During his first 10 years in power, Saddam Hussein was a United States ally who gained full military and political support during his war with Iran, received biological and chemical weapons that were used against Iranians, acquired military aid during his 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, and received dual-use materials to build weapons of mass destructions. The United States backed Saddam Hussein, financed him and equipped him, but eventually turned against him when he started to get out of control and was no longer serving the imperial interests. The United States Government later exploited all the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein, that were originally committed with their support, to justify two crimes that had a significant impact on the Iraq we are witnessing today.
What made Saddam Hussein turn from an ally to a nemesis was his invasion of Kuwait, because that was not supported by the United States. And after Zbigniew Brzezinski, the United States National Security Advisor, declared "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq” in 1980 while Saddam was massacring Shias, 22 years later, George Bush declared that Saddam Hussein is a “murderous tyrant” who is posing an imminent threat to the United States, and that he is “not willing to stake one American life on trusting Saddam Hussein”, when Saddam announced that he does not have weapons of mass destruction.
First Crime:
ِAfter the invasion of Kuwait, the UN Security Council imposed sanctions against Iraq that banned all financial transactions with Iraq, international flights to Iraq, and trade with Iraq, but it was well understood that these sanctions were originally imposed by the United States and Britain. When Saddam Hussein refused to withdraw his forces from Kuwait, the US-led coalition launched air assault and land attack on Iraq and its forces in Kuwait and the Iraqi forces finally forfeited from Kuwait.
Depleted uranium, considered to be a weapon of mass destruction, was proven to have been used by the United states and Britain during their air assault on Iraq and Kuwait. Over 300 tons were fired. The effect was and is still horrendous. There was a sharp increase in cancer cases, congenital malformation, malignancy, leukaemia, and brain tumours. In the words of John Pilger: “what happened in the gulf war was a form of nuclear warfare”. The imposed sanctions, which were maintained even after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, blocked equipment and expertise to decontaminate the areas targeted with depleted uranium. Much worse, all types of medicine were blocked from entering Iraq on the basis that medicine could be converted into chemical weapons, leaving the people of Iraq with untreated fatal diseases.
Books, textbooks, journals and newspapers were banned. Even pencils, because graphite might be used for nuclear reactors. For a country dependent on oil for revenue, those sanctions were devastating. Chlorine was also banned and sewage was discharged untreated into the euphrates, diseases that have been eradicated in the 1970’s, such as cholera and typhoid, returned. Even though food and medicine were explicitly exempted from banned goods, because the United States and Britain dominated the Security Council food and medicine were blocked from entering Iraq. During the first eight months of sanctions 47,000 children under the age of 5 died. By 1997 some 7000 children were dying each month of hunger and disease. According to UN estimates sanctions cost the lives of over 1 million Iraqis.
The “Oil for Food” program, which allowed Iraq to sell a fraction of its oil for money that goes straight into an account controlled by the Security Council, was not sufficient in alleviating the crisis. According to Hans Von Sponeck, a UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, the program provided only $100 for each person to live on for a full year. Even after the sanctions were lifted, the Security Council still maintained 20 million dollars of oil revenues until 2016 to cover the expenses of all activities related to the program. The Security Council also has the right to maintain approximately 131 million dollars to cover the expenses of the UN representatives and agents that have worked on the program.
Dennis Halliday, the UN’s coordinator of Humanitarian Relief in Iraq resigned in protest against the effect of the sanctions. He said:”we are waging a war, through the United Nations, on the children and people of Iraq”, “I had been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of a genocide; a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individual, children and adults.”
In 1991, the United Nations Security Council announced that if Iraq renounced its weapons of mass destruction and agreed to monitoring by the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), the sanctions would be lifted. By 1988, UNSCOM agreed that all weapons infrastructure and programmes were completely eliminated.
After 8 years, the brutal effect of the sanctions left the people of Iraq in extreme poverty and sever devastation. The regime of Saddam Hussein came out much more powerful than before. When asked if the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying for sanctions, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline Albright, replied: ”we think the price is worth it.”
Second Crime:
After the atrocious sanctions that brought Iraq down to its knees, another atrocity was orchestrated by the United States that was to crush Iraq socially, economically and politically. The invasion of Iraq was to ensure that Iraq will never rise again to its feet, that Iraq will forever be a subordinate of the United States. First, the invasion was carried out because Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destructions which posed a threat to the national security of the United States, and because Saddam Hussein had links with AlQaeda in the 9/11 bombing. When weapons of mass destruction were not found, and links with AlQaeda failed to be proven, the pretext changed, Saddam Hussein became a ruthless dictator that needed to be dismantled to liberate Iraq from his fist. Even though there was enormous international opposition to the war and a lack of credible evidence that condemns Iraq, the United States and Britain waged the war.
Before the invasion, many experts had warned that the invasion will stimulate terrorism. The leading international military-intelligence journal concluded that “attacking Iraq would intensify Islamic terrorism not reduce it”,”a war in Iraq threatens to fuel unrest and create new terrorist threats”. Those predictions were proven to be true. A UN report indicated that recruitment for alQaeda increased in thirty to forty countries as the United States began the planning of the invasion. According to terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, terrorism increased sevenfold in Iraq after the invasion.
During the seven year invasion, the Iraqi people were once again victims of the ferocious foreign policy of the United States. According to the British polling agency Opinion Research Business, the death toll reached 1.03 million. 5% of Iraq’s 27 million population were killed, wounded or uprooted. The once rich agricultural system of Iraq was severely damaged to the extent that there are serious concerns whether anything can be grown again.
In April 2004, The United States army launched an assault on the city of Fallujah where most of the city’s 300,000 population were displaced. White phosphorus was used by the US army, till today, the people of Fallujah are still suffering from the consequences of this fatal chemical weapon. In the words of Nir Rosen, a journalist and a chronicler of the Iraq war, “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.”
With the power vacuum created by the invasion, militias began to form and sectarian conflicts between Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds erupted. The power shift from Sunnis, who were dominating the political scene before the invasion, to Shias eventually led to a civil war fought mainly between Sunnis and Shia. That is in addition to the ethnic cleansing that Baghdad and other cities and villages were subjected to on the hands of the invasion forces and militias.
If we look at Iraq today with the rise of the Islamic State and the divisions and conflicts that succeeded it, we can easily trace the origins of this crisis to the crimes committed by the United States and Britain. But all that was well worth it for the United States. After all they gained control over a country that is the second largest source of oil in the world and is conveniently positioned in a major energy-producing region, the Middle East. That was vivid during the beginning of the invasion when protecting oil fields was of a high priority while Iraq’s infrastructure and historical monuments were left to destruction. The once nationalised Iraqi oil became greatly privatised as stated in the Declaration of Principles, that was signed by the United States and Iraq in 2007, that the United States has the right to remain indefinitely in Iraq to deter foreign aggression and maintain internal security, and to encourage the flow of foreign investment to Iraq, especially American investment.
In reality, Iraq has been killed many times on the hands of the United States. It is quite true that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, but his successor, is another U.S-backed dictator. Iraq still lives under an authoritarian regime that deprives the Iraqis of their basic rights. It is only ironic that George Bush claims that Iraq was a great accomplishments. If he means destroying the legacy of the cradle of civilisation and turning it into a haven for terrorism, killing over 1 million people, displacing millions others, and destabilising an entire region, then yes Iraq was a “great accomplishment”.
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