U.S. officials usually dismiss such talk of American responsibility as so much agitprop. They say that Iraq is a conspirator in its own decline. And they add that the country is now allowed to pump enough oil to stave off the worst suffering. Under the oil-for-food program, Iraq can sell $5.2 billion worth and use some of that money to buy food, medicines and limited medical technology. That allows Iraq to buy about one-third of the food and medicine it purchased before the war, according to Halliday. Then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright went on CBS's "60 Minutes" in 1996 and assayed a defense of the toll taken by sanctions. A reporter stated that some estimates placed child deaths in Iraq at half a million (Halliday uses the same figure), and asked if the price was worth it. "I think this is a very hard choice," she replied, "but the price -- we think is worth it." More recently, Albright returned to "60 Minutes" as secretary of state and advised reporters that "you can't lay that guilt trip on me. . . . I believe that Saddam Hussein is the one who is responsible for the tragedy of the Iraqi people." Halliday wades warily into this moral calculus of blame. He is not inclined to defend Saddam Hussein and senior Baath Party officials, and he acknowledges problems in the distribution of food and medicine. And Iraqi officials have, on occasion, insisted on ordering sophisticated medical machinery when wiser people would zero in on basic medicines and foodstuffs. There are a few streets in downtown Baghdad, he concedes, that seem strikingly cosmopolitan, full of well-fed shoppers. That, however, is but to concede the obvious: In all tragedies, even more so in authoritarian nations, the poorest and most rural suffer worst. What's more to the point, say two other U.N. inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity, is that even the best-run sanctions program could not deliver enough food and medicine to ameliorate all the suffering. Halliday seizes on that point, extends it. Let's suppose that sanctions have contributed, through poor nutrition, stunting and dysentery, to but 100,000 deaths. "I've been to hospitals where they have enough heart medicine for two patients and there are 10 who need it. How do you count that? How do you spread it?" He leans across the table toward a visitor. He uses a word he has hitherto danced around. "These are criminal calculations." He refused to talk about them at first, the four leukemia kids. It seemed one of those maudlin stories the press favors, Dickensian puff pastry that will only encourage those who favor a more punitive policy to dismiss Halliday as a "damn bunny-hugger." He relents, finally, and tells of his visit to the Saddam Hussein Medical Center in Baghdad. Once a modern hospital, it's now filled with dust, baking in the heat of an infernal summer. The air conditioning rarely works. He found four children there, three girls and a boy, gravely ill with leukemia. There was not enough medicine for all of them. So he broke his first rule in Iraq: He searched for medicines on the black market, traveling by car on the hot dusty track to Amman, Jordan. He describes his next steps in a clipped, weary monotone. "I walked back into the hospital. . . . We went to the ward, we had picked up some presents for Christmas. We found that two of the children were already dead." He didn't go to hospitals much after that. He had no solutions. And he "didn't want to be one more foreigner gawking with no answers." He recounts this in his sun-filled apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. He is 57, with bred-in-the-bone reserve. He was an assistant secretary general at the United Nations. It's considered bad form to publicly rebuke a member nation. "I used to lecture my staff about such things." He chuckles at himself. "Now I talk a lot about ends justifying means." The leukemia incident wasn't the only time he bent the rules. Frustrated at the rising death toll in late 1997, worried that the United Nations lacked the will to stand up to the United States, he took the highly unusual step of lobbying France, Russia and China to relax sanctions. And one long night in Baghdad, he typed and retyped an uncharacteristically passionate letter to his boss, Secretary General Kofi Annan. "I wrote a very nasty letter, probably too nasty," he says. "I said that we were managing a process that was resulting in thousands of deaths. I told him you have to stand up and speak." The letter fed a growing sense that he needed to leave. But he refused. His staff needed a leader, and enough could be done in the margins of sanctions policy to save thousands of lives. Since his departure he's traveled a lot -- on his own dime, he says -- to New Zealand, Iceland and all over Europe. He was invited even to Great Britain to sit on a government-sponsored panel and criticize that nation's policy toward Iraq. He has refused to return to Iraq, though, even when invited by Saddam Hussein. He doesn't want to appear sympathetic to the regime. In this country, he's found himself appearing mainly on talk radio shows and college campuses. The establishment press and Congress paid far greater attention to the resignation of a different U.N. official: UNSCOM arms inspector Scott Ritter. Ritter's narrative of Iraqi deception and the apparent willingness of the Clinton administration to look the other way resonated in a nation that has lived with the unfinished business of Saddam Hussein and Iraq since the end of the Gulf War. Ritter, the war hero, has come to function as sort of a doppelganger, his outsize personality and tougher prescriptions overshadowing Halliday's. "You can't match Ritter. He's a hero, he's got a great message to sell," Halliday says. "I play as just some jaded U.N. official. I can't match his sex appeal." The jokes conceal a tension that ran through relations between the humanitarian staff and the arms inspectors in Iraq. The arms inspectors are convinced, based on voluminous documents and intelligence sources, that Iraq still harbors at least the raw stuff of weapons of mass destruction: poison gas, biological weapons, perhaps worse. It's a history best paid notice: Saddam Hussein has used some of these weapons on his own people. But Halliday says he found it nearly impossible to get the arms inspectors to work with his staff, and to persuade them to allow some technology into the country, to repair energy and water systems. "I would drive home through raw sewage, watching children all but bathe in it," Halliday says. "But they wouldn't meet with us. They seemed worried we'd convert their cowboys into bunny-huggers." His doubts about the UNSCOM mission run deeper. It's a dangerous world, in which companies and nations across the so-called civilized world hawk the most murderous weapons, legally and illegally. To insist on staying inside Iraq until every weapon is destroyed seems a fool's errand, he says. "The inspectors destroyed tons and tons of arms and that was great," he says. "But they need a timetable." Nor is getting rid of Saddam Hussein necessarily the answer, he argues. The dictator's son, for one, is far worse, he believes. As are the many thousands of young Iraqis who have no access to Western thought and education, and who increasingly believe that Saddam Hussein is too moderate. "Beware what you ask for," Halliday says. "Killing Saddam does not necessarily solve anything." Some American officials argue that there is an exile movement with hooks deep into Iraq, and that a carefully coordinated guerrilla movement could establish power someday. Weeks after that interview, Halliday called again. He's worried that the United States appears intent on war, he's flying to Washington to hold a few meetings. Hours later, he's in Washington. The civil servant's reserve is slowly falling away. He confesses he's getting radicalized, that he feels the need to speak more deeply, more passionately. Of late, he's taken to asking American audiences if they could survive on some beans, some rice, a little yogurt and impure water. "I feel somewhat guilty for abandoning my colleagues in Iraq during this talk of bombing," he said a week ago. "Now I see the American generals talking about possibly 10,000 more Iraqi deaths. This is not a strategy, it's simply to the point of madness. "One day, we'll all be called to account and clobbered in the history books."
Instead of making excuses and try to prevent those massacres the US wants to attack Irak again and kill more innocent people without any clear fact.... I cannot understand that sorry ... something is missing in this logic.. 500,000 child died since the beginning of this embargo and WHY?????????? FOR OIL... come on there are several dictators in the world I remember Rwanda where more than one million people died ... Did the US intervene NO... I can understand doing business but I cannot understand that the price to pay is so many innocent lives.. I am sorry for the 3,000 people dead on the terrorist attack of the world trade center but I also feel sorry for the genocide of the Iraki people.. Peace to you all
By Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, September 15, 2002; Page A01 ...Although senior Bush administration officials say they have not begun to focus on the issues involving oil and Iraq, American and foreign oil companies have already begun maneuvering for a stake in the country's huge proven reserves of 112 billion barrels of crude oil, the largest in the world outside Saudi Arabia. The importance of Iraq's oil has made it potentially one of the administration's biggest bargaining chips in negotiations to win backing from the U.N. Security Council and Western allies for President Bush's call for tough international action against Hussein. All five permanent members of the Security Council -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- have international oil companies with major stakes in a change of leadership in Baghdad.... ...But with the end of sanctions that likely would come with Hussein's ouster, companies such as ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco would almost assuredly play a role, industry officials said. "There's not an oil company out there that wouldn't be interested in Iraq," one analyst said... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18841-2002Sep14.html It's all about oil, $$$, and power, all else is lipservice, media spin, and rhetoric. Human lives mean nothing, Oil/ Energy groups get fatter, and our solder's and civilian's blood gets spilled. If as many have come to believe, that the energy cartels have produced and helped elect this administration not to mention that they play a pivotal role in the US foreign policy, then of course they want their return on their investment. And there is a lot of $$$$ at stake. Election campaigns, and media control cost a lot, but the returns on that venture are huge when it pays off. Josh
Hey, i will be the first person to say i am wrong!!!! i misspoke....i appreciate you pointing out my error. please accept my humble apology for the error.
...Josh, Thanks for your reply to my question. But I was asking about Iraq specifically. What do those that are against a war with Iraq suggest we do exactly? Sit back? work through the UN (for another 11 futile years)? I'm all ears.... No problem. It was more of a general answer. With Iraq specifically, not sure what the final answer could be, but war should be our last option if an option at all. But I'm not sure how big of threat to us he is if at all. For 11 years we have heard nothing of him up untill last 1-2 months. (very interesting for the media to hit us more and more with war on Iraq the closer we were getting to 9/11) If you have a min read the next post on .....Search for the Saddam Bomb... If we remove him and how ( and the devil as we all know is in the details) who is going to fill the vacuum? We are not even done with Afghanistan, terrorists are out there ( and many in our cities). So if I may answer in a different, way. We may need to rethink our priorities. Instead of bombarding the public that we will go in and level them. Lets focus on the more real threats. Did you happen to watch C-Span the last couple of nights on hearings about all the info we had on the 9/11 attacks? Information was overwhelming, especially between spring of 2001 to August 2001. It was enough there that in August of 2001 we had even a time table of high possibility airplane attack most likely 747 series in the next 1-2 months. Findings were escalated to upper level gov't officials but nothing was done. Maybe fixing that type of problem would be of higher priority? Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, China, North Korea, Philipines..heck most if not all of the nations are having problems with crooks and madmen at the helm. We have many of them here too. Integral part of humankind's history. Is it our job to police the world? And the way we are going we act like judge jury and executioner. We need to tell the public the truth, but that cannot be, because if the public gets empowered, then how would the select few that operate behind the scenes would keep on fleecing it in countless ways. We want his oil, and an excuse to go in. If we are true to our principles and democracy and all the values for which America stands, we should leave them alone, and focus on the better problems. Josh
...Why, if Saddam is a madman, has he not used gas or anthrax on us? Osama would â in a heartbeat. Probable answer: Saddam does not want himself, his sons, his legacy, his monuments, his dynasty, his army and his country obliterated and occupied by Americans, and himself entering the history books as the dumbest Arab of them all. Rational fear has deterred this supposedly irrational man. Has it not? Why, then, is the United States, having lost 3,000 people in a terrorist atrocity by an al-Qaida network that is alive and anxious to kill thousands more, about to launch a new war on a country that even its neighbors â Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia â believe to be contained? What is this obsession with Saddam Hussein? ... http://www.theamericancause.org/patsearchingforprint.htm Josh
Josh, Again I do not see an answer to my question in your post. You mention that he hasn't done anything and therefore why should we go after him. Then you digress to other topics. I understand everything else you are saying (we want his oil, other despotic governments around the world, are we the police of the world, etc.) I hear you there. But again I ask you, what should we do with Iraq? In one clear sentence please. I'm just trying to understand your viewpoint regarding this point.
Babak, In a simpler sentence: Just leave them alone and let the Iraqi people take their problems and solve them. Why do we need or have to do something and why now about Iraq? hmm. that was 2 sentences, first one applies directly Second, to get your opinion on why we need to do something about Iraq out of all the nations in the world and why now? Josh
Many people that are against an attack at this point are harboring some kind of resentment that has nothing to do with Iraq. A good example is TraderFut who thinks anybody in favor of an attack on an arab country is a racist. The rest of them seem to be so negative and cynical that they ignore anything that doesn't fit their views. Other than offering them Prozac and a hug, I don't know what to do with them. To TraderFut: move to america if you aren't already here, become a citizen, find a community that you like, and live happily ever after. Don't waste your life energy defending Sadam Hussein.
OK, then when he attacks his own and the neighbors around him, are we to step in then? When the U.N. then drafts a resolution to stop him and they need military expertise and might, and we say that we object and won't participate, will Russia and China unite and transport the necessary equipment and manpower there to get the job done? If we choose to get involved with removing Sadamn then, do we get an extra fee for the extended equipment use? Heaven help the administration at home if an American dies in the struggle then (actually, at anytime). The real trouble that I have with your statement is this. What if the Iraqi people don't think there is anything wrong with developing their nuclear expertise and capabilities to kill THE capitalist dog America (the actual mythical rhetoric beast) and all those who support it? Think about this too, he wasn't in Kuwait to show America any military threat. You see these extremists generally don't want to find a way to live with you. Their particular answer/solution from Ala is that they want YOU dead at any and all costs! And everyone can see that Sadamn is an extremist. That leave him alone policy that you speak of, maybe we should have followed it in Kosovo? Slobo would have loved you for it. We only helped remove him because, uh, he was killing innocent people. There were no weapons of mass destruction involved. Why did he have to go? I think that double speak is the trouble here. The world is troubled because we follow multiple policies depending on who asks us and what we can get out of our actions rather than the humanitarian game we usually present. If we lose more lives because we waited to get involved in Iraq, will the press and the naysayers then say, "Dumb administration policies. Why didn't we get him when we SUSPECTED that there was a problem? What did the administration know and hold back from saying then that would have saved the taxpayers money and the military lives now? Why did we wait?" Hmm, sounds eerily like all the noise that I hear in congress and with the families who lost loved ones during the terrorist attacks. In this case I say, end the trouble before it becomes major trouble. You always, ALWAYS, want to remove a tick before it buries its head into the skin.