Hey y'all, so here's the thing, I'm giving a speech to the Tarrant County Libertarian Party on April the 28th, that's Saturday, April the 28th, from 2 to 4, Central Time, up there in Fort Worth, so if you're anywhere near the 200 square miles of concrete known as Dallas-Fort Worth, head on out there, and I'll see you, it'll be cool.
I'll sell you a book.
Oh, you can find out all about it at eventbrite.com.
Oh, and I guess I'll write up a blog entry too at the Libertarian Institute and at scotthorton.org.
Sorry I'm late, I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had, you've been took, you've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, Ben, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Dennis Halliday.
He was the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from the first of September 1997 until 1998, and he resigned in protest over the Iraq sanctions, calling them genocide.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Dennis?
I'm great.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate your time on the show.
It's a very important topic here to talk about today.
So Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State of Bill Clinton in, I guess, his second administration, for most of it anyway, she has a new book out about the dangers of centralized power, believe it or not, and violence and stuff.
And so a lot of people were going after her on Twitter and so forth about her infamous statement that the price of 500,000 dead children from the Iraq sanctions was worth it to continue to enforce the American blockade for the larger political purposes as they were using it against Saddam Hussein.
And now it's interesting that she's apologized many times for saying this, although no one apparently has ever quite been able to corner her and ask her whether she regretted the actual policy itself and thought anything other than just being rude and saying we think the price is worth it that way.
But anyway, here's my real point, sir, is that it was brought to my attention that possibly those numbers weren't right.
And there were a couple of articles that I wasn't aware of that said that the original study done in 1995 in Iraq had been at least mostly retracted based on accusations that the samples had been basically tweaked by either the Iraqi government or the people carrying out the study.
At least one of the authors had issued a partial retraction, this kind of thing.
But then I know there are other studies as well that also reached something like the same conclusions.
And I thought, well, I better get a real expert on to talk about just what happened there with the sanctions policy in Iraq and what it really meant for the people of Iraq.
And then also get an interesting opinion about the different studies and the actual numbers and this kind of stuff, too.
So I guess the floor is yours, sir, to tell us whatever you want to.
Well, the data that we used in Iraq when I was there, I arrived, as you said, at the beginning of September.
By the end of September, I was aware of the mortality rates for young children in Iraq.
And together with the director of UNICEF, because this was a UNICEF project, UNICEF data, and I think we can trust UNICEF absolutely, in my view, he and I went to visit the American sorry, the Russian, Chinese and French ambassadors who all resided in Baghdad.
The UK and the United States was not represented at the time in Iraq.
And I asked him to take these reports to their capitals and in turn to the Security Council in New York to impress upon the Security Council member states that we were killing the children of Iraq.
Now, that figure of 500,000, that was 95, 96.
She said that on 60 Minutes, I believe.
And I think that's a gross underestimate.
By that period, the figures actually were higher.
And the death rate grew out of two main phenomena.
One was the United States bombing of infrastructure, civilian infrastructure.
That means electric power, water treatment and sewage treatment systems.
And that itself is a violation of international law, destroying civilian infrastructure.
And out of that came the fact that potable water was no longer available.
In Iraq in those days, mothers didn't breastfeed.
They used baby formula mixed with water.
And of course, baby formula, no matter how high its quality, mixed with bad water leads to early child death.
That's one of the main reasons why children died in the very early months.
Secondly, the United States during the Gulf War used depleted uranium in its battles in the south, up around Basra in the south of Iraq.
That polluted the atmosphere, the water systems, the root crops, and led to an outbreak of in children leukemia and in adults thyroid cancer.
And thousands of children died of leukemia.
I mean, I've met and seen and witnessed many of them myself in the hospitals of Basra, but also in Baghdad.
And these two combined and together with sanctions over, actually, they lasted 13 years, led to a low level of malnutrition amongst all children, I would say.
And stunted attention capacity, stunted growth capacity.
You could look at a little boy, he looked like he was 12, and you'd find out he was actually 15, things like that.
So we allowed this regime of sanctions and controlling food and other intakes, medical supplies out of Washington, out of New York, but driven by Washington and London.
And that's why in my resignation, and I call this sanctions with genocidal intent to destroy the country, punish the people of Iraq, not in fact the government who had made the bad decisions including the invasion of Kuwait.
Well now, so, it all makes sense, and I have a section in my book with all the quotes from the Bush senior administration officials, as you described, deliberately, talking about how they deliberately destroyed the civilian infrastructure of the country, and how, you know, you get rid of this guy for us and we'll allow you to fix your electricity, was one of the quotes.
As they said, they were, I guess, and this is what she was saying the price was worth it, was, and sometimes they articulated this in pretty clear language, they were trying to make the Iraqi people so desperate that they would rise up and overthrow Saddam for us.
But in fact, you see, as you'd suspect, it worked exactly the other way around, that Saddam Hussein, who of course had created an effective government, had built heavily into infrastructure, housing, highways, and all the rest of it, had created jobs and opportunities for the Iraqis, including education up to Ph.
D. levels, was a popular man in many respects.
And the invasion of Kuwait was easily justified by most Iraqis at the time, although after they ran Iraq debacle, they didn't want any more war, of course.
But the fact is, you see, that Kuwait was stolen from greater Iraq, including the district of Basra, by the British in 1919, I believe it was, after the First World War, simply because they wanted the oil revenue.
So taking Kuwait back, for many Iraqis, was an absolutely natural, necessary, desirable phenomenon.
And so, of course, there are going to be two sides to this story.
Yeah.
Now, okay, but so here's the thing.
How does anybody know?
We're talking about excess death rates compared to what would have been.
But you know, the Iran-Iraq war preceded the first Iraq war.
And so, you know, there was all kind of hardship going on back then, too, of course.
So that's one thing.
But then when it comes to estimating, I mean, you know, I don't think anybody would doubt your experiences in the hospital seeing the victims here.
But how can you be so sure about the statistics, sir?
Well, look, I mean, I had no capacity to count the death of children, whether in hospital with leukemia or simply because they were poisoned by water that wasn't potable.
I can only rely on UNICEF.
And in the UN system, I rank UNICEF as one of the most outstanding agencies, although I didn't work for them myself.
I would work for UNDP at one stage.
But UNICEF, I think, is outstanding.
And nobody understands the issue of women and children better than UNICEF.
And they have no reason to lie.
These are apolitical people running UNICEF in Iraq in those days, as I was.
So there was no question, no need to exaggerate the loss of life.
It was just the reality as they thought.
Now, I know there's a gentleman whose name I now can no longer remember.
He was a nurse that I knew in the States.
And he defended, of course, Bush and the government position and the wording of Madeleine Albright and did dispute the figures, saying they were artificially enhanced by the Iraqis.
But as I said before, these were not Iraqi government figures.
These were figures obtained and published by UNICEF.
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Thanks.
Well, you know, I recently got deep into the weeds, going back and forth with someone about this, and so I was looking at all these things, and it seems the main argument now is that later UNICEF studies don't seem to show this massive increase.
And so that they kind of, even the 1999 study, which more or less verified the 1995 study, which had supposedly been so twisted, that even that one apparently failed to hold up compared with all the information that was gathered after Iraq War II began, and America got more statistics from the Iraqi government and were able to survey more people, this, that, the other thing.
So I don't know if you're aware of all that controversy or not.
I did actually email back and forth with a guy, I'm sorry his name is Tim, I should have had this ready, sir, I'm sorry, but a guy who had written a critical thing about this, and that was his position, but he did say that he wasn't denying that this had happened, just that he wanted to, and any specific numbers, and he refused to say he had a favorite ballpark estimate either, but he just thought that it should be pointed out that that first study was, you know, not conducted to the very proper, you know, specifications, etc.
But...
Yeah, well, you know, I'm not a statistician, so I really can't deal with that.
But the fact is, as far as I know, there were no Americans on the ground in the health sector or any sector linked to the well-being of children.
So I don't know where these American experts found their data.
They must have found them indirectly of some sort.
So it's a mystery to me.
But, you know, whether it's 500,000 or 300,000 or a million, which is a more recognized figure at the end of the sanctions period, it's equally unacceptable and shocking.
And the fact that Madeleine Albright, an ambassador to the United Nations, speaking on behalf of the United States, could agree that somehow this was worth it, it's astonishing.
It's just astonishing and unacceptable.
I always assumed she must have been horrified afterwards when she thought through what she had said.
The woman was a grandmother.
I mean, she was a perfectly normal person.
But on that day, she certainly let herself down, and I think let down the United States in acknowledging that killing half a million children was somehow worth what?
Worth punishing Iraq, worth Kuwait, worth bringing down Saddam Hussein?
Was that the name of the game?
Probably it was.
It didn't work, clearly.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, it's, well, two points here, real quick.
You say 300,000 on the scale there.
I want to mention that there's this study by Richard Garfield.
It's available at CASSI.
That was the Campaign Against the Sanctions in Iraq.
It's cassi.org.uk, and it's called Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children.
Richard Garfield.
I think this may be the nurse that you're talking about, says R.N. and Dr. Ph.
D.
Yeah, that's right.
And so that was pretty much his estimate, was 300,000, according to his statistics.
It's a very well-done piece.
And the guy that, I'm sorry, I forget the guy's name, Tim, whichever it was, that was disputing the UNICEF studies, when I sent him this, he did not.
He said this looks to be a very carefully and well-done study and didn't take any issue with it.
If we estimate then, sir, that 300,000 children died who would not have otherwise died as the low-end estimate of what we're talking about then.
Yeah, that I believe was Garfield's point, that there was already a high mortality rate in Iraq prior to the sanctions, despite the Iran-Iraq war.
Now that is not necessarily true, because at that time, in terms of education and healthcare, Iraq, thanks to the investment made by the government, had a healthcare system that was equal to that of Italy.
So I don't think, I don't know where Garfield got that figure, and I don't, he certainly wasn't on the ground in Iraq, so I'm a little uncertain as to where he gets 300 as opposed to 500.
Well, I'll send you the link to it, it is interesting, and he's going off of all the same things that you're talking about, about the water and the formula and this and that.
And you know, I think, I'm no statistician either, but I didn't see where, well, it does make sense to think that the sanctions regime had no effect when we know that that was the effect that it was meant to have.
Yeah, that's the problem with sanctions, and they're still, although they're not the same as, that was a 13-year session that we imposed on Iraq through the Security Council.
Now right now there are dozens of sanctions regimes around the world, some are now called quote, smart sanctions, unquote, but the result is the same.
The aim may be to punish the government or the decision makers or the people at the top, but the reality is if you close down the banking system and trade and insurance and all the other things that make economy works, who suffers?
It's not the head of state, it's the poor people at the bottom, because the price of food goes up, the price of fuel goes up, the whole cost of living goes up.
That's what happens.
They're a hopelessly blunt instrument.
So although I have, for example, though I have reservations about the way the Israelis treat Palestinians, I do not support sanctions on Israel because Israel also has a poor population at the bottom of the pile, so to speak, and why should that 15, 20, 25%, some of whom of course are Arabs, why should they be punished for the policies of the government?
Right.
Yeah, I agree with that.
B and D, but not S.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah.
All right, so, and you know, here's the thing too, and this is really important, whatever the numbers are, Osama bin Laden said over and over in the 1990s that this was why he was attacking the United States, because the United States had bases in Saudi Arabia that they were using to bomb and blockade Iraq and leading to the deaths of all of these children as reported by the United Nations, and he said, how come your blood is blood but our blood is water?
Right.
I think the other offensive issue for him was the fact that there were half a million armed troops in Saudi Arabia, which for him is literally holy ground, and that was a very, and most of these troops, if not all, were Christian, was very offensive.
Yeah, and they weren't just standing around, they were bombing Iraq from those bases on a daily basis, basically, or bi-weekly basis at least.
Yeah, and so, yeah, who could, who could possibly, you know, overestimate the importance of that?
You know, when Madeleine Albright says she's sorry, is she sorry for that?
For the enemies that she created out of Ronald Reagan and George Bush's friends?
In these, you know, jihadist warriors from the old Afghan war?
Nobody ever asked her that either, but, and in fact, let me ask you about that.
When she made those comments, you know, I had missed it at the time, I was a teenager, and I caught up on that later, but did that get a lot of play in the Middle East, that she had said that?
Well, this took place in, it was in 95, 96, wasn't it?
Yeah, somewhere right there.
No, I watched that program, 60 Minutes was something I always watched, I was living in New York at the time, I was, what, I was the head of human resources for the United Nations under Boutros-Ghali at that time.
So it was an extraordinary statement, I think we were stunned.
Now, I would have said that got coverage, because I recall visiting the offices of ministers in the government in Baghdad the following year in 97.
Every one of them had two or three televisions in their office on all the time, and they were always showing CNN, or ABC, or NBC, so they, that information certainly went across.
And I would have thought they were equally horrified, but do the people in the streets know that?
Well, I don't know the answer to that question, honestly.
Yeah.
Well, it's certainly an infamous clip now.
Yeah.
And, you know, again, as sorry as she says she is, that's American foreign policy on a daily basis anyway.
I mean, how many kids have died since Iraq War II, never mind the 1990s, in terms of excess deaths, never mind even those who were shot at checkpoints or caught up in bombing raids or anything, but just the kids who got sick and died who wouldn't have if their country had been at peace?
But, you know, there's nothing rational when it comes to the work of the military and the United States and others in warfare.
I mean, there's a huge, and rightly so, fuss about the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
But, you know, already, I believe, three or four hundred thousand people have been killed without the use of chemical weapons in Syria, using traditional deadly weapons.
I mean, to get excited about chemical death as opposed to being blown to bits by a by a missile or whatever, it's irrational.
Well, they can cite it as a legal pretext for further intervention is what's important.
Yeah.
But the fact is the United States used chemical weapons in Vietnam.
They destroyed the entire...
Well, they're using depleted uranium in Syria right now in the east.
Well, Monsanto was manufacturing Agent Orange in Vietnam, along with other reputable companies, made millions and billions out of it, possibly, and killed, who knows, two to three million Vietnamese.
And that's a chemical device.
So, you know, I do understand we have two standards here.
It's them and us.
We're OK.
They're the bad guys.
All right.
So tell us more about your time in Iraq, then, some of this kind of specialized point of view that we just didn't get a chance to hear you tell your side back then.
Well, when I arrived in September, as I said, I discovered that the child mortality figures were horrific.
I actually asked Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, for his support in going to the Security Council and asking for an increase in the program.
In those days, the program, when I arrived, was worth about $4.2 billion, and, of course, every dollar of that $4.2 billion was from Iraqi oil revenue.
There was no other source of funding.
And Kofi Annan did not support me.
I didn't get any support, so I guess I cheated.
I went to see the Russian, French, and Chinese ambassadors, and I gave them copies of the UNICEF report.
They took those copies to their capitals, and they, who, in turn, took it to the Security Council.
And in December of that year, 1997, I was asked to come into New York to explain to the Security Council why the program should be increased, and it was increased.
Instead of $8.4 billion, which is what I asked for, together with the government, who gave me permission, because, after all, it was their money, the Americans, I think, got the view that, why don't we make it $10 billion?
In which case, if they can produce $10 billion in oil revenue, then we will control the entire revenue of the state of Iraq, which is an understandable ambition, and that is what happened.
And then, so, yeah, I wonder how much a difference that made when they finally instituted that oil-for-food program in terms of, you know, trucks and food and clean water and electricity and all these things.
Was it all finally fixed then, with all this money?
We were not allowed to address the issue of potable water and village pumps, and there was sewage treatment.
All of that was not—we were not allowed to fund that sort of work in Iraq proper during the period I was there and the period after me, for the reasons that you explained.
They wanted to continue the punishment.
In the north, in the Kurdish north, where we had access, which the government did not, I used to go up there and talk to the Kurdish leadership—Barzani, Talabani, these men—and we employed Kurdish-Iraqi companies to rebuild sewage systems, to rebuild water systems, to build schools for children and things like that.
It was a totally different program.
They got a free pass, so to speak, and we could use money for that purpose.
In the south, I wasn't allowed to put money into water systems or wells or anything of that sort of basic need.
Yeah.
By the way, I'm sorry to change the subject here real quick, but I found that footnote.
It was Tim Dyson who had written that article about the later UNICEF studies apparently showing no increase, if people want to look at that.
Yeah.
I've got that on the record there.
So yeah, now, that's a big part of it, right?
In Iraqi Kurdistan, that was basically, as you say, the government couldn't go there.
It was really an autonomous American protectorate throughout the 1990s.
So— That's correct, yeah.
So then, I mean, did the sanctions really apply to them at all in the first place?
Or they had open trade all along?
Or how different—did their circumstances change with the welfare system?
The distribution of food in the south was done by the government through 49,000 outlets, which already were in existence, given their own humanitarian program long before we turned up.
In the north, however, we employed the World Food Program.
And they had about 1,000 Kurdish staff who distributed the foodstuffs and medication and all the other technical stuff throughout the country to the Kurdish population.
And, I mean, that worked pretty well.
They did a good job.
But they had the same sort of problems of stunted growth, malnutrition.
You know, the problem was the humanitarian program with limited resources didn't provide protein from meat products, for example.
We only provided vegetarian food.
There were lots of—no eggs, no chicken, none of that was going on.
So, actually, what happened was that the supplies, which every individual had a right to take from the outlets south and north in the country, they moved into a barter system.
So a family having three quarts of cooking oil might trade in one quart for two chickens or something like that.
It became a very interesting program.
Yeah, well, a very primitive one, you know, in place of just, you know, actual—the ability to produce and buy and sell on the market.
No, that's quite right.
And, you see, most people, when they think of Iraq, probably think primitive.
But Iraq was not a primitive country.
It was a very advanced state in those days, with its doctors getting trained in the United States and Europe, with its universities first class.
I mean, they were doing extremely well, thanks to massive oil revenue, despite the Iran-Iraq war and the loss of money and waste there.
They did very well in terms of education and health care and jobs and housing and all the good things that people want for themselves and for their children.
Do you have an opinion, sir, about—I know this is a little bit outside of your purview—about why they couldn't just send Rumsfeld back over there to shake hands with this guy and welcome him back into the American order in the Middle East?
You know, all this stuff about him being so damn insane is just nonsense.
So what's the problem, really?
Sir, are we talking about Assad?
No, about Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, for this to just go on and on and on through, I know, the dual containment policy and all this stuff.
But why couldn't they just figure out a way to let him save some face, let Bill Clinton save some face, and more or less normalize relations and lift these sanctions?
Yeah, what you're suggesting is absolutely, of course, reasonable.
But reasonable and the Security Council and politics and domestic politics doesn't necessarily hang well together, because the fact was that Saddam Hussein frightened the Gulf states, the Kuwaitis, the Saudis, and Iraq itself, given its ancient history of Sumeria, Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
They were a well-educated, well-fed, somewhat aggressive Arab state that scared the neighborhood.
I didn't even mention Israel, but Israel also naturally was nervous of the situation.
So they really wanted overthrow.
I mean, the regime change, I think, must have been the bottom line, how to get rid of this man.
And they didn't manage to have him assassinated or whatever.
In fact, they made him more popular.
They allowed him to stay in power due to the opposition outside Iraq itself, which turned Iraqis, who may have had reservations about Saddam Hussein's management style, into supporters.
It backfired totally.
It reminds me always of the early days in Cuba, when American policy kept Fidel Castro in power, possibly for a very long time, which might otherwise not have been the case.
Yeah.
Well, just the same as would happen anywhere, right?
You get attacked by foreigners, you rally around the flag.
It's as simple as that.
Exactly what happened here.
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Now, you talked about the hospitals down in Basra and all that.
How much ability to travel around the country did you have in the areas controlled by the Iraqi regime at that time?
Well, the diplomatic corps was confined entirely to Baghdad.
But I was not the diplomatic corps.
I was the United Nations.
And I was in charge of this humanitarian program with its 149,000 outlets all over the country.
So I had on the staff about 300 people in Baghdad.
And amongst them were inspectors who went out every day of the week visiting outlets throughout the country to make sure that what we provided was, in fact, getting to the people without any interference, without any hidden cost, whatever.
So as an individual, I was very uniquely fortunate in being able to travel all over the country, north and south, including a little touristic visit once to the city of Ur, which, as you may know, was where Noah supposedly brought the ark down and started this international city and so on.
So, you know, it's up to Nineveh in the north and Mosul and Babylon and all these incredible ancient cities which are mentioned in Genesis in the Old Testament.
The whole country is just it's like a chapter of the Old Testament.
And so I was extremely fortunate.
And it's an extraordinary country with a huge, amazing history, all of which is being lost and, sadly, damaged in many cases due to the various conflicts.
And I mean, since the invasion and the occupation by the United States, the breakup of the military, the breakup of the Ba'ath party, and Mr. Bremer's interference in the Constitution in violation, again, of international law, and then the arrival of ISIS.
I mean, Iraq, I don't pretend to understand Iraq today.
I can't comment, to be quite honest.
Yeah, well, it's certainly a mess.
There's certainly nothing but a bunch of questions about the future of Iraqi Kurdistan, the future of the Sunni-dominated West after Iraq War III now, and just who knows what.
So anyway, so back to 20 years ago, then, and getting into this mess.
You and a man named Hans von Spoenig, whose name I apologize for mispronouncing, I'm sure, both resigned in protest over the situation in Iraq.
And it certainly made headlines back then.
But how would you characterize the reaction and what effect did it have?
Well, when I resigned, I was the first assistant secretary general of the UN ever to resign, I believe.
So it did cause some ructions.
And John Pilger, the Australian journalist in London, made a documentary, took me back to Iraq, actually, and made a documentary, 1999, 2000, which got a lot of publicity.
And I sent a copy to every member of the Security Council.
And Sergei Lavrov, who was the ambassador in those days, now the foreign minister, stood up in the Security Council and said, look, I've received this DVD from Dennis Halliday.
I suggest you all look at it, because it shows you what the sanctions regime of the United Nations has done to the people in the country of Iraq.
So there was some, but at the same time, I resigned.
And one of the well-known American armed military inspectors, Scott Ritter, do you remember the name of Scott Ritter?
Sure, yeah.
Now, Scott Ritter resigned also.
And he got more publicity in the States, of course, than I did.
And he was a very interesting man.
I mean, in later years, I got to know him and like him.
And he and I did interviews on television together in Canada and various places.
And he was a hard-nosed U.S. Marine who was a specialist in weapon systems.
And he ran this weapons program for the United Nations, starting, I believe, in about 1992, right up to still going on when I was there.
And they, of course, uncovered the capacity for biological warfare, which the Iraqis had bought the seed stock in the United States.
They also uncovered some aspect of chemical warfare capacity.
In that case, the turnkey chemical plants had been sold by the Germans.
They also looked at the missile ranges and long range and so on, and the nuclear capacity, of which there was none, effectively.
And all of this, of course, was then disregarded by George Bush and Tony Blair and I can't remember the name of the head of the State Department.
But it reminds me very much of the North Korea situation now, where it's a dangerous game, and we should try to avoid it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess there's just no way to overstate the consequences of this policy in the 1990s, and all that's unfolded in the 21st century because of it, when it absolutely just did not have to be that way at all.
Obviously.
Can you tell me a little bit about Hans von Spahnik here?
And what was his role?
Hans is a friend of mine, obviously.
I knew him when I was, I used to be head of human resources for UNDP as well.
And he was in Pakistan and India for many years.
Very good man.
He was asked to replace me when I resigned.
So on my way out of Baghdad back to New York, I stopped off in Geneva, where he was living at the time, and, of course, briefed him privately and publicly, so to speak, as to what he's going to find and what he might be able to do with it.
And off he went.
And he actually was tempted to resign after 12 months himself.
And I begged him to stay a bit longer, to put in 18 months if he could possibly, because we didn't want to look, we began to look like we were settled in cahoots, which we were not.
He had the same reaction to mine.
The word he used was actually complicity.
He did not want to be seen to be complicit with these murderous sanctions of the Security Council, while, in fact, he was actually running this humanitarian program, which made one hell of a difference.
I mean, I don't want to knock it in any way.
It worked because the government made it work.
They had the great civil servants and ministers, for that matter.
But it didn't solve the underlying basic problems of the country, which was starved, of course, of capital and other means to invest and enhance the economy.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on the show and talking about this with us, Dennis.
It's like a history lesson.
I've forgotten a lot of this stuff until you asked me about it.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
It's always the 20th anniversary of something, so maybe you should write up a thing.
I'd sure be happy to publish it at Antiwar.com if you wanted to.
Oh, you would?
Okay.
Anyway, thanks for the interview.
It was interesting to do that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you again.
Appreciate it.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That's Dennis J. Halliday.
He was the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq in 1997 and 1998.
Hey, I want to add on a special thanks to the heroic Ron Paul, the greatest American hero ever, in my estimation, for interviewing me on his show, The Liberty Report, with the great Dan McAdams as well.
It was really great.
They interviewed me on Monday, and it ran on today, Wednesday.
I don't know what day you guys are hearing this, but it ran on Wednesday.
You can find it on YouTube.com, and I'll blog it and all that.
We talked about Syria and Afghanistan and other things, libertarianism.
So thanks, Ron.
You're great.
