No War, No Sanctions
Encouraged by the massive anti-war demonstration in London on September 28th, anti-war activists in the UK believe that the invasion of Iraq that Bush and Blair so desperately want can be stopped. There is certainly an enormous amount of work still to be done but there are signs of dissent in all sorts of interesting places. For example, a current TV advertisement for the tabloid daily newspaper, The Mirror, begins with a voice over footage of Saddam Hussein saying ``A dangerous man with weapons of mass destruction threatens the world...'' as Saddam Hussein's face is replaced by George Bush's.
Preventing the invasion would be an extraordinary victory for progressive people. There is hardly anything that US/UK imperialists have ever wanted more than their military bases in Iraq and they're using everything in their power to achieve it. If we can stop them, the boost to progressive movements here and internationally would be enormous.
But, and it is an enormous but, even if we stop the invasion, the sanctions on Iraq will remain unless we turn the anti-war campaign into a campaign against the sanctions as well. And the time to do that is now. Whenever we speak against war, we must also speak against the sanctions and we can begin by calling the sanctions what they are: war by another name. The sanctions regime constitutes a military siege against an innocent population, enforced by warships patrolling the seas and compounded by almost daily bombing.
We have known about the human cost of the siege for many years now. UNICEF estimates that sanctions have contributed to the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children. It is no exaggeration to call this genocide as Dennis Halliday, former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, has done. It lies on all our consciences that we have not cared enough for the suffering children of Iraq and have allowed hundreds of thousands of them to die and millions more to have their young lives blighted, stunted and isolated without raising our voices louder.
We now see the siege more clearly than ever for what it is politically: a US/UK strategy for maintaining a situation of perpetual crisis with Iraq, a crisis that can be exploited whenever the opportunity arises. It also weakens the population who must struggle to survive from day to day in the ruins of their collapsed economy and social structures, thus severely reducing the chances of any truly democratic movement developing. Even the limited hope of being able to reconstruct their country by themselves with no external interference may be long gone as educated people have either left or lost their skills after years of unemployment and a whole generation has grown up without education. The siege also makes sure that any vestigial military capability the country might have had will crumble and be degraded even further, so that it will be utterly defenceless when the US moves in to establish its bases.
If we stop the invasion, it will be too late then to say ``oh, and we want sanctions lifted too.'' Bush/Blair will be engaged in serious damage limitation and the first thing they will want to do is maintain the siege and so keep the door open to another war in the future. They will go into propaganda overdrive about how sanctions are more necessary than ever to ``contain Saddam''. Every year, every month, every day the siege continues the more Iraq's infrastructure decays and the more the suffering intensifies. The time to demand the end of the siege is now. We must link opposition to war and opposition to sanctions. Every ``Don't attack Iraq'' poster must also say ``End the Sanctions.'' Anti-war feeling is high. Progressives can take the opportunity to educate those who oppose the war and explain why sanctions are just as immoral. The next anti-war march in London must be an anti-sanctions march also.
Fay Dowker 16th October 2002
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