Sanctions Against Iraq

Sanctions Against Iraq are presented as a policy whose consequences, in Noam Chomsky’s account, cannot be separated from the political choices that produced and sustained them. He argues that a decade of U.S. policy devastated Iraqi society while strengthening Saddam Hussein, and that the deaths of civilians, including children, should be counted as consequences of the policy rather than set aside as collateral or unintended harm. The discussion makes Iraq a test of whether the same moral standards are applied to the conduct of powerful states as to their adversaries.

Policy and political effect

Chomsky describes the sanctions in the context of a broader U.S. policy toward Iraq over the preceding decade. He says that, contrary to the preferred Western account, people in the Middle East saw that this policy had devastated Iraqi society while reinforcing Saddam Hussein’s power. He adds that Saddam had received substantial U.S. support when his government committed grave atrocities, including the 1988 gassing of the Kurds. The point is not that the sanctions and that earlier support were identical acts, but that both belong in an account of policy whose consequences and political alignments are often obscured in Western discussion.

That contrast also matters to how the sanctions were understood outside the United States. Chomsky says that Osama bin Laden’s broadcasts across the region communicated a message that many listeners understood, including people who distrusted him. Their understanding, in this telling, rested on the contrast between the devastation wrought on Iraqi society and the U.S. relationship with Saddam Hussein. The passage presents that contrast as a source of political comprehension, not as an endorsement of bin Laden.

Civilian deaths and the test of moral consistency

Chomsky frames the human cost of the sanctions through the consequences attributed to them. He refers to an estimate that about half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions and recalls Madeleine Albright’s response when asked about that figure on national television. She acknowledged that consequences of that kind were the price of a difficult choice for her administration and said, “We think the price is worth it.” The exchange makes the consequences explicit: the children’s deaths were not an abstract possibility but a cost publicly recognized and accepted by a senior official.

Elsewhere, Chomsky estimates that U.S. policy had contributed to perhaps one million civilian deaths in Iraq, including half a million children. He uses the estimate to challenge the language by which state violence is named or minimized, placing support for Israel’s atrocities and U.S. backing for Turkey’s repression of its Kurdish population in the same wider discussion. These comparisons do not make the cases identical; they put pressure on the habit of treating the violence of official enemies as a crime while describing the consequences of policies supported by the United States as regrettable, incidental, or beyond serious scrutiny.

The standard he proposes is one of consistency. He argues that institutional or ideological causes should not make a crime disappear from moral judgment, just as the famine in China between 1958 and 1961 is not dismissed as irrelevant because Mao may not have intended the deaths of tens of millions. Nor, he says, should condemnation of Hitler’s crimes in Eastern Europe be used to neglect Stalin’s. Applied to Iraq, that reasoning means including those who suffer the consequences of sanctions in the account of their harm, rather than limiting attention to those killed directly by weapons. The question of personal intention does not cancel the responsibility to reckon with foreseeable effects.

Public argument and selective attention

Chomsky argues that the facts surrounding U.S. policy toward Iraq are rarely mentioned and are consequently little known, even among intellectual elites. He contrasts this relative obscurity with the reassuring U.S. portrayal of the proposals made at the 2000 Camp David summit as generous and magnanimous, a characterization he says was not shared in the Middle East. In this broader argument, the sanctions are part of a public narrative in which the suffering of Iraqis is muted while the conduct of official enemies receives concentrated moral attention.

His account also criticizes the way public argument can be narrowed by demands to reject supposed excuses for terrorism. Discussing Michael Walzer’s call for an ideological campaign against arguments that justify terrorism, Chomsky contends that, in practice, such a demand can discourage examination of the causes and context of violence directed at states Walzer supports. He connects that criticism to the treatment of political violence and civilian harm, including the sanctions’ effects on Iraqi children. The central issue is not whether civilian deaths can be made acceptable by a label, but whether the same scrutiny is applied when a policy is defended by a government with power and influence.

Strategic setting and the limits of the account

The discussion places Iraq within a wider assessment of U.S. power after September 11. Chomsky says the U.S. government would seek to use the moment to advance militarization, weaken social-democratic programs, divert attention from the harms of globalization and environmental problems, and transfer more wealth toward a smaller group. He also warns that a massive military offensive could fulfill Osama bin Laden’s wishes and intensify a cycle of violence. These claims supply the political frame for his criticism of policy, but the sanctions remain a distinct example: their consequences for Iraqi society are cited as evidence of the costs hidden by official language.

Chomsky further describes U.S. policy as shaped by powerful domestic interests and by strategic aims that include access to energy, markets, and resources. He traces the stated U.S. preference for acting multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary from Bill Clinton’s 1993 formulation to Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen, and says that George W. Bush went further even as coalition-building softened the rhetoric. This discussion does not establish that every U.S. action had the same immediate purpose as the sanctions. It situates Iraq within a recurring pattern in which strategic claims and public justifications must be examined separately from observable human consequences.

The book’s treatment of the sanctions thus ends as an argument about accounting: the effects of policy belong in the judgment of policy, even when the damage is mediated through institutions rather than inflicted in a single attack. Chomsky insists that civilian suffering in Iraq should not become a footnote simply because it resulted from sanctions, because the responsible decisions were presented as normal policy, or because the people bearing the cost lived outside the political community whose leaders made those decisions.