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

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: The US invasion and occupation of Iraq over the past seven years has inflicted multiple disasters on the country. But many argue that the US war against Iraq really began more than twenty years ago. In August 1990, the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq in response to its invasion of Kuwait. The United States was instrumental in imposing and keeping the sanctions in place until May 2003. While they had a devastating impact on Iraq and its people, the sanctions are often overshadowed by the 2003 US invasion when pundits examine US policy on Iraq.

Our next guest writes of the sanctions, quote, "U.S. policymakers effectively turned a program of international governance into a legitimized act of mass slaughter." Joy Gordon is a professor of philosophy at Fairfield University and author of the new book Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions. She joins me now from Fairfield University in Connecticut.

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."

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Joy Gordon, what effect did the sanctions have on things like mortality, on public health, on education?

JOY GORDON: The sanctions—again, this is in combination with this initial devastation of all of Iraq's infrastructure—the impact was enormous. Child mortality spiked, increased by 250 percent. A country that had had negligible levels of things like cholera and typhoid, those were off the charts. There were epidemics of waterborne diseases that never really came down. The bankrupting of the state, which was one of the direct goals of the sanctions, had enormous consequences, as well, because all fundamental public services in Iraq were centralized, were dependent on the state. Food had been available in markets prior to the sanctions, but under the sanctions, the state instituted a rationing system. And according to all the UN agencies and NGOs that commented on this, they said that was the single factor that prevented famine in Iraq. But it was a state-run process. So when the state was bankrupted by the sanctions, because they could not export oil and they could not import equipment for the country to function, the result was that all public services collapsed, as well. Even the ration system started to decrease. Teachers and doctors lost wages, lost salaries. And there was a mass exodus of engineers, professionals, everything you need to run the country at a fundamental level.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the estimates that at least half-a-million children were killed as a result of these sanctions?

JOY GORDON: It's called the excess child mortality figure, which is—which means, really, how many children under five died during sanctions who would not have died without the sanctions. And that number is highly contested. The Iraqi government claimed one thing for a while; other groups claimed things for a while. But in the end, if you look at the best data and the most reliable data, it seems that it must in fact be over half-a-million children under five were dead as a result of sanctions. A medical demographer who has done the most thorough study of this puts the estimate at somewhere between—I think it's 660,000 and 880,000 children under five who died as a consequence of the sanctions. And remember, that's just children under five, because those are more easily measurable by epidemiologists. But that would include an unmeasurable number of persons over five, of the elderly, of the sick, and that would be in addition to this somewhere between half and three-quarters of a million children under five.

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