Over A Quarter Of A Million Dead In Iraq!

May I point out that this actually does indicate that 83% of health-related goods were allowed through. The vehicles have obvious military uses. The heart and lung machines probably contained electronic components with potential military applications. The vaccine thing sounds like a bad judgement, erring too far on the side of caution with dubious scientific grounds - but it wasn't for no reason at all, and it demonstrates the difficulty of trying to differentiate between military and civilian goods. The US had no logical reason to want to increase the suffering of the Iraqi people, it was a huge political headache for successive US administrations.

I won't dispute the facts and figures in the reports you quoted, but the bias in their conclusions is pretty evident to me.

And they were being obstructed every step of the way. Without unrestricted access, weapons inspections are meaningless. You're not going to find evidence of wrongdoing when you're being allowed to see only what they want you to. With Saddam restricting access, it was reasonable to assume he had something to hide. In retrospect, this was probably a massive bluff to avoid showing his hand to Iran, but we had no way of knowing that at the time.

Wishful thinking. What gives us our ability to control, regulate and monitor without troops on the ground? We're entirely dependent on cooperation from the regime.

You're attributing cause and effect in a highly contentious way here. Yes, it's now apparent that Iraq's military was crippled, but it could just as well be argued that was because the sanctions were effective.

Again, you're heavy on the criticism, but don't explain how a different outcome could be achieved. I find your notion of us "keeping him in check" without military action naive.

It all comes down to the same thing - there isn't an easily defined line between military and non-military goods. We can embargo arms, but a reasonably industrialized nation can make it's own. There isn't a way to limit a country's domestic weapons industry without crippling it's industry as a whole and destroying it's economy. The Iraq sanctions debacle just proved what a blunt, ineffective tool they are. It also handed a huge propaganda gift to Saddam and created a political nightmare for Bush and Blair. This, I suspect, was one of the main motivations behind the war - it was already a mess, they probably (naively) hoped that toppling Saddam would enable them to draw a line under it.

 

Well, this is the whole point I've been making.

What right did we have to cause so much death and suffering with such an obviously, blatantly ineffective weapon as economic sanctions over such a long period? Saddam was almost entirely disarmed following the first gulf war anyway. You just can't keep punishing a people for the sins of their 'leader', but that's exactly what sanctions were doing. What was the benefit? Saddam posed no threat after 1991. Inspections while far from perfect could have prevented substantial rearmanent and made it very difficult for Saddam to make any seriously threatening moves.

To keep a population in poverty and to cause a situation which was obviously going to lead to the deaths of many thousands was an unforgivable decision and was probably made for dubious political reasons. It resulted in a massacre. Humanitarian concerns were the last consideration during the sanctions regime and in the decision to go to war.

 

Like I said, much of this is spin. If you actually read the reports by the weapons inspectors, in the early years they made massive progress in dismantling and monitoring Saddam's nuclear and chemical capabilities. When the inspectors returned in 2002 they were making huge progress and their analysis of Saddam's situation was pretty damn accurate. In fact they erred on the side of caution and over-estimated his abilities. It's pretty hard to hide substantial WMD capabilities. They thought there might be some small remaining old stockpiles (it turned out there weren't) but nothing serious. Certainly nothing worth killing hundreds of thousands over.

The lack of co-operation which occurred during the mid-nineties was largely as a result of the punitive sanctions regime which were by then seriously affecting the people and the economy. Saddam refused to continue to co-operate unless they were eased - and if they had been, I don't doubt Saddam would have resumed his co-operation - there was always the threat of re-imposing them if he stopped.

 

He could have, and undoubtably would have, rearmed had we allowed him to.

Cutting to the chase, it seems our main point at issue is the effectiveness of inspections. You seem to believe that a group of people with no military force behind them can effectively curtail the ambitions of a hostile regime. I disagree. I remember watching coverage (back around 1994 I think) of those guys in a virtual seige outside a facility that wouldn't let them in. They were utterly powerless. I think that had sanctions not been in place he would easily have been able to re-arm.

The best solution might have been to "finish the job", as Norman Schwartkopft lamented, in 1991. Unfortunately, the political realities of the coalition at the time didn't allow for that, and it would still have created the mess of an occupied Iraq. It was a very difficult situation, and It's very easy to criticise with the benefit of hindsight, but I feel that the alternative option you propose would really not have been workable.

 

I think the scene you describe would have been later than 1994. This was the period during which the US was effectively undermining UNSCOM by infiltrating their team with spies and refusing to back down on sanctions. This is why Saddam stopped co-operating with inspections, which he had been doing following 1991, when the inspections regime was extremely effective at dismantling what was left of Iraq's WMDs. Read the accounts of the weapons inspectors who were there.

 

How can you infiltrate a weapons inspection team with "spies"? Their whole purpose is to uncover the secrets the regime don't want known, it's like a form of legitimized spying anyway.

 

Again, read what the UNSCOM personnel who were there have said, I'm just repeating it. The CIA put spies into the UNSCOM team.

The point is, UNSCOM were neutral. They were there to disarm and monitor, and only to disarm and monitor. Not to report back information of military significance to foreign governments. The CIA's intentions by contrast were to gather information on Saddam's infrastructure and capabilities by means of espionage which they had no business doing. Information for instance on that military infrastructure which was NOT proscribed under UN resolutions. This is largely unreported, but it is one of the reasons why Saddam stopped co-operating with UNSCOM in the mid-nineties.

Link:
http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/ciaraq.htm

 

Worst case scenario: we lift sanctions and the weapons inspections crumble. Saddam re-arms. He stockpiles chemical agents and has the technology to threaten countries in his immediate vicinity with short range ballistic missiles and artillery. He knows what happened last time he did that. He knows that the next time he tries something stupid he will not survive. His whole case history shows that he will protect his own regime rather than risk losing it all. How likely is it that he will cause as much suffering as the sanctions regime caused the civilian population of Iraq?

On a purely utilitarian argument and the worst case scenario, the sanctions were still the wrong choice.