November 15, 2007
by Stephen Lendman

By any estimate, the human toll in Iraq is horrific from all that happened after Saddam's August 2, 1990 Kuwait invasion. Four days later, Operation Desert Shield was launched. It began with US-led UN-imposed economic sanctions, large US and other troop deployments to the region, and a sweeping Kuwait-funded PR campaign to win public support for Operation Desert Storm that began January 17, 1991.

Before it ended six weeks later on February 28, US forces committed grievous war crime violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions and UN and Nuremberg Charters. They included gratuitous mass killings as well as bombing and destroying essential to life facilities that included:

-- power generating stations;

-- dams;

-- water purification capabilities;

-- sewage treatment and disposal systems;

-- telephone and other communications;

-- hospitals;

-- mosques;

-- residential areas affecting 10-20,000 homes, apartments and other dwellings;

-- irrigation sites;

-- food processing, storage and distribution facilities;

-- hotels and retail establishments;

-- transportation infrastructure;

-- oil wells, pipelines, refineries and storage tanks;

-- chemical plants;

-- civilian shelters like Al Ameriyya that was attacked February 13, 1991 by two laser-guided "smart bombs" killing around 400 civilians including 142 children;

-- factories and other commercial operations;

-- government offices;

-- historical sites; and more in a willful malicious effort to return the country to a pre-industrial age and punish its people horrifically.

Lost was power, clean water, sanitation, fuel, transportation, medical facilities and medications, adequate food, schools, private dwellings and places of employment. Early post-war estimates placed the number of civilians killed at 113,000 (mostly children) according to the Red Crescent Society of Jordan. In addition, US CENTCOM commander, General Schwarzkopf and others, estimated 100,000 or more Iraqi military deaths plus thousands more killed gratuitously as they were retreating in disarray.

What then followed was 12 years of the most comprehensive genocidal sanctions ever imposed on a country as an act of vengeance and US-imposed imperial arrogance. They were first adopted in UN Resolution 661 four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait. They included a full trade embargo that crippled the country economically but initially allowed in food, medical and other essential humanitarian needs. UN Resolution 670 followed in September, 1990 that imposed an air blockade and measures to enforce it.

After the war in April, 1991, UN Resolution 687 was adopted. It required Saddam accept cease fire terms and comply with Geneva protocols banning biological and chemical weapons. It also affirmed Kuwait's sovereignty, but it wasn't good enough for US officials who wanted sanctions to remain in force until Saddam was removed.

Later on, the oil for food and medicine program was adopted under UN Resolution 986 in 1995 but was hopelessly inadequate by design. An internal UN report in 1999 revealed it delivered only $74 of food per annum per person (about 21 cents a day) and $15 worth of medicines (about 4 cents a day) with vitally needed items banned or in short supply like syringes, anesthetics, vaccines, antibiotics and other drugs. Everything with potential "dual use" was blocked - chlorine to purify water, vital medical equipment, chemotherapy and pain-killing drugs, ambulances, and anything Washington wished to deny the country punitively with horrific consequences.

Further complicating things, all Iraqi funds were frozen and administered through a US-controlled Development Fund for Iraq. In addition, UN Resolution 661 stipulated all goods entering the country had to be approved by a 15 member committee that included the five permanent Security Council members. Approval had to be unanimous with every member having veto power. The US representative abused his authority by blocking items or causing long delays in importing others. The practice became so extreme, on one occasion baby food was denied on the grounds adults might consume it. At other times, items on the World Health Organization (WHO) humanitarian priority list were blocked such as rice, school books, paper, agricultural pesticides, medical journals and catheters for babies.

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The results were predictable and devastating. Normal life was impossible and became a daily struggle to survive. It became apparent by the mid-1990s many didn't or wouldn't:

-- the UN World Food Program (WFP) reported 2.4 million Iraqi children were severely at nutritional risk in September, 1995;

-- in December, 1995, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said 12% of Baghdad children were "wasted, 28% stunted and 29% under weight;"

-- by year end 1995, FAO reported 567,000 Iraqi children sanction-related deaths;

-- by March, 1996, WHO noted a six-fold mortality rate increase among children under five;

-- in October, 1996 UNICEF reported 4500 monthly Iraqi children deaths from sanction-caused starvation and disease;

-- by 1999, the under five child mortality rate rose three-fold from 1989, malnutrition doubled, and the entire young child population was affected;

-- UN Secretary-General Boutras-Boutras-Ghali noted how health conditions deteriorated dramatically by the mid-1990s, and by 1997 the WHO Director General said Iraq's health care system was systemically broken; in addition, malaria, typhoid, cholera and other life-threatening and communicable diseases were rampant.

These actions were committed willfully and are war crimes under relevant Geneva Conventions and other international law. They also constitute genocide under provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that "means any (acts like those listed above) committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the national, ethnical, racial or religious group (by) killing (its) members; causing (them) serious bodily or mental harm; (or) deliberately inflicting (on them) conditions (that may destroy them in whole or in part)."

US administrations under GHW Bush, Bill Clinton and GW Bush are criminally liable under "the genocide convention" and other relevant international law. Up to the March, 2003 attack and invasion, more than 1.5 million Iraqis, including over one million children, likely died from the combination of war and economic sanctions. Two UN heads of Iraqi humanitarian relief resigned under them in anger and frustration with Dennis Halliday saying in 1998 he did so because he "had been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over one million individuals, children and adults" including 5000 Iraqi children monthly in his judgment.

To date, most members of Congress are mute on the Iraq genocide and continue funding it with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Yet on October 10, the House Foreign Relations Committee hypocritically passed a non-binding resolution calling the 1915 - 1923 Armenian holocaust (taking 1.0 to 1.5 million lives) genocide with a full House vote on the measure still scheduled for November in spite of waning support for it and uncertainty where it will go in the Senate.

Speaker Pelosi still backs the measure and in 2006 as Minority Leader pledged to support legislation "that would properly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. It is imperative that the United States recognize this atrocity and move to renew our commitment to eliminate genocide whenever and wherever it exists." Today, Speaker Pelosi is mute on Iraq, Afghanistan and fully supports AIPAC's agenda and its top priority of war with Iran. She's not bothered by her own government's genocide that far exceeds the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Turkish Armenian slaughter during and after WW I. The data below estimates as many as four million Iraqis have perished from 1990 - 2007, but speaker Pelosi's condemnation of it is nowhere in sight.

Dr. Gideon Polya is a well-published biological scientist who's book, "Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950," came out this year. It "documents....non-reported (worldwide) avoidable death(s) of 1.3 billion people since 1950" including in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also published his data on millions of violent and non-violent deaths under the three most recent US administrations in articles like his October 7 one on Countercurrents.org. In it, he cites data on Iraq from the Lancet, UN and British polling firm ORB. His "Asian Wars" totals in Iraq, Afghanistan, Occupied Palestine and Lebanon are horrific, and, if correct, exceed any others published to date. A summary of his data follows.

-- Eight million total violent and non-violent deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon breaking down as follows:

-- 70,000 "US-backed" Israeli-caused deaths in Lebanon from 1978 - 2006, 10,000 of which were violent killings "by Israelis" or their "surrogates;"

-- 300,000 1967-2007 Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) deaths plus another 10,000 violent deaths;

-- 200,000 violent 1990-91 Gulf war deaths;

-- 1.7 million 1990-2003 Iraqi sanctions-caused deaths including 1.2 million children under age five;

-- 3.2 million 2001-2007 US Afghanistan war deaths including UN Population Division data totaling 2.5 million plus 700,000 children under age five;

-- 2.0 million 2003-07 US Iraq war deaths including 1.2 million UK polling firm ORB violence-related estimates plus 800,000 children under age five from UNICEF data; and

-- 500,000 2001-07 opiate drug-related deaths resulting from the resurgent Afghan opium industry under US-UK occupation; the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates its output at 93% of world production.

Polya cites the failure of occupying powers to supply essential "life-sustaining requisites" as a major cause of preventable deaths. He also notes his eight million estimate exceeds the Nazi-inflicted Jewish holocaust total of about six million. And he rightly observes that major media misreporting, denying or "ignoring of this horrendous, ongoing mass" slaughter is the equivalent of Jewish holocaust denial and doing it endangers security for "both....victims and....perpetrators."

There's no denying the toll on victims, but consider the cost at home post-9/11:

-- a nation with no outside enemies permanently at war and claims the right to wage preventive wars under the doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" using first strike nuclear weapons even against non-nuclear states;

-- world stability and peace further threatened by the administration's abandoning NPT, ending Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty protection, rescinding and subverting the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, deploying so-called "missile defense" for offense, and plans to weaponize space toward the goal of "full-spectrum (unchallengeable) dominance" of all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems plus as much of the world's energy resources as possible;

-- a military budget hugely exceeding the rest of the world combined; The Independent Institute analyst Robert Higgs estimates the true FY 2007 budget exceeds $1 trillion with all defense-related items included;

-- a rogue government operating outside constitutional and international laws and norms with the Congress and courts criminally complicit;

-- an unprecedented wealth disparity in an omnipotent corporatist state;

-- growing social decay and poverty in the richest country in the world;

-- a secretive, intrusive, repressive administration under a president who disdains the public interest and is a serial liar and war criminal;

-- condoning and operating secret torture-prisons around the world as a weapon of cruelty, vengeance and social control; and

-- a cesspool of corruption stemming from incestuous business-govenment ties that defile democracy and mock any notion of government of, for and by the people.

The toll in Israel is evident as well. Angela Godfrey-Goldstein is an Israeli Jew, based in Jerusalem, and the Action Advocacy Officer with the Israeli Committee Against (Palestinian) House Demolitions (ICAHD). On August 30, 2007, she delivered an address at the UN Conference at the EU Parliament in Brussels commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Occupied Palestine. In it, she noted part of the toll on Israeli society caused by 40 years of Palestinian repression:

-- around one million Israeli Jews "voted with their feet and left the country;"

-- an estimate by some that up to 50% of Israeli youths refuse mandatory Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) service plus a "grey" Air Force refusal rate of around 30%;

-- a significant recent observation from John Pilger that "something (around the world) is changing. (There's a) swell of a boycott....growing inexorably....an important marker (may have) been passed, reminiscent of the boycotts (preceding) sanctions against apartheid South Africa" that led to the fall of its white-supremicist government; and

-- her experience working with "diplomats, politicians and aid workers in Israel and Palestine (shows) that, on an individual basis, there's enormous personal support and empathy for the Palestinian cause" because decades of abuse against them are intolerable and must end.

Push eventually will come to shove. We better hope it arrives soon. The world can't wait much longer.

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Stephen Lendman [send him email] lives in Chicago, and maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com. He also hosts "The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour" online at www.themicroeffect.com.