December 23, 2001
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:"No Sanctions" crowd forgot to speak to the locals
In a recent post, I made lengthy comment about the illogical arguments against the sanctions on Iraq.
A reader pointed out an article by Michael Rubin in the (June 2001) New Republic on the contrast between Northern Iraq and the rest of the country under sanctions:
But Sulaymaniyah, a city in northern Iraq with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, tells a different story. Indeed, across a crescent-shaped slice of northern Iraq, the picture is the same: The shops are stocked, and the people are eating. Northern Iraq lives under exactly the same international sanctions as the rest of the country. The difference here is that local Kurdish authorities, in conjunction with the United Nations, spend the money they get from the sale of oil. Everywhere else in Iraq, Saddam does. And when local authorities are determined to get food and medicine to their people--instead of, say, reselling these supplies to finance military spending and palace construction--the current sanctions regime works just fine. Or, to put it more bluntly, the United Nations isn't starving Saddam's people. Saddam is.....All of which helps explain why, despite the inconveniences, residents here don't want sanctions weakened--they want them strengthened. Indeed, when the Bush administration recently announced it was going to use "smart sanctions" to target the military--not Iraqi civilians--one farmer in a rural village asked rhetorically how the administration could talk about Saddam's war crimes one day and reward him the next. Didn't the United States care that Saddam started two wars and used gas against Iraq's non-Arab population? Then again, whatever doubts northern Iraqis have about American resolve, it's better than the sheer disdain they feel for the French and the Russians, who, they say, sacrifice freedom to win lucrative contracts from Saddam. "Surely they understand that we hate Saddam," says one northern Iraqi deputy minister. "Once he is gone, we won't forget that they wanted to help him."
The arguments for weakening or removing the sanctions peddled on Lowly Delusions suffer from what Steven Den Beste calls "deeply loving and compassionate chauvinistic contempt." There is no moral high ground for those who suggest we ease up. Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at December 23, 2001 11:37 PM | Technorati inbound links