Book review: “Genocide in Iraq” - 1.7 million avoidable deaths under Sanctions

“Genocide in Iraq. The case against the UN Security Council and member states” by Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tarik Al-Ani (Foreword by Professor Joshua Castellino; Clarity Press, Atlanta) is an extremely important book that sets out the case for prosecution of people involved in the Zionist-backed, US-spearheaded genocide in Iraq during the period of Sanctions (1990-2003).

Of course, as recognized by the authors, the carnage continued after the illegal US-led invasion and occupation. However the authors have chosen here to limit consideration to the horrendous effects of Sanctions because they were UN sanctioned, and in being associated with an estimated 1.7 million Iraqi avoidable deaths from deprivation (1990-2003; substantially children; an Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide) violated the intent and letter of international law and international humanitarian conventions devised to protect non-combatants and children.

This book should be in every state, city, local, school and university library so that everyone throughout the world (and especially children) can see for themselves the horrendous consequences of mass collective punishment of civilian populations to achieve political and strategic ends i.e. of state terrorism or more precisely, collective state terrorism.

In his Foreword to “Genocide in Iraq”, Professor Joseph Castellino (Professor of International Law, Middlesex University, UK) writes: “ The Al-Anis’ book provides a context to Iraq that many commentators on Iraq seem unaware of. Their and our engagement with this text is crucial if we are going to begin to address the injustice that is collectively being felt in Iraq. Yet in many ways this book is not about Iraq at all. It is about the distance to which we have fallen as an international community in debasing the values contained in the United nations Charter” (p12 ). Thus, for example, sanctions imposed by nuclear terrorist states such as the UK, US, France and Apartheid Israel on nuclear weapons-rejecting and nuclear weapons-free Iran are currently associated with an estimated 100,000 avoidable Iranian deaths each year. Conversely in this Orwellian world , about 100,000 people die from opiate drug-related causes each year due to US Alliance of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from 6% of world market share in 2001 to 90% in 2007 (see “Afghan Holocaust Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afgha... ).

The Introduction to “Genocide in Iraq” outlines the purpose of the book which is to record the devastation of Iraq under sanctions, contextualize Iraq within an Arab World subject to hegemony, invasion, occupation, and devastation by an endlessly greedy, interventionist, exceptionalist, warmongering, and Zionist-beholden America and by genocidal, racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel, and to make out a legal case against the UN Security Council and member states for their involvement in the destruction of Iraq, the Iraqi Genocide. The Al-Anis : “The purpose of this book. The imposition of sanctions on Iraq was one of the most heinous of crimes committed in the 20th century. Never in modern history of the world has any nation been subjected to such indiscriminate and brutal collective punishment. But that crime received very little attention in the Anglo-American world. The explanation of this failure was most eloquently summed up by Professor Thomas Nagy [George Washington University Business School]: “Many, including the author recoil from contemplating the possibility that a Western democracy, particularly the USA, could commit genocide. However, it is precisely this painful and even taboo possibility which needs t be examined”” (p15).

Chapter 1, Iraq’s millennia of rich history” describes the long history of Iraq back to the dawn of human civilization in Mesopotamia and up to invasion by Britain in 1914 and the subsequent infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) between Britain and France to divide up the Middle East: “The Wilaya [province] of Baghdad inherited the Babylonian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, Mosul (formerly Nineveh) inherited the Assyrian Empire, while Basrah inherited Uruk and Ur- the Akkadian/ Sumerian Empire. At no time until the beginning of the 20th century, and even after the arrival of the colonialists, had there been a political entity of any form on the Western side of the Persian Gulf between Oman and Basrah. The political authority of the Wali (Governor) of Basrah extended, to varying degrees, down to the borders of Oman” (p19). This chapter also deals with the Shi’a and Sunni divide in early Muslim Iraq, the glories of Muslim culture based on Baghdad and the genocidal sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols under Hulagu in 1258, destruction of a kind that was to be repeated by the US Alliance in the period 1990-2011.

Chapter 2, “From monarchy to occupation. Iraq from 1916 to 2003” details Iraqi history under the British invaders and post-independence up until the illegal and war criminal US Alliance invasion in 2003 (for a very succinct, avoidable mortality-related history of Iraq and indeed of all countries from neolithic times up to the present see my book .”Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” that is now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/ ). Chapter 2 deals with the UK-installed puppet monarchy; oil; successive military and Ba-athist regimes; Iraqi concessions to Iran to stop the Israeli-backed Kurdish revolt, and the subsequent disastrous invasion of Iran in the US-backed Iran-Iraq War; the disastrous invasion of Kuwait (greenlighted by the endlessly mendacious Americans); and suppression of Shi’a interests by secularist Ba’athist but minority Sunni-origin Saddam Hussein: “Thus when the American tanks rolled into Baghdad on 9 April 2003, many Shi’a in Baghdad felt it was not their battle” (p57).

Chapter 3, “The Bas’ath pursues the economic development of Iraq” is summarized by its first sentence: “Whatever one’s opinion regarding the Ba’ath regime, no one can deny that between 1968 and 2003, Iraq had been transformed from a non-developed country to a semi-industrialized one” (p58). The Ba’ath [renaissance, resurrection) Party’s motto “Unity, Liberty , Socialism” summed up its pro-Arabism, anti-imperialism and socialist agenda. Under Ba’ath regimes Iraq made huge strides in oil exploitation, industry, irrigation, agriculture, electrification etc and in generating a requisite large, educated population.

Chapter 4, “The Ba’ath’s progressive social and political policies” summarizes how the Ba’athists established a public welfare-based socialist state. Ba’athist Iraq sought Kurdish and other participation, noting that “It is worth noting here, almost 40 years later, Turkey, a NATO member and a contender for the EU, still refuses to recognize the Kurdish language, which Iraq made official in 1974” (p98). The Ba’athists variously espoused non-Ba’athist participation, encouraged religious freedom and womens’ rights, hugely expanded free education and made huge strides in public health. Democracy ultimately means satisfying the will of the people and a fundamental desire of all people is for the survival of their children. Thus Table 4.4 (p108) indicates that under-5 infant mortality (deaths per 1,000 births) was 171 (1960), 127 (1970), 83 (1980) and 50 (1990). This enormous achievement was to be undone by 2 decades of Zionist-backed, US-UK-imposed sanctions, bombing, war and occupation. Indeed infant mortality jumped to 125 deaths per 1,000 births after imposition of sanctions (although this is denied and falsified by the Maliki Puppet Regime).

Chapter 5, “The destruction of Iraq” details the progressive destruction of Iraq after its 2 August 1990, US-greenlighted invasion of Kuwait that had been part of Iraq since time immemorial but existed as an entity under International Law through illegal actions of genocidal British imperialists . In contrast, colonization- and genocide-based, and only 65-years-old Apartheid Israel still occupies territories it illegally seized in 1967 from Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, the peoples of which had been living in those territories from the dawn of history – however it was not subject to international sanctions and still has the full backing of the US, UK, EU, Canada and Australia (except for increasingly disingenuous and meaningless assertions about the “peace process, 90% of Palestine now having been ethnically cleansed of Indigenous inhabitants). In 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands (the Malvinas), formerly uninhabited islands that the British had claimed and settled from circa 1770 onwards; the Argentinians were expelled by the British but Argentina was not bombed back to the Stone Age (649 Argentinians were killed in the 1982 Falklands War as compared to the 4.6 million Iraqis killed in the period 1990-2011). The Al-Anis state: “Regardless of what explanations and justifications were given for the military assault on Iraq in January 1991, in reality, the destruction began on 6 August 1990, the day the Security Council adopted resolution 661 which imposed the most brutal total blockade against Iraq. Never before has a state been subjected to such collective measures, a blockade, not dissimilar to the sieges of the Middle Ages, which prevented everything from going in or out of the country” (p114).

The UN-ordered “Ahtisaari Report” was submitted on 20 March 1991 and stated in part: “The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society … Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy an technology” (p127). A further dozen years of sanctions , coupled with UK, US and Israeli bombing, were to further destroy Iraqi power, water, sanitation, irrigation, agriculture, education, industry, oil production, and health infrastructure as detailed in “Genocide in Iraq” e.g. “By 2002, nearly 20-30% of Iraq’s potentially irrigable land had become unusable, i.e. had been converted to desert by salinization of irrigation projects” (p142) – an immense crime against humanity in the land that invented agriculture 7,000 years ago.

The most damning part of the book describes the impact on children: “Numerous studies have been conducted on the effects of continuing sanctions on the people of Iraq… A survey undertaken by two independent scientists in November 1995 on behalf of the FAO found that there has been a nearly five-fold increase in mortality among children under the age of five in Baghdad compared to the period prior to the imposition of economic sanctions. The sustained mortality has resulted in half a million child deaths related to the war and the sanctions occurring over the past five years. The study concluded, “At this level of malnutrition and excess mortality, among children under the age of five, Iraq is increasingly becoming like a concentration camp. The economic pressure exerted by on the country by the U.S. and the international community effectively serves as a barbed wire”” (p136).

Chapter 6, “Sanctions and International law”, commences by comparing UN Resolutions on Iraq versus Resolutions on Israel: “But one example of ongoing double standards in UN application of punitive measures” (p143). A key point made by the Al-Anis in the sub-section “Invoking Chapter VII: the abuse of international law”, is that “Despite all the wars, interventions and aggressions that have plagued international relations since WWII, Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which enables action to be taken against a faulting state, has rarely been invoked and only ever against Third World states… in fact it is submitted here that the imposition of sanctions on Iraq, when it was no longer a threat to international peace, was itself an act of war or aggression and, by imposing sanctions, the Security Council was itself guilty of breaching international law… sanctions are unjust because the most fundamental principle of justice is that the innocent should not be punished and sanctions are clearly indiscriminate punishment” (p147-150). The Al-Anis point out that “The Hague Regulations (1907) concerning the Laws and Customs of Wars on Land is a good starting point. Article 50 of the Regulations provides that “No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible”” (p152). The Al-Anis proceed to examine gross violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Rights of the Child by the imposition of sanctions on Iraq.

Chapter 7, “The Genocide Convention and the question of intent” considers the articles of the UN Genocide Convention, most notably genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” and the claims of the Anglo-American war criminals that they did not “intend” to kill Iraqi children through sanctions and that these were “collateral damage” in an attempt to “make the world a safer place” Of course there was no evidence for the alleged Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (and if Iraq had had them would surely not have contemplated committing national suicide by using them for whatever reason against remote Britain or even remoter United States.) The Al-Anis tellingly state “In the USA “intent” is not one of the classifications of mental states. The influential Model Penal Code in North America sets out the following classes of mental states: Purposefully, Knowingly, Recklessly, and Negligently. It is immediately apparent that while common law in England acknowledges “intent” there is no such recognized corresponding class in the US” (p185). Remorseless, sustained violent action, knowingly causing the deaths of huge numbers of people over a prolonged period (4.6 million Iraqi deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation , 1990-2011) is “intentional” and, accordingly, genocide.

The Al-Anis quote former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark; “There can be no doubt that the sanctions against Iraq intentionally destroyed in major part members of a national group and a religious group, as such, killing members of the groups, causing bodily and mental harm to their members and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, at least, in part. If this is not genocide, what is?”. They also quote Professor George Bisharat (Professor of Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, California,) on genocide in Iraq: “Knowing pursuit of a policy that kills members of a group, causes serious bodily or mental harm to them or inflicts on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part constitutes genocide under international law” (p195).

Chapter 8, “The Sanctions Committee oversight”, describes how the UN Sanctions Committee reported at 90-day intervals to the Security Council on implementation of Sanctions against Iraq i.e. they were well aware of the horrendous human consequences. In 2000 the Secretary General of the UN stated: “Let me conclude by saying that the humanitarian situation in Iraq poses a serious moral dilemma for this organization… I am particularly concerned about the situation of Iraqi children, whose suffering and, in all too many cases, untimely death, have been documented in the report prepared last year by UNICEF and the Iraqi Ministry of Health” (p207). Many other people expressed similar concerns but to no avail.

Chapter 9, “Sanctions as genocide”, commences “ When a country is put under total blockade for some thirteen years during which nothing was allowed in or out and even essential medicine and medical equipment was subject to restrictions, then any of the results in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention were either intended by the perpetrators, or the perpetrators had no doubt that their actions would lead to these results, or they knew that these results would occur in the ordinary sense of events – each of which amounts to specific intent under English law” (p215). The Al-Anis reasonably conclude; “We submit that every state that acquiesced in the continuation of sanctions in Iraq, when all international bodies were reporting the genocidal effects of sanctions, ought to be considered guilt of complicity in genocide. To fail to do this signals a weakening of public international legal norms, and subjects the discipline to the politics of power – indeed in matters where it matters most, throws it out the window… This assertion is supported by Article IV of the Convention which reads: “Persons committing Genocide or any of the acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”” (p219).

The final chapter of “Genocide in Iraq”, “Conclusion. The need for an appropriate judicial inquiry”, commences with the following damning assessment: “ Imposing sanction on Iraq was one of the most heinous of crimes committed in the 20th century. Yet it has received little attention in the Anglo-American world. Despite the calamitous destruction resulting from the sanctions, no serious attempts by legal professionals, academics or philosophers have been undertaken to address the full scope of the immorality and illegality of such a criminal and unprecedented mass punishment” (p222). The authors attribute this disaster to British and French colonialism, US imperialism and greed for oil, and the that “:the creation of the State if Israel was precisely to serve the purpose of having a geographical barrier between the Middle East Arabs and North African Arabs in addition to solving the Jewish problem for the civilized Europeans” (p223).

This extremely important book concludes “As there is no statute of limitations with regard to bringing action in any of the crimes committed against Iraq, it is hoped that this book will serve not only as an indictment of and barrier to future global imposition of sanctions, but also as a tool in bringing the actual perpetrators of this crime to a Nuremberg-style day of judgment” (p228).

I have been reporting the horrendous human cost of Western imperialism for several decades. I have endlessly apprised my own country Australia about the Iraqi Genocide (see “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/oc... ; Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqi... ) and have made repeated, detailed complaints to the International Criminal Court about the Iraqi Genocide and related atrocities (see: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqi... ). However Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist-perverted Mainstream media resolutely look the other way. Indeed the US-installed Iraqi Government has evidently falsified UN Iraq infant mortality statistics to claim that Iraqi infant mortality decreased under sanctions and Occupation and that under-5 infant deaths totalled 0.4 million (1990-2003) and 0.8 million (1990-2011) - whereas pre-Maliki Puppet Regime UN Population Division data indicate that Iraqi under-5 infant deaths increased enormously under sanctions and Occupation, totaling 1.2 million (1990-2003) and 2.0 million (1990-2011).

In Iraq avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation under Sanctions (1990-2003) and Occupation (2003-2011) totaled 1.7 million and 1.2 million, respectively, as determined from UN Population Division data. Violent deaths in the Gulf War (1991) and the Iraq War (2003-2011) totaled 0.2 million and 1.5 million, respectively. Under-5 infant deaths in Iraq under Sanctions (1990-2003) and Occupation (2003-2011) totalled 1.2 million and 0.8 million, respectively, 90% avoidable and due to gross US Coalition violation of the Geneva Convention. Iraqi deaths from violence or from violently-imposed deprivation total 4.6 million (see “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqi...).

What can decent people do? Decent people must (a) tell everyone they can and ensure that “Genocide in Iraq” is in every library ; (b) demand war crimes trials and removal from public life for all the leaders and their associates of the US, UK, Australia and other countries involved in the Iraqi Holocaust; and (c) urge and apply sanctions as consumers and voters against all countries, corporations, people, politicians and parties complicit in the Iraqi Genocide. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity.