The Cruelty Of Sanctions

By John Pilger,

Devised and policed by the United States and Britain, the extreme suffering caused by these “sanctions” included, according to Unicef, the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under the age of five.

Ten years later, in New York, I met the senior British official responsible for the imposition of sanctions. He is Carne Ross, once known in the UN as “Mr.Iraq.” I read to him a statement he made to a parliamentary select committee in 2007: 

“The weight of evidence clearly indicates that sanctions caused massive human suffering among ordinary Iraqis, particularly children. We, the US and UK governments, were the primary engineers and offenders of sanctions and were well aware of this evidence at the time but we largely ignored it or blamed it on the Saddam government. [We] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.”

I said, “That’s a shocking admission.”

“Yes, I agree,” he replied. “I feel very ashamed about it.”

“Before I went to New York,” he said, “I went to the Foreign Office expecting a briefing on the vast piles of weapons that we still thought Iraq possessed, and the desk officer sort of looked at me slightly sheepishly and said, ‘Well actually, we don’t think there is anything in Iraq.’”

During this year’s US presidential campaign, both candidates agreed on sanctions against Iran, which they claimed posed a nuclear threat to the Middle East. Repeated over and over again, this assertion evoked the lies told about Iraq and the extreme suffering of that country. Sanctions are already devastating Iran’s sick and disabled. As imported drugs become impossibly expensive, sufferers of leukemia and other cancers are the first victims. The Pentagon calls this “full-spectrum dominance.”

Via: "Anti-War"