The toll of war paid by Iraqis

Reviewed by Hada Sarhan

From: the Jordan Times (used w/permission)

Iraq, The Human Cost of History

Edited By Tareq Ismael and William Haddad

Published By Pluto Press, London, 2003. Pp. 267

"THE CHAIN of evil-hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the abyss of annihilation," said Martin Luther King.

This book extensively investigates the cost incurred by the people of Iraq due to a war waged by the military, diplomacy and economic cruelty through sanctions.

The volume is made-up of articles and analyses by seven prominent intellectuals and academics known both as supporters of social justice and for the high academic standard of their work.

Thomas Nagy, an associate professor at George Washington University, writes in an article titled "Safeguarding `our' American children by saving `their' Iraqi children: Gandhian transformation of the DIA's genocide planning, assessment and cover-up documents" that he discovered a US report inside an unorganised heap of 40,000 documents on the Department of Defence Gulflink website that was hid from American voters by classifying it as "military secret" in 1991. [Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)]

Nagy explains that the document, titled "Iraq water treatment vulnerabilities", spelled out how sanctions could be employed to prevent Iraq from supplying clean water to its people.

The fact that this document is dated Jan. 22, 1991, reveals that the United States government was well aware of the impact of sanctions and suggests that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis may have even been a "desirable goal", according to Nagy.

Stephen Zunes, associate professor and chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Programme at the University of San Francisco, writes in the article titled "The US obsession with Iraq and the triumph of militarism" that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq constitutes an "important precedent", being the first test of the new "pre-emption" policy articulated by President George Bush, which declares that the US has the right to invade sovereign countries and overthrow their governments if they are seen potentially hostile to US interests.

"The decision to invade was less a reflection of any real threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime than a manifestation of a unipolar world system where international legal conversations and institutions can now be abrogated if the world's one remaining superpower deems it necessary," writes Zunes, also Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project and associate editor of Peace Review.

According to Eric Hering, a senior lecturer in international polices at the University of Bristol, the sanctions on Iraq have been maintained despite their human cost because US officials believed that the sanctions served US interests while the cost to people in Iraq is acceptable and "the price is worth it", as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to UN, put it.

With British assistance, writes Hering, the US has worked hard on propaganda campaigns based on misrepresentations of what is actually going on.

"US and British officials often end up believing their own propaganda, as it is psychologically easier to accept it as the truth and also because their facility in working within that framework is an indispensable part of being accepted within their national bureaucracies," writes Hering.

The book can be found at Bustan Lil Kutob bookstore in Shmeisani. It can also be purchased on Amazon.com.

Originally published in the Jordan Times on December 1, 2003