Invisible War: How 13 Years of US-Imposed Sanctions Devastated Iraq

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Invisible War: How Thirteen Years of US-Imposed Economic Sanctions Devastated Iraq Before the 2003 Invasion

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Welcome to Democracy Now!, Joy Gordon. Can you take us back to 1990, how these sanctions were put in place, and what effect they had on Iraq over the thirteen years that they were held there?

JOY GORDON: Sure. The sanctions were imposed in August of 1990, so almost exactly twenty years ago, after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. The sanctions were almost completely comprehensive. They precluded Iraq from any imports and any exports, with very limited exceptions. They allowed medicine, and they allowed food, quote, "in humanitarian circumstances." But that phrase wasn’t defined. In fact, what happened for the first eight months is that within the Security Council committee that maintained the sanctions—it was called the 661 Committee, after the resolution. Each country had veto power. It operated by consensus. And for the first eight months, the US, accompanied by a couple of others, but absolutely the US, would not even allow Iraq to import food. This is a country that had been importing two-thirds of its food. There was a fight, for example, that went on for weeks and weeks over whether or not Iraq could import a shipment of powdered milk, and the US opposed that just intransigently.

After March of 1991, after the bombing of the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was allowed to import food without restriction, but the real problem was infrastructure, because in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the US-led allied forces bombed all of Iraq’s infrastructure—water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, telecommunications towers, roads, bridges. The country was reduced to a dysfunctional country in every regard almost overnight. UN envoys going into Iraq reported that Iraq has been reduced to a preindustrial country. One described the situation as "near apocalyptic." And it was that combination of things, the massive bombing of all infrastructure combined then with the sanctions, that made it impossible for Iraq to ever recover. It was reduced a level of development from a sophisticated country with a very high standard of living to a country that was, in the words of the envoy again, a "preindustrialized country."

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SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Joy Gordon, finally, put this all in context of the situation in Iraq right now. After thirteen years of sanctions, the war was launched, following by the US invasion and occupation. How did the sanctions play a part in determining Iraq’s fate in 2010?

JOY GORDON: Well, Nir Rosen was talking about how Iraq has been reduced to a preindustrial country. But I think we saw that already the case. We saw exactly a lost generation. There was a delegation of staffers, of congressional staffers, who went to Iraq in, I think it was, August of 2000. And they wrote a report, which they circulated widely throughout Congress. And in it, they had a quote from the head of UNICEF, who they had met with when they were there. And she said, if the sanctions are not lifted—the sanctions are resulting in such a profound isolation, such a profound collapse of education of any kind, of the possibility of equipping and training an entire generation to be competent, to have a sense of themselves in the world, to have any sense of a future. She said, "There will be a generation, or more than a generation, that will not be able to recover from this, and that will be very dangerous." That quote was included in a report that was circulated to nearly every member of Congress in the year 2000. So, none of this is surprise. It was documented constantly throughout the '90s, beginning quite literally in March of 1991. It was—this information was completely well known within the Security Council, and it was documented by the most reputable NGOs in the world, by UN agencies, constantly. Everyone knew that Iraq was collapsing. Everyone knew that there would be a lost generation, that there would not be the means to sustain the fundamental conditions of life needed for just a decent human life.

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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/1/invisible_war_how_thirteen_years_of