U.N. sanctions in Iraq: deadly weapon, wrong target.

As for that mysterious child of lies, the Arab, Colonel Wingate can converse with him for hours, and at the end know not only how much truth he has told, but exactly what truth he has suppressed," wrote a British journalist in admiration of the Governor General of the Sudan in 1900, and thus encapsuled both the arrogance and the hubris that have marked the Western powers' dealings with the Middle East since the peak of the colonial era. I read those words in David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace as my bus rumbled-past a string of oil trucks roaring in the opposite direction-through the checkpoints at the Iraqi border and into the second leg of the seemingly endless fourteen-hour trek across the desert from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad.

I have just returned from Iraq. I went alone to test my convictions by freely walking the streets, often without a guide, and talking with people. I talked, however briefly, with Iraqi officials in the ministries of information, education, and foreign affairs; with war veterans, humanitarians, doctors, and Christian lawyers. I visited the Amiriya shelter, where two of our "smart" bombs killed 403 civilians, and the Saddam Children's Teaching Hospital, where I met a dozen infants who, I was told, were suffering--as a double consequence of the war and the milk and medicine shortages aggravated by the embargo--from malnutrition, dehydration, and various blood diseases; and I saw the museum exhibit in the Qishlah government center, which, through before-and-after scale models, depicts how Iraq has miraculously rebuilt the great majority of its bridges, oil refineries, TV stations, etc., to prewar working condition. In one sense, a week is not a long time. In another, when you try to measure something as elusive as human suffering, a single day can seem an eternity. I went wary of the "child of lies" in both their government and mine, yet convinced, by my own application of traditional just-war principles, that the Persian Gulf War had been avoidable, that however just the stated goal of liberating Kuwait, the human cost--in both military and civilian casualties--was disproportionate to the actual good we accomplished.

I also went with mixed feelings about the continued role of the UN sanctions. I had supported economic sanctions against South Africa, and, on a visit there last summer, had seen their effect in the last days of legal apartheid. And I had supported the sanctions against Iraq in the months before Desert Storm. But then sanctions were an alternative to war; they seemed a proportionate, temporary hardship that would inflict less pain than bombing. Now they seemed a continuation of the conflict, hurting those Iraqis who, while the urban elite had rebounded from the war, were least able to recover from the effects of the bombing on their power and water supplies.

I return with most of those convictions and questions reinforced, though faced with Bosnia's plight and new allegations about Saddam Hussein's pressure on the Shiites in the south--less reluctant to use force as an occasional instrument of justice.

But what is the impact of what I saw? One is the exercise of seeing a complex situation from another point of view, of traveling in "enemy territory" and heating their stories compared to our versions of the same events. The other is the degree to which both Iraq's own morale-boosting campaign and the articulation of American policy, especially as reflected in the media, seem preoccupied with the person of Saddam Hussein. In Iraq, his image is everywhere-on murals and on TV; in the United States, our conversations jump to him, rather than to the Iraqi people. I open a recent U.S. News and World Report (August 10) to "The Next Battle with Saddam." It depicts a Bush-Saddam face-off, with the familiar pre-Desert Storm graphics and scenarios and the various missiles, laser-guided bombs, etc., we are preparing to employ again. We emphasized this public "get Saddam" posture in June by canceling joint military maneuvers with Jordan as punishment for trading with Iraq (a trade essential to Jordan's economy), and in August by sending troops on maneuvers in Kuwait. Meanwhile, Saddam zips around in his speedboat as if in mocking mimicry of his nemesis in Kennebunkport.

Faced with the evidence that the Iraqi people rather than their leaders are suffering as a result of the sanctions, we tend to reply that it is Saddam, because he dares to stay in power despite our wishes, who is responsible for their plight. Indeed, to read, for example, the U.S. State Department's testimony to the House Select Committee on Hunger (March 18, 1992) and that of the Catholic Relief Services (August 1, 1991, and still current) is to read two glaringly different analyses of the same elusive reality: the State Department stresses Saddam's continued brutality; CRS sees a country "on the brink of a major humanitarian crisis."

To a visitor in Baghdad, two seemingly contradictory trends seem clear. First, thanks to hard work, ingenuity, cannibalizing spare parts, an embargo-busting trade of petroleum with Jordan (for a while, 50,000 barrels a day), and similar border leaks in Syria, Iran, and Turkey, Iraq has rebuilt nearly 70 percent of the infrastructure the coalition destroyed in the war, restored 90 percent of the electricity in Baghdad, repaired 120 of the 134 bridges that were bombed, and made the capital once again a throbbing, bustling, commercial--if not quite beautiful city.

In short, there are only a few downtown signs---like the bomb hole in the face of a prominent office building--of the war. In the good hotels, wealthy Iraqis and foreigners who have changed dollars on the black market can afford the food. In the street markets there are sports shirts, cheap shoes, and blue jeans from somewhere, and huge fish hauled fresh from the polluted Tigris, which a visitor might eat at his peril. An outsider senses that the rebuilt bridges, oil refineries, and communications centers, celebrated in the Qishlah exhibit, are meant to stimulate a rebuilt national pride. We Americans tend to snicker at the omnipresent, towering, smiling wall portraits of Saddam--an Orwellian "Big Brother." But it is highly possible that Iraqis see him genuinely as the Father-protector. True, the Father has invested his good efforts in Baghdad, rather than on the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south; but the consensus seems to be that the July rumors of squashed coups and assassination attempts represent mainly the disappointed hopes of his exiled enemies and the CIA, and that Saddam Hussein, partly as a result of our continued sanctions, is growing stronger by the day. An American relief worker, who has studied the situation from the beginning, told me that partly in reaction to the sanctions, the Iraqis have become more nationalistic and have centered that feeling of loyalty on Saddam.

Second, Iraq's poorest and weakest citizens, particularly the children, are suffering terribly. And invisibly- In one sense their condition has been reported. See: the CRS testimony; the British publication Middle East International (May 15, 1992); study groups from Harvard and Tufts universities; Murray Kempton's analysis of Ramsey Clark's report on his visit to Iraq (Newsday, February 27, 1992); a series of recent reports in the Jordan Times; and Leslie and Andrew Cockburn's "Saddam's Best Ally," in Vanity Fair (August 1992). But only a media blitz CNN, "Nightline," "60 Minutes," Time 'and Newsweek covers, and page 1 of the New York Times-catches the American public's attention.

On July 24 as I walked through the wards of the children's hospital, my guide told me that on the first night of the bombing some mothers, in panic, grabbed their newborn infants from their incubators and ran out into the cold, where the children died. It struck me as an ironic parallel to the later-discredited story, which President George Bush had used in justifying the war, of the Iraqi soldiers who had dumped Kuwaiti incubator babies on the floor. Kuwaitis had even shown CNN cameramen their graves. Each side has its own stories of infant victims.

I moved from bed to bed and tried to look each mother in the eyes. There was nothing I could say, except ask questions. An Iraqi pediatrician worked his fingers over the scrawny torso of a tiny child with bulging eyes and distended stomach and explained to me dispassionately how this child fits into the larger picture of Iraq' s growing infant mortality. True, the goverment provides a basic ration of rice, flour, sugar, and tea for poor families, and the UN and other agencies distribute food; but, the red tape of the sanctions, the freezing of Iraqi assets, the shortage of dollars, and rampant inflation made worse by the CIA flooding the Iraqi economy with counterfeit dinars all mean a shortage of milk, medicines, syringes, surgical gloves, the spare parts that repair the blood testing equipment, and incubators.

I asked later why Iraq did not confiscate the wealth of the elite who were getting rich on the black market and use that money to buy medicine for children. I got an unsatisfactory answer about the distinction between the public and private sectors, but Murray Kempton answered my question well enough: "Saddam Hussein has always been conspicuously indifferent to the sufferings of his subjects...." Meanwhile, Middle East International (May 15, 1992) has reported that between August 1990 and January 1992, 31,330 children below and 67,636 above the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, and that in the first three months of 1992, 12,000 infants and 19,950 older children died. Infant mortality has trebled and deaths among older children doubled. Beggars, once, I am told, rare on the streets of Baghdad, have reappeared. Little boys hustle cartons of cigarettes to passing cars. And thousands of Iraqis take the fourteen-hour bus trip to Amman to hawk their personal belongings-shirts, plastic jewels, prayer beads--on the street to return home with a few more dinars for their families.

True, much of Iraq' s behavior strikes us as self-destructive. It has become increasingly less cooperative with UN and other humanitarian agencies working to alleviate hunger and disease (New York Times, August 9, 1992). True, the UN has proposed that, under strict UN supervision, Iraq produce and export $1.6 billion worth of oil; more than a third of the profits would go for reparations, and the rest for humanitarian relief. Iraq claims that the UN's restrictions would violate national sovereignty and amount to putting its main resource, its oil industry, into receivership; and that, as one man expressed it to me, using a metaphor for his understanding of Saddam's relationship with his people, the UN's control of food distribution would be so fight that "a father could not feed his own children."

Religious leaders, like the seven Catholic patriarchs of the East, have called for the lifting of the embargo "...to allow the Iraqi people to rebuild themselves and again join with the international community in building up and developing the region upon sound foundations" (Origins, September 26, 1991 ).

Why not listen to them? What is the purpose of the sanctions? If the purpose is to force Iraq's compliance with the UN resolutions on disarmament, it seems, according to a Washington Post (July 26) story, that the work of UN disarmament inspection teams is virtually completed, that the known Iraqi missiles, chemical weapons, and nuclear facilities have either been destroyed already or will soon be. Indeed, the confrontation at the Ministry of Agriculture, a UN official admitted, may have been based on a misunderstanding- In fact, a demonstration which I witnessed there had all the elements of a charade. Saddam seems to thrive on confrontation; each apparent defiance of Bush and the UN and their repeated bombing threats solidifies the support of a frightened populace.

The real purpose of the sanctions seems to be to punish the Iraqi people until they see Saddam, rather than Bush, as their punisher and somehow remove him. There are two problems with this policy. First, it's not working; second, it can't be morally justified, either in its immediate effects (increased hunger, disease, and the deaths of children) or its hoped-for indirect effect (the murder of Saddam). (Note: If John Kennedy's turning his eyes away from the murder of Premier Diem and his alleged complicity in CIA plots to assassinate Castro were worthy of general moral condemnation, how is a national policy to encourage Saddam's murder morally acceptable?)

But weren't the sanctions against South Africa, which also caused some hardship for the common people, seen as morally correct? Sanctions worked in South Africa for three reasons: (1) the black leadership were convinced that the common people were willing to bear the impact of sanctions on themselves to achieve the long-term goal, a democratic society; (2) the South African white elite, who had begun to travel and confront the outside world, were tired of being seen as racist fascists and excluded from prestigious international events like the Olympic Games; (3) these sanctions had a clearly understood high moral goal.

Apply these norms to Iraq. (1) There is little evidence that the Iraqi people perceive Saddam rather than the U.S./UN as the source of their pain; the majority will adapt to the hardship. (2) The Iraqi elite are not shamed by international disapproval. According to the Cockbums and other sources, Saddam' s family and his supporters are getting rich on the business and smuggling opportunities created by the sanctions. (3) This administration argued before Operation Desert Storm that the goal of this "just" war, to liberate Kuwait, could not be achieved by sanctions alone. Now, by war, the goal has been achieved. By declining to pursue Iraq's army to the gates of Baghdad and to give military support to the Kurd and Shiite rebellions, which it had irresponsibly invited, the Bush administration signaled that it preferred a stable Iraq governed by Saddam Hussein to a dismembered country controlled by Kurds and Iran-backed Shiites. That restraint was a sensible, morally-defensible policy. We should live with its consequences.

Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., is a professor of journalism at Loyola University in New Orleans.