Humanitarian

No country in the world has suffered more sustained misery at the hands of the American Empire in the post-Soviet era than Iraq, which has been punished with a degree of ferocity unseen since the invasion of Vietnam.  The people of Iraq have endured horrific tragedies caused by the United States government during the past 20 years, beginning with the rule of the ruthless tyrant Saddam Hussein who was armed and aided by the United States[1] during the 1980s while he may have massacred between 50,000 and 100,000 Iraqis.[2]  Later, when relations between the United States and the dictator soured, the people of Iraq endured a US invasion[3] in 1991 during which as many as 100,000 Iraqis died and 300,000 were wounded as a direct result of the atrocities committed by the US military.[4] During the Gulf War the United States committed widespread abuses and war crimes, including the infamous use of bulldozers to plow living, injured, and dead Iraqi soldiers into the ground, burying some alive.[5]  Civilian targets were purposely attacked,[6] Iraqi soldiers who had raised a white flag in surrender were mercilessly killed,[7] and the military used depleted uranium in bullets and missiles, causing untold suffering including birth disorders and genetic defects.[8] The US bombing campaign targeted Iraq’s electrical power plants—crippling its water, sewage, and medical systems—and also destroyed the majority of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure, severely crippling its economy and limiting its ability to provide for its population.

Following the utter devastation of Iraq’s economy in the Gulf War, the United States imposed draconian economic sanctions on the country which prohibited the sale of food, medicine, machinery, and other humanitarian items[9] to Iraq.  The effect of the embargo was catastrophic for the Iraqi civilian population: it is estimated that perhaps 1.7 million Iraqis died as a direct result of the sanctions, including perhaps 1 million Iraqi children under the age of five years old.[10]  The culpability of the United States in the deaths of the 1.7 million Iraqis cannot seriously be disputed; it is simply ridiculous to claim that a government could impose complete sanctions preventing the sale of food, medicine, machinery, and other vital items to a country utterly demolished by war, with no means of providing for its own population, and not realize that such an embargo would lead to millions of civilian deaths. The government officials responsible for the imposition of the sanctions were clearly aware of the human toll of their policies, and were remorseless: when Clinton’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline Albright, was confronted with the fact that half a million Iraqi children had died because of the economic sanctions on the television show 60 Minutes in 1996, she did not challenge the statistic, but infamously declared “we think the price is worth it.”  

The sanctions remained in effect until the 2003 military invasion, which has led to an additional 100,000 Iraqi deaths thus far according to the best estimate by the British medical journal the Lancet.^[11]  Once Saddam Hussein’s regime had been defeated, the United States established a military occupation in the country, began a counterinsurgency campaign against anti-occupation forces, and proceeded to turn over much of the Iraqi economy to American corporations.  Among the many egregious atrocities[12] committed by the United States in Iraq include the use of napalm in combat^[13] and brutal torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.[14]

The extremely brutal American policy towards Iraq during the past 20 years would seem to be so terrible as to border on genocide. The term “genocide,” like the term “holocaust,” is one that contains extreme emotional value and should never be used lightly, or for purposes of political persuasion.  However, the atrocities perpetrated against the people of Iraq during the last 20 years are so extreme that we should at least be willing to discuss the applicability of a term such as “genocide.”

The term “genocide” is defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as:

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”[15]

Of the five acts listed above which are classified as being genocidal, the United States has clearly and indisputably engaged in the first three, directly killing with its own military at least 200,000 Iraqis during 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq, causing serious bodily injury to the 300,000 Iraqis injured during the Gulf War, the 42,500 civilians (at the very least) injured during the 2003 invasion,[16] and the untold thousands exposed to depleted uranium and napalm, and deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about destruction by passing sanctions on the sale of food and medicine to an impoverished, economically devastated country.  Dennis Halliday—the UN Humanitarian Coordinator on Baghdad, Iraq who resigned in protest over the sanctions—clearly thought the United States’ actions met the United Nations’ definition of genocide, as he said upon resigning: “I don't want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.”[17]

            But, it would seem, simply killing members of a group, causing bodily harm to members of a group, or deliberately inflicting destructive conditions on a group of people is not a great enough crime to merit the term “genocide.”  If every instance in which one of those three acts occurred were to be classified as genocide by the UN, then every single war, ethnic conflict, and counterinsurgency campaign in the world would qualify as genocide.  Perhaps a better way to determine whether or not the actions taken against Iraqis by the United States government classify as genocide is to compare the Iraq situation with other historical situations that are generally accepted as genocides.  In mainstream discourse, there are several campaigns of mass-murder which have been deemed genocide, including the extermination of more than 10 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and political dissidents by the Third Reich in Germany, the annihilation of perhaps 1.5 million Armenians by nationalists in Turkey, and the murder of at least 800,000 Tutsi by Hutu nationalist in Rwanda.  Other events which are generally described as genocide in mainstream discourse—despite some dissention—include the massacre of 1.7 million Cambodians by the country’s government under the Khmer Rouge regime, the murder of millions of dissidents by the government of Joseph Stalin in the USSR and Mao Tse-Tung in the People’s Republic of China, the colonization and murder of an untold number of indigenous inhabitants of the western hemisphere by European colonialists, the ethnic warfare in the Democratic Republic of Congo which has caused approximately 4 million deaths, and the various campaigns ethnic cleansing associated with the demise of Yugoslavia.

Iraq is certainly comparable to several events typically described as “genocides” in terms of death toll; the death toll caused by the United States during the last 20 years—roughly 1.9 million Iraqis[18]—surpasses the death toll of the Cambodian auto-genocide (1.7 million), the Armenian Genocide (1.5 million), the Rwandan Genocide (800,000), and the Bosnian Genocide (200,000).  It would appear that, measured just in terms of deaths, US policy towards Iraq should certainly qualify as genocide.

However, some people argue that genocide is a term that can only be used to describe campaigns designed to completely obliterate an entire ethnic, social, or political group from the earth, and nothing short of this—no matter how high the death count—merits the term genocide. US Policy in Iraq clearly does not meet this description; the US government’s motive for killing nearly 2 million Iraqis is clearly more about enforcing corporate political and economic hegemony than it is about a racial agenda.  However, there are many other historical cases of mass-violence typically called genocide that arguably do not involve purposeful obliteration of a single group, such as the extermination of indigenous Americans by Europeans—which was essentially a campaign of colonization so unspeakably brutal that almost all of its victims were killed—or Pol Pot’s massacre of millions of his fellow Cambodians who stood in the way of his political, economic, and social goals.  If we decided that US policy toward Iraq should not be described as genocide, then the extermination of Native Americans or Pol Pot’s massacre should not be described as genocide either.  However, if we continue to call Pol Pot’s massacre genocide, then we must accept that the US Iraq policy must also be deemed genocide. 

Anyway, I doubt that it makes a great deal of difference to the victims of a mass-slaughter whether their murder’s intention was to exterminate them or merely to take control of their resources.[19]  If we elect not to classify US Policy towards Iraq during the last 20 years as genocide, we do so only because of a technicality in terminology, and not because the people of Iraq have suffered any less than the victims of comparable tragedies that technically are genocides.

Regardless of whether US policy toward Iraq is to be classified as genocide or not, it is important that we as Americans begin to understand the magnitude of the crimes committed by our country’s government; that the number of deaths is even large enough to merit comparisons to the Cambodian Genocide ought to be enough to galvanize many Americans into opposition to the war and the occupation of Iraq.  The criminal war against the people of Iraq is still going on, and it must be our utmost priority to end the campaign of colonization and extermination.  We must do absolutely everything that we can to ensure that not another Iraqi dies at the hands of the US government.  We must demand that American troops leave Iraq immediately.  Every day that US troops remain in Iraq, the slaughter continues, and the suffering endured by the people of Iraq and the people of the United States increases.