All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Joy Gordon.
She's got a PhD in philosophy from Yale University, a JD from Boston University Law School.
She teaches political philosophy and international relations, and she's the author of the new book Invisible War, the United States and the Iraq Sanctions, and she's also written about it for Harper's.
You can find it at harpers.org.
Welcome to the show, Joy.
How are you?
Good.
Pleasure to be here.
Well, I appreciate you joining us today.
Very powerful book, very good work, and if I can praise this, I don't know how eloquent I'll be at it, but I want to try to say that for subject matter that is so complicated and technical, I think you do a really great job of making it readable, especially considering that you have to skip around in time, back and forth all the time.
You still keep the narrative nice and coherent, and I think probably if people weren't having to take notes like me all the way through it, they could really sit down and breeze through it.
I think it's an important subject and something that people don't know nearly enough about, so congratulations, and thank you for your contribution to our knowledge on this.
Well, thank you for your very generous description.
There's an awful lot of footnotes in there, and I worry a little if it's just a little bit dry, but thank you for saying that.
Yeah.
Well, it is very readable, and I mean that, and that's to you, audience.
This one actually goes on your list of books that you get recommended that you actually read rather than the ones that you just get recommended and never get to, which I know we each have both kinds, but that's the way it is.
All right.
So now, I'm sorry.
Let's not waste any more time on this.
Let me play a very short clip that many are familiar with, but too many are not, of the former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes.
We have heard that a half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima, and is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
And now, we know that she has apologized for saying that, but has never apologized for the policy, and the policy in question, of course, being the blockade, the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, inherited by Bill Clinton from George H.W. Bush.
And I think the first thing to get to here is the completeness of these sanctions, which I think was the most, the thing that I learned first and foremost from this book was that the sanctions against Iraq were on virtually all international trade.
Yeah.
There were very few exceptions, and then, to the extent there were any exceptions, those were interpreted very narrowly.
So, for example, at the very beginning, there was a blockade, well, first of all, it's important to remember that Iraq was very dependent on trade, so 70% of its economy came from oil sales, and it imported an enormous amount of goods, so it was not at all someplace that was economically self-sufficient.
And then, the other thing is that when the U.N.
Security Council passes a measure under Chapter 7 of the U.N.
Charter, Chapter 7 concerns aggression, breaches of the peace, and threats to the peace, and the Security Council can impose measures that are economic or diplomatic or military, and when it does that, every member state of the United Nations is bound to comply with those, is bound to enforce those.
So it's very different than the U.S. or the Soviet Union or a handful of nations deciding they're going to break off trade with a country.
This obliges all 190-plus countries in the world to have no trade with Iraq.
So this was something that really had never been seen before.
Obviously there are sieges in history, but it was inconceivable, really, before now, that there could be essentially a siege on behalf of the whole world.
Something like that was envisioned with the League of Nations, but never took place.
And this actually took place.
And the results were really, had an enormous impact right up front, so that was August of 1990, and the original sanctions allowed Iraq to import medicine, but only allowed it to import food under, quote, humanitarian circumstances, unquote.
So then the question was, what constitutes humanitarian circumstances?
Because Iraq had been importing two-thirds of its food, so clearly that's cut off, and while they can increase agriculture, you can't increase agriculture in less than a growing season.
So it created an immediate food crisis.
So then there was this debate within this committee of the Security Council, are there humanitarian circumstances?
And many of the countries wanted this to be found, so that Iraq could import food.
And they said, of course, you cut off two-thirds of a country's food supply, that has to be circumstances that will allow it to import food, for God's sake.
The U.S., Britain, and a few other countries, but it was really the U.S. that was most adamant, with its veto power within this committee, to block Iraq from importing food, at least in any legal venue, for eight months, until March 1991.
And if you read the debates of these committee discussions, they are really stunning.
You see the U.S. representative saying again and again, things like, we will not find that these conditions are met unless we see absolute irrefutable evidence that there is something like an advanced state of famine.
And anything short of that, we will not permit Iraq to import food.
So that's just one example at a very extreme point in the spectrum of how the sanctions worked.
And now, that number that Leslie Stahl used there is the same number that you use in the book, 500,000 children.
Can you tell us about where that number comes from?
I know it's been debated.
I'm actually using a different 500,000.
So the 500,000 that she's using, that Leslie Stahl asked her about, is a number that UNICEF produced in 1999.
They said the number is excess mortality of children under five.
So how many children under five died during sanctions who would not have before then?
And that number's been disputed in lots of different ways.
And the whole history of that number is sort of very politicized.
There's a footnote in my book that's three pages long explaining the history of that number and disputes about the methods for arriving at it.
If you look at all of the epidemiologists and medical demographers who have written on that number or tried to calculate that number of under five excess mortality since then, there's really only one group, a group having to do with the Volcker Committee, that said that the number had to be significantly lower or that it just couldn't be arrived at.
But their data was subject to dispute for different reasons.
And if you look at all of the other reports, all of the other findings, you can pretty much say, at least according to the best statisticians who've worked on this, that the number is you can say it's somewhere around 500,000 for all child mortality over the course, under five child mortality, over the course of the whole sanctions regime, which is 1990 to 2003.
That number is a careful and solid number.
Well, you know, you point out in the book that this is actually unprecedented, completely, I guess, even including World War II years or something where you have, or maybe not including World War II years with the word sustained in here, but you say this is the first time really in history that you have child mortality numbers increasing like this in a society over a long period of time, in 200 years, since some giant, you know, cold snap created a famine in Europe or something.
Yeah.
The thing is that if you have, if you have a disaster, you have any natural disaster or war, then over the longer term, there's the possibility of rebuilding.
Or you have some crisis in the nation that it doesn't really, that continues like a terrible economic situation, like our Great Depression.
But then what's possible is for people to make adjustments to accommodate that.
In the case of Iraq, that wasn't possible because coming on top of the bombing of the infrastructure in 91, the sanctions were so thorough and so comprehensive that there were no other resources that could be pulled in to make things adapt.
All right.
We're out of break.
We'll be back in just a minute.
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All right, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Talking with Joy Gordon.
She's the author of the book, Invisible War, the United States and the Iraq Sanctions.
The pre-invasion era, post-desert storm, you know, the Clinton years.
And we were talking about the humanitarian situation under the sanctions.
Of course, the Iraqi state was smashed in the first Gulf War, including their sewage and their water and their electricity.
And then as we were discussing, the reason that the child mortality rate was unprecedented for that kind of sustained period of decline of the survival rate of babies was because they were unable to rebuild any of their infrastructure due to the near total blockade in the 1990s.
And now, I guess we need to kind of, if you want to address anything left unsaid about that, Joy, that'd be fine.
Otherwise, I guess we can get into how it got like this and the dual policy of containment and regime change at the same time and how the bureaucrats put themselves in the position of enforcing such a policy on the people of Iraq for so long.
Sure.
Well, let me just sort of tie up this other piece for a bit.
There was a UN Secretary General envoy that went to Iraq in 1991, one in March and one in July.
And their reports described the situation after the bombing as near apocalyptic.
One of the reports said, Iraq has been reduced from a modern industrialized society to a pre-industrial society.
There were no functioning water or sewage treatment plants.
Every major electrical generator had been bombed, telecommunications, transportation roads, bridges, all of Iraq's infrastructure had been devastated.
So Iraq was a wealthy country.
It has oil wealth.
If things had just stopped there, they could have rebuilt.
Or if just the sanctions had been on since the prior August, they could have increased their own economic activity and recovered.
But it was coming on top of this devastation that the sanctions then prevented Iraq from importing anything for years and years that could be used to rebuild a water treatment plant or a sewage treatment plant or an electrical generator.
And that was really because within the 661 Committee of the Security Council, the U.S. took a particularly extreme position in saying that these goods were military dual use.
And so this may get a little into your second question about the containment and how that worked.
Well, let me just mention real quickly, parenthetically here, that you say in the book that their GDP went from $62 billion a year in 1989 to just $10.8 billion in 1996.
So again, they import two thirds of their food, their entire economy is completely dependent on oil sales, and the U.S., by way of the United Nations, was simply strangling that entire society.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
And that was an explicit goal of the U.S. administration.
It was to impoverish the state, to break Saddam Hussein's regime, and also to impoverish the state so badly that it could not rebuild its military and present a threat to its neighbors.
That was the reasoning.
But in the course of impoverishing the state, then the state also can't do anything else.
And in this case, the state was how electricity was provided to the country, how water was maintained throughout the country, how roads and bridges were maintained.
So if you break the back of the state as a whole in order to contain Saddam Hussein, you also break everything that's needed.
You also make everything that's needed to sustain human life in a modern society dysfunctional.
Well, let's talk about the contradictory nature of the kind of dual policy here, where on one hand, they're containing Saddam Hussein, they're trying to make him comply with all these Security Council resolutions, presumably.
And yet on the other hand, they're saying they'll never lift the sanctions until we have regime change, which at the same time, of course, took away any incentive that he had to comply with them from then on.
Yeah, and there's a few points where you see US administrations acknowledging that, acknowledging that the very process that they say is supposed to create incentive for disarmament in Iraq, in fact, is going to make it very unlikely that Iraq will ever comply with the demands.
The other problem is that under the UN Charter, well, let's say there's two other problems.
The first one is, the Security Council resolutions don't talk about regime change.
They don't ever say, we demand that Saddam step down.
And so there was, from the beginning, a conflict between the US goal in this and the Security Councils.
And it's not even clear that the Security Council could demand regime change, because the way that the Charter works is that it recognizes, pretty much as an absolute, the sovereignty of each nation.
And that's Article 2.
And sovereignty is defined in two ways.
One is your territorial boundaries, and the other is the right to have a political system without interference.
So however good or bad that is, that's fundamentally about the autonomy of the nation.
And it's not clear that the Security Council could ever demand that a regime end, or demand that someone step down.
But in any case, they certainly didn't do that.
And there's lots of resolutions where they repeat, we recognize the sovereignty of Iraq.
So that put the US in this sort of odd position in regard to the Security Council, where the US was in a position to, because of the veto power, to prevent the goods from going into Iraq, and to prevent the sanctions from being lifted through something called the reverse veto.
But that was in contradiction with what are the resolutions themselves.
So you ended up with this odd situation where the US had a goal, which kind of, in effect, became the goal of the Security Council, although that was certainly never by its choice.
And it looks as though it could not legally have chosen to do that.
In a sense, it's sort of like the fight over enumerated powers versus implied ones in American history and our Constitution, right?
Here was the United States, as the Federalists, insisting that the UN Security Council can basically do what it wants, even if it's not in the charter.
It doesn't say that ever.
It just is the case that through different kind of procedures within the committee, that's what ends up being, taking place.
Right.
On a de facto base there.
Now, talk about that reverse veto.
What does that mean?
Well, a reverse veto is an interesting thing.
It happens when the Security Council imposes, so I'm guessing all of your listeners know that the Security Council of the UN is a counter-majoritarian body.
Oh, you're going to have to make this one quick, sorry.
Okay.
There's the bumper music.
Well, anyway, it just means there's an open-ended resolution.
There would have to be a new resolution in order to ever end the sanctions, and America could always veto any new resolution.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
All right.
Hey, everybody, please read Invisible War.
It's such an important book.
Thank you for your time, Joy.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for the opportunity.
