I think Iraq will be different because it was a much bigger issue than the war in Afghanistan. The American people will be more interested in whats going on there after the war, so that will attract the media, which will lead to politicians directing more effort into restructuring Iraq. I don't deny that oil will be a major factor in the US wanting to rebuild Iraq instead of leaving it up to the natives, although I don't think oil was a reason Bush lead us to the war. major oil companies have an interest in making sure Iraq's oil industry works well so they can buy more oil, and that will lead to an expanding of the rest of Iraq's economy.
-Ah!!! And of course US companies will have big profits by rebuilding the damage that US itself inflicted. Of course, this is not imperialism?
Now compare that to your estimate of 3000-4000 (according to IraqBodyCount.com its 5000-7000, but that site was created by liberals and is probably exaggerated).
-Actually these ´reports could be highly underestimated, since the collapse of Iraqi government let the country withouth a working health system, able to collect epidemiological data. Furthermore, they don´t include the so called latter mortality, described in NEJM
We should have "finished the job" in 1991, but George Bush Sr. was relying too much on his coalition, which only agreed to free Kuwait, and he expected the the Shiite rebellion he incited would drive Saddam out while his army was recovering from the war.
-In his autobiography, Colin Powell argues that it was better to allow Saddam remain in power, since he would be the least of the evils He also argues that the embrago would be useful to weaken Iraq. Better said, the US decided to allow Saddam to remain in charge and pusnish the Iraqi people as a whole
Many high level conservatives have pressured for war in Iraq ever since the first Gulf War ended, but George Bush Sr., Clinton, and GW (before 9/11) ignored them. Immediately after 9/11 the conservatives pressured for war against Iraq again, but it was decided to invade Afghanistan first. That is why the war in Iraq happened when it did, we (or at least the top level conservatives) were concerned about atrocities in Iraq the whole time.
-That´s hipocrisy. The US troops did nothing when the Iraqi Army crushed the Shiite rebellion in 1991. And the worst crimes of Saddam happened when he was a good allied of the US (and of the USSR too), including the killing of thousands of members of Iraqi communist party, an attrocity that probably was hailed by US conservatives.
The effects of the economic embargo you mentioned were most likely exaggerated, although I aknowledge that it probably killed thousands. The UNICEF report claiming 500,000 children were killed by sanctions relied heavily on future projections of the population, many of which turned out to be wrong.
-Given the dramatic increases of infant mortality and the dramatic economic regression (Iraqi GDP fell by 50-65%), hundreds of thousands of excess deaths are highly possible. And the UNICEF report didn´t count how much adults died as a consequence of sanctions, so an overestimation of children deaths can be balanced by an underestimation of adult deaths. Of course the real numbers are don´t know, but a smaller decrease in GDP in Russia (1991-2000), which was much more self sufficient economically than Iraq resulted in 3-5 million deaths, and Russia even was not subjected to sanctions. Another point of disagreement is the relative fault of Saddam and UN in this disaster. I think that Saddam diverted a lot of resources to palaces and weapons, but, even if Olaf Palme were in charge he would find difficult to avoid an humanitarian disaster under these conditions.
http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/01/iraq-memo.htm.....
The crisis has been particularly acute in the area of public health, putting millions of Iraqis, if not an entire generation, at grave risk. The humanitarian panel noted that communicable diseases that had previously been brought under control "have now become part of the endemic pattern of the precarious health situation" (para. 21). Chronic malnutrition has affected nearly one in four Iraqi children for much of the last decade. UNICEF, comparing the 1984-89 and 1994-99 periods in the government-controlled center and south of the country, found that infant mortality had increased from 47 to 108 deaths per 1000 live births, while child mortality (under five years of age) has increased from 56 to 131 deaths per 1000 live births.(7) This is a rate of increase that is unprecedented. Put simply, children under five are dying at more than twice the rate of ten years ago. Lack of access to sufficient and appropriate food and medicine has been one element, but also crucial has been the degradation of the water and sanitation sectors, contributing to chronic intestinal and acute respiratory infections.
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The devastating impact of the sanctions is largely a consequence of their unprecedentedly comprehensive scope and duration, coupled with the fact that their imposition followed the military campaign to compel Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. This campaign, conducted under the authority conferred by Resolution 678 (1990), included air attacks that crippled most of Iraq's electrical power system. Because of the centrality of the country's electric power grid to water and sewage treatment, the health care system, agricultural irrigation, and other vital civilian areas, these attacks have had grave civilian consequences. The embargo, in turn, has severely impeded the repair and reconstruction of these sectors that together function as a life support system for most of Iraqi society. More than nine years after the war, it is less and less possible to resort to the make-shift repairs and cannibalization of parts that for a number of years enabled the country to keep in operation some of its pre-war stock of generators, transformers, water pumps, and similar sorts of equipment.
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This physical breakdown has been accompanied by the devastation of the country's human resource infrastructure. Real incomes and purchasing power of the great majority of Iraqis plummeted, leading many salaried professionals and skilled workers to emigrate or to shift to casual unskilled labor. This systematic "de-skilling" of the population has been aggravated by the severe intellectual isolation stemming from the extension of the embargo to cover professional and scientific journals and books as well as travel outside the country to professional conferences and the like. The damage to the country's physical and human infrastructure and the acutely distressed income levels of most of the population have seriously compromised the beneficial impact of a program limited to commodities alone.
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The economic siege of the country has contributed directly to the general pauperization of the vast majority of people. The comprehensiveness and protracted nature of these sanctions, now in their tenth year, have had long-term consequences by, in particular, impeding the repair of the country's infrastructure--communication, transportation, education, government services. These generalized humanitarian consequences have radically complicated and limited the possibilities for meeting basic civilian needs under a program restricted to the delivery of commodities. The Secretary-General expressed this in his two-year review when he noted that "there is little experience with the type of problems encountered when the whole spectrum of basic services starts to fail, as is happening in Iraq" (para. 55).
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The policies of the government of Iraq have greatly compounded and magnified the humanitarian crisis. These include Iraq's failure to comply fully with Resolution 687; its refusal between 1991 and 1996 to implement any "oil-for-food" arrangement and its mixed record of cooperation since then; and its use of scarce available resources for non-humanitarian purposes--including military purposes as well as palaces and monuments--thereby redirecting the consequences of sanctions away from itself and onto vulnerable civilians. The recent reports of the Secretary-General on the operation of the humanitarian program have criticized the government's excessive warehousing of medicines and failure to order foods specially designed for the nourishment of infants, small children, and nursing mothers, and also noted Iraq's failure to cooperate with the program by routinely not providing government escorts for observer teams, thus preventing them from carrying out their duties. Broadly speaking, it is clear that the Iraqi government is not fulfilling its obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to use "the maximum of its available resources," including "international assistance and cooperation," to provide an adequate standard of living and improve living standards.
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At the same time, the member states of the Council, given their responsibility to the international community as members, have an obligation not to destroy or undermine the right of people to an adequate standard of living, the improvement of living conditions, freedom from hunger, and the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. The Security Council must share responsibility for the enormous impact of the measures it has imposed on the well-being of Iraq's population. For this reason, we urge the Council to revise the present embargo in favor of a regime that targets specifically the ability of that government to import military and dual-use goods, and lifts restrictions on the import of civilian commodities and on financial transactions broadly, restrictions that have a disproportionately harmful impact on ordinary Iraqi people.
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The Convention on the Rights of the Child obligates States Parties, which include Iraq and all members of the Security Council with the exception of the United States, which has not signed the convention, to "take appropriate measures: (a) to diminish infant and child mortality; (b) to ensure the provision of necessary medical assistance and health care to all children; [and] (c ) to combat disease and malnutrition including...through the provision of adequate nutritious foods and clean drinking water" (Art 24, 2). While there may be varied interpretations regarding the measurement of such rights as guaranteed by the Convention, policies that in fact promote the deterioration of nutrition and health, for instance, or directly impede their realization, clearly contravene these standards.
The blame is mostly on Saddam, since we tried to make the sanctions humane by initiating the oil-for-food program, which Saddam refused to accept until 1998 or so, resulting in the deaths of many.
-The oil for food program helped very little, because a modern economy needs to be able to import in other to keep its civilian infrastructure working. Even if you can buy medicines, you can´t do too much withouth importing books teacing how to use them, or to import Rx rays or CT or Radiotherapy machines (all forbidden under sanctions-"double use equipment"). The same can be said about transportations, agriculture, industrial equipment and so on.
We also had no other option, because had we lifted sanctions, Saddam would hawhicve built up his military again and invaded another country like Kuwait. This would have killed many innocent people.
-Wrong, you could have limited the military equipments to be imported. It´s much better to put a ban (or even a restriction) over the imports of items like aircraft, tanks, missile systems and other stuff who are difficult to hide and absolutely necessary for waging offensive wars, than destroying a society, and more, the sanctions actually strenghtened Saddam, since they made Iraqi people dependent on government help (people has no jobs), which was used for political ends.
I agree with the communist party of Iraqi who argues that Iraqi people
owes nothing to USA
"The United States fully supported Saddam during his
senseless war against Iran, in which nearly a million
lives were lost on both sides," al-Dujaily said in his
tiny office on the ground floor of the former army
building. "After the invasion of Kuwait, it imposed
sanctions that did nothing to harm Saddam but killed
half a million Iraqi children."
al-Dujaily is a leader of the Iraqi communist Party.