, but greatly escalated from March 2003 into an incalculable cultural
disaster. Eleanor Robson of All Souls College placed its seriousness in
historical perspective: “You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol
invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale.” (53) The U.S.
leadership keeps good company.
It should also be noted that the pre-invasion bombing
campaign, launched by the U.S. and U.K. governments to destroy what remained of
Iraq’s air defenses as part of their preparation for the 2003 invasion, went
unreported by the news media until three years later. (54) But in 2002, the
tonnage of bombs dropped on Iraq by U.S. and U.K. fighter-bombers rose from
zero in March, to 54.6 tons in September, and 53.2 tons in December. (55)
Remarkably, although Iraq complained about these offensive breaches of the
peace, nobody paid attention, despite the fact that Iraq filed documentation
about them on a regular basis with the UN Security Council and the
Secretary-General, as it had been doing for many years. (56) This actual start
of this second phase of the great Iraqi bloodbath, as early as the spring of
2002, was never reported by any contemporaneous U.S. source we have been able
to find.
Nor have the illegalities of U.S. policy during the
occupation been carefully examined now that the removal of the former regime
has been accomplished. With UN Security Council Resolution 1546 in early June
2004, (57) the United States even managed to secure retroactive legitimation of
its military seizure of a sovereign country. In letters reproduced in the Annex
to this breathtaking rewriting of history, Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi,
who had been imposed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (i.e., by the
occupying U.S. forces) only days before, requested that the U.S. military
remain in Iraq as the leader of the so-called Multinational Force; in U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell’s reply, the United States solemnly pledged to
do so. For its part, the Security Council played along with this farce,
accepting that the “multinational force in Iraq is at the request of the
incoming Interim Government... ,” thereby adding the Council’s de jure seal of
approval to the U.S. invasion-occupation, the gravest violation of the UN
Charter in recent memory. Also unexamined by the media is the Status of Forces
Agreement between the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and
the U.S. invader-occupier, which grants U.S. forces colonial privileges. (58)
Also contrary to international law will be any new legislation drafted under a
military occupation that governs all facets of the extraction and shipment of
Iraq’s oil and gas resources, as well as the distribution of the revenues. The
latter is particularly contentious and was still incomplete well into 2009, as
the Kurdish Regional Government remains eager to strike its own deals and
serious tensions are growing inside Iraq between the Kurdish north and the Arab
south. (59)
The April and later November 2004 attacks that
destroyed much of Fallujah and depopulated a city of some 250,000 inhabitants
have been compared to the Nazis’ 1937 bombing of Guernica, Spain, (60) although
these were much larger assaults than that carried out by the Nazis, with vastly
more sophisticated and lethal weaponry and firepower, and left more devastation
and casualties. But with civilian killings largely kept off the official books,
and, even when acknowledged, treated tolerantly for these unworthy victims,
such killings and bloodbaths by the United States and its allies have been
thoroughly normalized. High officials of the new Obama administration display
no guilt about the mass killing and devastation caused by their predecessor.
Indeed, in their view, it is the Iraqis who owe the United States a debt. As
Vice President Joseph Biden explained, “we’ve expended our blood and treasure
in order to back their commitment to their constitution” (61)—a bald-faced lie,
as the U.S. “investment” was based on the fabricated threat of Iraq’s “weapons
of mass destruction” and on the real aim of projecting U.S. power into this
oilrich region. Biden’s statement also ignores the monumentally greater costs
in Iraqi blood and treasure exacted by his government’s “supreme international
crime.”
Amusingly, we can see in Table 2 that while thirteen
newspaper references to “genocide” in Iraq in the years 2004–2008 deal with the
effects of the invasion-occupation, more than triple that number, forty-eight,
apply the word to Saddam Hussein’s longsince defunct regime, and fifty-four
mention it to describe the possible consequences of a civil war or a U.S.
withdrawal. (62) As in the case of Vietnam, the real bloodbath, engineered by
the United States, cannot be acknowledged; only enemies and targets of the
United States can commit the crime officially labeled “genocide.”
TABLE 2: Attributions of
“genocide” in the case of Iraq, 2004 –2008 [A]
|
Perpetrator – Cause of the Genocide
|
Print Media Use of ‘Genocide’
|
|
The 2003 War and Occupation
|
13
|
|
The 13-Year Sanctions Regime
|
3
|
|
The Saddam Hussein Regime
|
48
|
|
Sectarian Conflict or Post-U.S. Withdrawal
|
54
|
|
Other-Irrelevant
|
30
|
[A] Factiva database searches carried out under the
“Newspapers: All” category in January 2009. The exact search parameters were
those used in Table 1, Row 2. (See note 62.)
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