Mix of sort of speakers tonight to address the topic of Iraqi sanctions or sanctions on Iraq.
As you'll know from the up the flyer. Our guest is Joy Gordon, who's written I'm going to hold up the book so you can see it,
the book called Invisible War the United States in the Iraq Sanctions,
which is a Harvard University press volume that's come out,
which takes an interesting look at the impact of the sanctions and also engages with legal and moral questions around sanctions themselves.
Joy comes at this from sort of a mixture of disciplines in that she's a professor of philosophy at Fairfield University,
but she also has a J.D. from Boston University's School of Law and is a member of the bar of the state of Connecticut.
But she's primarily trained as a philosopher. She teaches courses in political philosophy, human rights, international law, philosophy of law.
And you may have seen her articles in The Nation and in Harper's,
as well as academic publications like Ethics and International Affairs, Middle East Report, Arab Studies Quarterly.
So she's published widely on different questions related to human rights and sanctions.
She also, in relation to what she's speaking about today,
testified before the House Committee on Energy and Common Commerce regarding the oil for food program in Iraq.
So you may even want to discuss some elements of that.
And we've asked just to sort of kick off the discussion with the larger group, Professor David Miller, who's known to many of you.
He's one of ours in Oxford who teaches political theory, who's got wide interest in political theory.
I know David's work in terms of his writings on nationalism and global justice recently, his book on national responsibility and Global Justice.
But I thought of him today because he he wrote a very interesting for today, because he wrote a very interesting article, I guess,
about about eight or nine years ago in the Journal of Political Philosophy on distributing
responsibilities and the idea of how we allocate international responsibilities.
And it started off with a discussion of sanctions in Iraq and Iraqi civilians.
And it made me think that it would be a really useful person.
Therefore, to start off the discussion, particularly since we are talking about legal and moral issues around sanctions.
So I'm going to hand it over to Joi first. She said she's going to probably talk for about 3 minutes and then I'll give the floor to David and
then I will pass it over to you for any questions that you have that you want to ask of the speakers.
Welcome. Well, thank you very much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here. I came here sort of via an issue whose work on the UN economic rights was very influential on me.
And this is a I started working on Iraq because I had started more broadly working on the ethics of economic sanctions.
And when I was doing a book on that with what was supposed to be a one chapter, a little case study on Iraq,
and then that sort of grew hydra like so with each new line, it developed more lines.
And then as I was working on that, because it was a massively complicated bureaucracy,
much different than any other sort of sanctions, instance of which the documentation.
And so that I was reading whatever documents or websites I could and then I had questions.
I was not clear about what was going on in the website.
And so I just started calling U.N. officials and calling diplomats and saying, can I come interview you about this moment?
Mostly from my own background. But then what they say is, here's what you need to know.
You need to know about the holes. And it's not clear from the websites what that is.
And they said the U.S. is strangling Iraq in a way that goes well beyond what anyone else on the council is doing or
wants to do in ways that goes well beyond what the resolutions indicate and well beyond what the charter permits.
And then I would say, well, so who where would I find a document of this?
And they would say, Well, everyone knows. And I'm thinking, that's not really a good footnote.
Everyone knows. And so I'm thinking, well, this, this won't go that well.
And then I just keep talking to people and talking to people.
And then finally I start finding the U.N. guy who produces a certain kind of document.
And I say, and the cult status lists, I said, Could I have a copy?
They said, Well, no, I can't give that to you because I'd be fired.
I say, okay, well, so who did you. Prepare it for.
And he'd say, this committee is this committee of the Security Council that meets behind closed doors.
It's for the first several years, it did not even distribute its agenda to its own members.
It never distributed its minutes to all of its own members and only distributed to the P5.
Its. And so that as I'm talking to people, I realise there's this completely secretive kind of entity.
And so then I start going to each of the people who's on this committee and I say, Is this what's going on?
And Do you have status lists and sector reports?
And they say, Oh, oh, that stuff that I get that I dump in that box over there.
Oh, sure. Go dig through that and help yourself. And then it turns out there's these there's very profound tension and antagonism.
These meetings often degenerated into screaming matches. They were it was not always among the P5.
The ones who were the most aggressive and the strongest about raising the moral
issues were typically the elected members and of those the developing countries.
And they had a great deal at stake. The U.S. had been very vindictive toward Yemen when it had not gone along with one of the early votes,
pulled a massive aid program, and Saudi Arabia expelled all Yemenis guest workers with a big hit to the economy.
So in the face of that kind of vindictiveness, in this context for all of these countries, Ecuador, Namibia, on and on and on,
to be challenging the U.S. very strongly and to read these minutes, it's just stunning to see how strongly they're raising these as moral issues.
They have nothing to gain. The Arab countries presumably have something to gain.
Russia and China and France, too. But everyone everyone is raising this very, very vocally as a serious moral issue.
Why are you doing? There is no rational reason for the things that you people are doing.
There would be there was one incident that you get from these minutes where the U.S. was had just locked up over time,
a series of everything related to glue, glue for wood, glue for paper, glue for bookbinding,
glue for shoe leather, every kind of glue, because it was basically blocking everything related to industry,
everything that could be contribute, that could generate a productive process at all.
And one country says, what is your concern with the glue?
Are you afraid the Iraqis will glued together weapons of mass destruction?
And the U.S. delegate, you know, the old adage of I don't know if this is sort of literally true.
I suppose it is that old horses, when they die, they go to the glue factory.
So the U.S. delegate says we're blocking the glue because we care about the horses.
So it's hard to know what to make of that kind of flippant, contemptuous remark.
Presumably it's not something that he would have said in a public setting or if he thought the minutes would become public.
So you end up with, among other things, minutes that the document this this tension and this conflict very, very, very precisely.
But where I think no one was ever expecting that anyone would see the minutes they didn't read them when they have them,
they didn't they barely knew they existed. So you end up with documentation of people being very candid.
So so it ended up really being, I think, indicating a kind of a smoking gun, a smoking gun of a very complicated,
bureaucratised sort, but a situation where there there is a kind of deliberate, systematic, gratuitous damage that's done over time.
Reform attempts are rebuffed time and time again.
Information that documents the human damage is discredited for political reasons over and over again.
And and so that's that's how I come to this story.
So what I'd like to talk about today is the role of the United States and the damage that was done by the UN sanctions on Iraq from 1990 to 2003,
while the UK was, in many regards, in lockstep with the U.S. in some respects, the U.S. had no support from anyone, not even Britain.
I believe it's critical to understand the process within the U.N. Security Council in which the damage was done and from which to this day,
Iraq has not recovered.
Starting in August 1990, the United States was instrumental in imposing the cruellest sanctions in the history of international governance.
While the U.N. Security Council was mandated to respond to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait,
the sanctions regime it imposed in conjunction with the massive bombing campaign of 1991 destroyed nearly.
All of Iraq's infrastructure, industrial capacity, agriculture, telecommunications and critical public services,
particularly electricity and water treatment for the next 12 years.
The sanctions would prevent Iraq from restoring any of these to the level it had achieved in the 1980s and would devastate the health,
education and basic well-being of almost the entire Iraqi population.
The situation was worsened by the corruption in the Iraqi government,
and the Iraqi government was not particularly effective in mitigating the harm done by the UN measures.
But it was the extraordinary harshness of the sanctions coming on top of the
1991 bombing that was primarily responsible for the collapse of Iraq's economy.
It was the consistent policy of all three U.S. administrations from 1990 to 2003 to inflict the most extreme economic damage possible on Iraq.
This was true even though each administration insisted that it was committed to the well-being of the Iraqi people.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said, I care more about the children of Iraq than Saddam Hussein does.
But the truth was that in implementing the policy on sanctions, the human damage was never a factor in U.S. policy.
The overwhelming concern of the U.S. government through strategies that were overly broad and extreme,
was to prevent Iraq from rebuilding its military. The first strategy was simply to bankrupt the nation as a whole.
The second was disarmament, which included a prohibition on dual use goods interpreted in the broadest possible sense, invoking dual use.
The United States unilaterally blocked child vaccines, water tankers during a period of drought cloth.
The generator needed to run a sewage treatment plant. Radios for ambulances.
Any goods that could even conceivably be used by the military for any possible purpose.
The problem, of course, is that there is precious little that is used by a civilian population that is not also used by the military.
Window glass. Brake fluid. Telephones.
Light switches. The list is absolutely without end.
Regardless of the US government's public posturing.
The officials who formulated and implemented the policy literally gave no weight to the humanitarian costs of their actions.
Quote, It was not part of our skillset. One State Department official said, prior to the Persian Gulf War of 1991,
the Iraqi government had invested heavily in social and economic development.
Iraq had made impressive strides in health, education and infrastructure.
In 1980, the Iraqi government initiated a program to increase the survival rates of infants and young children.
The result was a rapid and steady decline in childhood mortality.
Prior to the Gulf War, there was good vaccination coverage.
The majority of women were attended by trained health professionals during childbirth.
The majority of the adult population was literate, and there was nearly universal access to primary school education.
The vast majority of households had access to safe water and to electricity.
Iraq won an award from UNESCO's for its campaign to eliminate illiteracy among women.
In 1988,
the Food and Agriculture Organisation found that undernourishment was no longer a public health problem and that 7% of Iraqi children were obese.
Prior to the embargo, 93% of primary school age children attended school prior to the embargo.
Over 90% of the population had access to health care.
And it was a highly sophisticated health care system.
The majority of Iraqi physicians were trained in Europe or the U.S. and one quarter were board certified.
But the massive bombing campaign of the 1991 Gulf War changed all of that.
It systematically targeted all of Iraq's infrastructure.
In 1991, an envoy of the UN secretary general described in some detail the collapse that resulted from the bombing,
including water purification and sewage treatment. Agricultural production and food supplies and distribution.
The destruction of the telephone system. And all modern means of communication.
He identified the particular urgency of energy needs.
Without the production of electricity, he noted, food that is imported cannot be preserved and distributed.
Water cannot be purified. Sewage cannot be pumped away and cleansed.
Crops cannot be irrigated. Medicines cannot be conveyed where they are needed.
Among other things, this resulted in cholera and typhoid epidemics.
In 1990, the incidence of typhoid in Iraq was 11 per 100,000 people.
By 1994 it was 142 per 100,000.
In 1989, there were zero cases of cholera per 100,000 people.
By 1994, the. Per 1344 per 100,000 people.
With the sanctions in place. These epidemics then became permanent.
The collapse of infrastructure meant the medical equipment could no longer function for lack of electricity.
Food cannot be distributed because roads and bridges were destroyed.
The water was not fit for human consumption because sewage treatment plants had been destroyed.
All of this was reflected in the excess mortality rate of children under the age of five.
That is the number of young children who died during sanctions.
Who would not have died without them.
Although the data available from Iraq have not always been reliable, and this figure has been the subject of much debate,
the majority of the studies over the course of the sanctions regime suggest that for the period from 1990 to 2003, that figure is at least 500,000.
So it's 500,000 children under five, and then some uncounted or unmeasurable number of persons over the age of five,
including the sick and the elderly. As the humanitarian impact of sanctions became more visible in the 1990s,
a number of political scientists and ethicists proposed criteria for their ethical use,
including humanitarian exemptions, to protect the most vulnerable members of the population.
They argued that there must be some provision to allow in humanitarian goods.
These exemptions were ostensibly provided when the 66 one committee,
the committee of the Security Council charged with overseeing the sanctions, took on the task of reviewing requests for humanitarian imports.
But while this protection existed in principle, it was compromised in many ways, mainly by holes.
Any member of the Security Council could veto any item for any reason and put it on hold.
The holes were a stark illustration of the level of detail and the degree of effort that went into crippling Iraq.
One item at a time, they make evident how deliberate and consistent the US practices were.
It required constant attention and political manoeuvring. On a daily or weekly basis regarding each item and request of which there were thousands
annually in order to deny each in turn in the face of constant and vocal scepticism.
The use of holes also speaks to one of the fundamental issues for sanctions imposed by the U.N. when there
is a conflict between the UN's commitment to humanitarian principles and its commitment to security.
Which one trumps the UN Charter simply doesn't tell us.
In the case of the holes, the answer was that any security risk, however speculative or slight,
was given absolute credence and overrode any humanitarian concern.
However extensive uncertain. On one occasion, the United States blocked cloth as an input to industry.
The reasoning was that cloth is an input to industry.
If Iraq is allowed to rebuild its industrial capacity, it could then rebuild its military capacity.
On this reasoning, the United States blocked materials to make shoes,
glue for manufacturing cigarettes, sewing thread materials to produce plastic bottles for juice.
Raw cotton for the production of medical gauze. All on the grounds that they supported Iraqi industry.
And the quantity of these holes never went down. On the contrary, in the face of Iraq's crisis, they grew astronomically.
As of November 1988, 1998, holes on humanitarian contracts came to about $150 million by May 22.
They reached over $5 billion. So many of Iraq's humanitarian imports were blocked.
But over the seven year course of the Oil for Food Program,
the total humanitarian goods actually delivered to Iraq came to $204 per person per year for everything,
including food, medicine and the reconstruction of the infrastructure,
or about one half the per capita income of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Were it not for unilateral U.S. holds, the amount of critical humanitarian goods in Iraq would have increased by one quarter,
and that would have saved a great many lives.
On one occasion, the head of UNICEF identified 18 high priority contracts that were on hold for 300 water treatment plants,
affecting one and a half million people. Water tankers, which were particularly urgent during the drought that was taking place.
And water purification chemicals which were indispensable. Of these 18 contracts, 17 were on hold by the United States.
One was on hold by Britain. No one else on the Security Council blocked any of them.
On another occasion, the World Health Organisation described in detail the drastic shortages of essential drugs and medical supplies.
One consequence of this was the inability to treat patients who needed surgery.
In 19. 89, the number of major surgeries performed came to about 15,000 per month by 1992.
This number had dropped to about 5000 per month, one third, and remained there for the rest of the decade.
But while the need for medical supplies was obviously urgent, World Health Organisation reported that blood bank refrigerators had been blocked,
as well as materials to run medical tests and to produce pharmaceuticals.
In March 2002, there were 182 contracts in the health sector on hold.
178 of these were being blocked by the U.S.
The other four were blocked by the UK. Again, no one else on the council blocked any contracts for medical supplies.
These practices undermined all the humanitarian efforts in Iraq, whether by the government or by INGOs.
For example, to increase food production in the face of massive malnutrition,
the Iraqi government worked with U.N. personnel to import vaccines for entero toxin MIA,
a disease found in small ruminants such as sheep and goats that is endemic in Iraq.
These animals were critical for producing meat, cheese and milk.
The U.N. staff found that at least 6 million doses were necessary for the next vaccination campaign.
The United States blocked all of these on the grounds that sheep and goat vaccines could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction.
The United States invoked dual use and WMD to block every imaginable type of vehicle.
This crippled not only food distribution throughout the country, but every other kind of function critical for a modern society.
The U.S. bought tractors on the grounds that they might be used by the military.
Contract for a thousand water tankers as block on the grounds that they were lined with stainless steel and therefore were, quote, WMD dual use.
But it wasn't possible to provide potable water in remote areas without these.
The U.S. blocked firefighting trucks because the tanks, which had foam to put out fires,
were corrosion resistant and therefore might be able to carry chemicals, which in turn could conceivably be used to produce chemical weapons.
On this reasoning about what constitutes potential weapons of mass destruction,
the United States blocked olive oil plants, furniture, dental equipment, fireman suits and yoghurt making equipment.
And there were other rationales that were even more attenuated than those.
For example, atropine is a drug that is necessary in any surgery where the patient is put under a general anaesthetic.
Without atropine, it's not possible to perform an appendectomy.
To operate on a cancerous tumour. To surgically repair hernia.
And on and on. But the U.S. objected to Iraq's import of atropine on the grounds that it can also be used as an antidote to nerve gas.
The reasoning was it might be used by Iraqi soldiers if they became affected while deploying nerve gas on enemies.
So if we block Iraq from getting atropine, this would make it more difficult for Iraq to use nerve gas in warfare.
But this involved a level of speculation that was patently ludicrous.
Once a soldier inhales nerve gas,
he would have about 2 minutes to self inject the atropine correctly in the middle of battle before dying of respiratory paralysis.
Meanwhile, U.N. staff pointed out that the Iraqi military, should they want to deploy nerve gas, had no need for atropine,
since they had already provided soldiers with gas masks, which were far more effective than self injecting atropine.
On the same reasoning, the United States objected as well to a number of antibiotics.
The U.S. did not claim that the drugs themselves could be used as biological weapons.
The rationale was rather, that they could be used as an antidote to anthrax, if taken immediately and in large doses.
Consequently, the argument went Allowing Iraq to import these antibiotics could indirectly facilitate the use of anthrax.
So the U.S. opposed them throughout the sanctions regime.
These U.S. practices went well beyond the mandate of the Security Council's resolutions and well beyond the will of the rest of the council members.
The Security Council resolutions required the elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
But the goal of the United States was the elimination of Iraq's capacity to produce WMD.
While the production of nuclear weapons requires a large and sophisticated production facility,
the production of biological and chemical weapons, or at least some of their components,
can take place in nothing more than a college chemistry lab or a manufacturing facility for things like
fertilisers and pesticides to eliminate a nation's capacity to produce biological and chemical weapons.
Means eliminating all science education above the secondary school level.
Eliminating the capacity to produce yoghurt and cheese, or as one biochemist for the army,
would have it eliminating eggs because egg yolks could be used as a medium in which to grow viruses,
which in turn could be used for biological weapons. Any industrialised nation relies continually on manufacturing processes that could
possibly be converted to produce some aspect of a biological or chemical weapon.
To eliminate this capacity as opposed to the weapons themselves,
would literally require reducing a nation to the most primitive possible condition and keeping it in those circumstances in perpetuity.
That was not at all the policy adopted by the Security Council, which required only that Iraq be subject to partial disarmament and monitoring.
But it was the policy of the United States. Many have suggested that the sanctions imposed on Iraq violated international law.
Does Halliday, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator, as in Iraq, as well as legal scholars, have called it genocide.
Others have also maintained that the sanctions constituted war crimes in violation of the Geneva Convention,
as well as the peremptory norms of use kogan's the fundamental principles of international law that are unwritten or customary.
But neither the International Court of Justice nor the International Criminal Court could have
jurisdiction over this kind of situation for both the parties to the treaties or states.
There is no means by which a state or an individual could bring an action against the Security Council before the ICJ.
The ICJ could provide an advisory opinion to the Security Council if it's requested by the Security Council itself.
But neither the ICJ nor the ICC could prosecute the Security Council or issue a judgement against it.
So it seems that no one could be prosecuted and no state could be found liable for the sanctions regime or for the U.S. role in its implementation.
But even if there were a venue with jurisdiction, it does not seem that international law has the capacity to address this kind of atrocity.
For genocide or extermination as a crime against humanity.
The answer must have the specific intent to destroy the group because of its race or ethnicity.
Those responsible for this policy would have to have intended to destroy the Iraqis because and only because they were Iraqis.
It is not sufficient even to destroy the group in its entirety if it is for some other motive.
I think that we cannot infer the required intent here.
While the scale of human damage was enormous and the damage was conducted systematically,
the context suggests a wilful blindness and a shockingly high tolerance for collateral damage.
But these are not quite the same as the specific intent to destroy the Iraqi population.
I don't want to suggest that U.S. policymakers were benign in any regard within the U.S. policymaking process.
There is certainly no evidence of concern about Iraqi children or any other aspect of the suffering in Iraq.
The singular preoccupation of U.S. officials was the possibility that Iraq might rebuild its military.
It is true that U.S. officials found evidence of this when it seems that no rational person would
have and that they gave no way at all to the humanitarian consequences of their decisions.
But that is not quite the same as calculating the destruction of Iraqi civilians.
Nor is it the same as the intent to annihilate Iraqis because they are Iraqis.
A similar question arose in the 1970s, when there was a great deal written by philosophers in response to the Vietnam War.
Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the U.S. tactics such as blanket bombing,
the use of napalm and the and the systematic burning of villages amounted to genocide.
Hugo Vidal was sympathetic to the accusation, but in the end refuted it.
He argued that however appalling the U.S. policies were, however deliberately and knowingly, the atrocities were committed.
It could not be shown that this meant the specific intent requirement under the Genocide Convention.
He concluded, with the Scottish verdict not proven, not quite.
It seems that that is the case here as well. And for that, we have good reason to be deeply disappointed in international law.
There may not be a crime that could be prosecuted for a lack of a venue with jurisdiction
and because of the institutional context that authorised the sanctions overall.
Yet it seems absolutely clear that the extreme way in which the sanctions were implemented
violates the fundamental norms and principles of international human rights law.
Well, international law gives us a framework to judge those.
Acts driven by racial hatred on the model of the Holocaust.
It is not adequate to address atrocities that are deliberately implemented by indifferent officials for political or economic purposes.
I don't mean to use the term atrocity in a legal sense as referring to the acts that meet the
legal requirements for international crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity.
But I would use atrocity in the ordinary sense of the term as evoking simply the shock and awe and horror
that most would feel in the face of enormous and gratuitous human damage in the face of such damage.
When we hear rationales such as we believe that if Saddam had equipment to make cheese, he would use it to produce weapons of mass destruction.
We are hard pressed not to disparage the justifications as disingenuous and shameful.
It is not that the U.S. government is innocent, but rather that international law fails to account for this kind of culpability.
International governance has failed us as well in that it has been possible for an atrocity to be
committed by the very body of international authority intended to intervene in the face of atrocities.
It is a terrible lack and a terrible risk.
When the existing framework of international law does not envision the possibility that the very institutions that are
charged with responding to these violations could themselves commit them when it does not envision the possibility,
then, in the name of preventing aggression and threats to the peace,
the Security Council could implement a policy that would kill more people than all uses of weapons of mass destruction in the 20th century combined.
As was the case here, international governance has also failed us in the way that this occurred,
that the structure of the U.N. and the Security Council permitted a single nation to determine its decisions and in some cases,
to override the will of nearly every other member of the Council for years on end.
The United States succeeded in using the Security Council first to impose its own
agenda in violation of the Council's resolutions and arguably the UN Charter,
and then to unilaterally impose its own standard,
compromising the basic means to sustain life in an industrialised population for an entire civilian population.
As Hannah Arendt spoke about the bureaucratisation of evil.
The Iraq sanctions. Tell us about the legalisation of atrocity.
It may be that in the end there is a particular risk posed to humanity by international
governance as institutions of international governance extend their reach and legitimacy.
They also entail the risk of a new form of global violence, not from terrorism or cruelty or racial or ethnic hatred,
but rather from the possibility of a single nation hijacking an institution of global governance and
substituting its own agenda in the place of the interests and will of the international community.
U.S. officials did not act with the deliberate cruelty that's envisioned by international human rights law.
It was not a hatred of Iraqis that led U.S. officials to act as they did.
It was the decision that the Iraqis would bear the cost of the United States.
Intractable political dilemma. This particular catastrophe did not require actual hatred.
It required only the capacity of U.S. officials to believe their own rationales, however implausible they might have been,
and that there be no venue in which to challenge the reasoning as casual stick and disingenuous.
Madeleine Albright's memorable gaffe, in which she said that the deaths of 500,000 children were worth the price,
which she regretted for years was always an only a public relations error.
It made no difference that she and other State Department officials from that
point on vigorously insisted that they cared deeply about Iraqi children.
The more accurate answer, regardless of the public rhetoric, was of course it was worth it.
Lock and glue, water pipes, water tankers, thermos flasks, ambulance radios, refrigerators.
All of this was worth it because the negligible imaginary possibility that these could be
turned to nefarious purposes always outweighed the collapse of the Iraqi health system,
outweighed Iraq's frantic efforts to increase agricultural production, outweigh the disappearance of Iraq's middle class,
outweighed the hundreds of thousands of tons of untreated sewage that went daily into Iraq's rivers.
Those who formulated the U.S. policies were not shallow or ill educated or coerced,
nor driven by hatred or any impulse that they or we would identify as genocide.
Simon still, every act implementing this policy was knowing and deliver it and the consequences were known
and recognised even when they were contained with an elaborate denials of responsibility.
In 1946, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote In regard to the victors of World War Two,
we see the feelings of moral superiority and we are frightened.
He, who feels absolutely safe from danger, is already on the way to fall victim to it.
The German fate could provide all others with experience, if only they would understand this experience.
We are no inferior race everywhere. People have similar qualities.
We may well worry over the victors self certainty.
Jaspers was right to be worried about moral self certainty above all.
This study tells us much about the capacity of anyone, including those acting in the name of human rights and international law,
to suspend both rational judgement and the capacity to recognise obvious moral truths when called upon to do so.
Thank you. Lots of interesting issues raised there around the effects of punishment in this case that we might want to come back in the discussion.
But I'm going to hand it over to David first. David, to kick us off the podium.
No, no, it's. I can speak from here. Sure. Thank you.
Well, thank you very much for this.
I mean, I think we have said this qualifies as a savage indictment of the the sanctions policy.
It seems not to leave very much space for that, for reflection.
This is a problem that I'm not here as an expert on sanctions or indeed as an expert on Iraq,
as somebody who has an interest in the the ethics in the broad sense of these kinds of questions.
After reading, I read I haven't read compared to a whole book.
I read the concluding chapter. My first thought was, go to Michael Waltz's discussion of Dirty Hands, a rather old article.
And through that, to Max Weber's famous essay on politics as a vacation is this.
These are two writers who are essentially interested in the question about the relation between the kind of ethics that we
might use to judge everyday life and the kind of ethics that applies to politicians or people with political responsibility,
people who have to make political decisions. And the thought is that.
Why should I be so quick as to judge political action by the kinds of ethical standards that you might think apply in everyday life?
This is coming very well. This takes the form of his famous distinction between the ethics of absolute ends and the ethics of responsibility.
And of course, Labour argues that this primarily politicians have to be guided by the ethics responsibility, which.
And what that means is they have to be prepared to do things that the ethics of
Amsterdam would condemn because of the goals that they feel they have to pursue.
So babies must read over the babies. And you read a bit of. Yes,
but we can sort of exchange a German philosopher who seeks the salvation of the
soul of his own and of others should not seek it along the avenue of politics.
For the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence.
The genius or demon of politics lies in an inner tension with the God of love and the tension kind of any time between irreconcilable conflict.
No, I think all this is just to say that I mean, your because your your aim is not only, I think,
to bring out very forcibly the evil that sanctions created, but also to judge those who are responsible for the policy.
And the question is, by what standards should we judge their actions?
I think we can't really do that unless we also ask the question and this is not a question by any, I suppose, use of sanctions.
So be very interesting to hear what you think about sanctions in general. In general.
I mean, when when is it justifiable to use sanctions that are actually going to hurt ordinary people,
use them as a political weapon to achieve some end?
I mean, in general, I suppose sanctions are going to hurt the people that they're meant to help.
So there's really a paradox here that has to be addressed.
Now, what are sanctions supposed to be doing? I think here, if you think about Iraq,
there is a real confusion about the use of the arms because and I suppose you might say it's one possible defect of existing
international law that it limits rather narrowly the range of reasons for which certain kinds of action can be undertaken.
So it allows us to take action against certain kinds of aggression, unjust wars and so forth.
But it doesn't directly allow us to take action of forcible kind against humanitarian disasters.
So the systematic violation of human rights is not yet in international law constitute a reason for intervention.
So the fact that the Saddam Hussein regime is not only arguably possibly posing an external threat, but possession of weapons of mass destruction.
That was the sort of public argument that was given.
It was also, of course, in a way, much more serious, indirectly posing an internal threat to the members of Iraq itself, to the Kurds in the north,
to the marsh, Arabs in the south, its own actions, but at least prospectively, I suppose, genocidal against these groups.
So I don't know, perhaps you know better than I do.
What was really at the back of the minds of these U.N., these United States officials who were endorsing the sanctions policy,
but at least we must at least contemplate the possibility,
say the aim of sanctions was not simply just the discovery of elimination, the western province of mass destruction,
but it was the change of a regime which was potentially going to violate massively the human rights of other Iraqis.
I think then the question we need to ask is, did the sanctions were imposed stand a reasonable chance of bringing about that outcome?
And also we must ask the question,
how does how do the sanctions policy compare with other policies that might have been taken in order to achieve that end?
So what were the alternatives to sanctions?
I mean, that you can't, I think, judge just one policy unless you also consider what the other alternatives might have been to that regime.
So again, I'd like to ask you to say a bit more about what you think should have been done in place of this sanctions policy.
You think it's so indefensible?
Of course, the openness here is that we know with hindsight that the sanctions didn't have the effect that they might have had,
might have been intended to have, because in the end, you know, the regime didn't collapse.
And what brought the whole episode to an end was military intervention, because question is whether that could have been known ahead of time.
Hindsight is great, you know, people know and say confidently things perhaps they couldn't have said in advance.
So I think that in any way diminishing the force of the indictment that you've given.
I think we have to ask these other kinds of questions which are really about the political morality, not not the sort of fundamental ethics,
but the political morality of embarking on a course of action, knowing that it's going to impose significant costs on people.
But doing it on the basis that the final outcome in your judgement, is going to be worth the costs that are involved.
I think that's the sort of perspective, at least it's a kind of different perspective maybe than the one that you've very powerfully presented to us.
Joy, do you want to respond to some of that now or do you want to take more questions?
Why don't I take a couple of those things? You know, the thing is, I.
And the question is how you judge. And I do think the judgement is warranted because there is too much knowledge, too much deliberateness, too much.
Too many people knew exactly what the consequences of these policies would be.
Too many people were involved in deliberately formulating this. But I think the thing that's most striking to me about this is literally that, I mean,
I except for this army biochemist who thought that X should be blocked from Iraq,
I could not put my finger on a particular person involved in the process who was blameworthy in any political or moral sense.
There was something about the structure that diffused responsibility so finely that you literally cannot identify who made the decision.
So my question, when you say the U.S., who is making this decision?
Yeah, well, it was really difficult. I mean, it really took forever to sort of figure out what that structure was.
And I kept saying, as I was doing all this, who is who was saying the yes or the no?
And the answer is something like, first, all of these things went to technical experts,
and then they really say, can this item be used for an improper purpose?
They're not saying whether you should like it or not, but they're answering a technical question.
And so they make their finding as to whether it could be used for such a purpose.
And then it goes next to roughly it ends up in the in the desk of the political people.
So the political people look at, you know, some degree of stainless steel, non corrosive ness of the tank,
and they're not in a position to second guess the recommendations of the technical people.
And so they end up sort of deferring in each case, even though they're making the decision, they're not really making the technical judgement.
They're sort of accepting that. And then there's a kind of a careerism that I think occurs at each point.
You don't want to be the guy who lets the one thing in that ends up being used in some terrible, destructive way.
So it's maybe it's not likely that it will, but if it happens, that personal cost, you are enormous.
And on the other hand, there's no cost to you at all for blocking things,
because in addition to this bureaucratic structure, there really was this culture,
as far as I can see within this process,
within the non-proliferation unit of the State Department and the Mideast part and the political office and the office and the Defence Department and,
you know, all of these agencies that were participating, the way these meetings have been described to me,
where there would be in a meeting of 30 people, you know, 26 or 28 were non-proliferation experts, and maybe two of them would be political people.
So the tenor of the meeting is, let's see what could go wrong with this item.
And then you didn't. And there and the language described that was described to me as a people would
say things like no one was going to shed a lot of tears over denying Saddam X.
And that was typically the discourse within this culture of this this unit.
No one was going to shed any tears over denying Saddam. So there's this conflation of Saddam with the population as a whole.
And then once that happens, then, of course, you know,
you don't want to give stainless steel tanks to Saddam because he has such a a a cleanly monstrous kind of profile.
So so I think it's about the culture and then this diffusion of responsibility within the bureaucracy that has to be sorted out ethically.
I mean, as I was talking to various people from ambassador level down to data entry person,
the person who managed this database, I mean, none of them were bad.
I mean, none of them meant ill for the Iraqis or for anyone else.
And in and in their description of themselves, they would say, well, you know, we you know,
we did our best to try to make sure that, you know, the people had what they needed.
And that's how they described themselves and their and their mindset.
It's just really that when you look at it from an external perspective,
that that sounds when you look at this business with the atropine and the yoghurt makers and so on,
you know, as someone said, you know, three pots of yoghurt in the basement is going to produce a weapon of mass destruction.
That that kind of analysis seems bizarre.
Seems insane in some way. So, so,
so I'm not quite sure what the ethical standard is that we use to judge a process or an institutional
structure or something where there's lots of acts of clear decision making and willing deliberateness,
but in a way where you really can't identify exactly the locus of responsibility.
On sanctions in general, I mean, I, I mean, I think that sanctions are virtually always a failure and a disaster in every possible way.
The South African sanctions are often touted as as prototypical, but they're not they're really very that's it was really very anomalous.
I mean, for the most part, in every other instance that I know of, sanctions are imposed against the will of the persons who are most affected.
In the case of South Africa, the leadership of the black South Africans was initiating their own democracy movement and in that context was
inviting the global community to do harm to them for the sake of indirectly causing causing cost to their regime.
But that's quite extraordinary if you look at any other instance I know of.
So, for example, in Cuba, the most hostile dissidents to the state, the most critical dissidents in Cuba opposed the sanctions on Cuba.
The only Cubans or Cuban-Americans who support them are those who don't live in the country,
who live in Miami and are not themselves the subject of them.
And so I think I mean, there's other reasons.
There's also a track record of sanctions and a terrible track record of the language used is of the sender nation getting the target nation to comply.
That's just the success rate of that is low.
And so then you have this certainty, really a certainty of doing harm to those who are least responsible for the policy.
You have a low likelihood of it bringing about the the the goal that you say you want.
And and I and I have to take issue with you. I don't I think I'm entitled to make that argument.
I think I can legitimately make that argument without offering a substitute.
And and it may be that there aren't other good alternatives, but but what I can say for certain about this is it's unlikely to succeed.
It's very likely to harm the wrong people.
And I think that that claim can stand on its own, even if it leaves a terrible gap and the other kinds of tools that are available.
So can I just say,
do you think that the threat that the Saddam Hussein regime posed to human rights was sufficient to make a call for regime change justifiable?
Well, I guess I take kind of a strong position on regime change.
I think that Article two of the charter says that it's not permissible and not it is not legal questions is an ethical question.
But that's maybe a defect in international law.
What I think you have to place the question, you know, what kind of threat Saddam Hussein posed not only to the people who are supporting him,
but the other groups in Iraq who feel he already inflicted this terrible injury.
Well, so we don't start with that. I mean, the whole is no longer an interesting ethical question unless you think there's a real the issue here.
Well, let me muddy the question a little bit, and I will,
and I'll grant you that the as a theoretical proposition it has, it kind of stands on its own and demands an answer.
But however badly Saddam Hussein treated the Kurds and his political enemies prior to 1994,
the majority of the Iraqi population was quite well-off by every standard.
It had the highest standard of living in the Arab world of it.
And even under the sanctions,
there were significant efforts by the Iraqi government to to manage as best as possible in a way that clearly tied to the
people's welfare to urgently increase agricultural production and to to rebuild infrastructure as much as possible and so on.
So so I think it's and I don't want to defend Saddam Hussein.
I mean, I would not have wanted to be a Kurd or place when I made or after 1991, a marsh Arab in the south.
But I think it's just his track record is more complicated than that.
And I think it's worth noting mortality increases after 2003, excess mortality increases after 2003.
So Iraqis under Saddam Hussein during sanctions were better off than they were under
U.S. occupation or U.S. led occupation in the 14 months after 2000 after removal three.
And I haven't looked at the numbers in the last couple of years,
but I'm guessing by any measure that the measurements of life expectancy and quality of life,
you know, there's been no no striking improvement of in human welfare.
It's the news reports, at least, that we get are of just a terrible sort of backward spin in every kind of regard of there's new
sorts now having to do with the amount of violence on the streets and the options for women.
So so just to marry the question of should Saddam Hussein?
I think it's not clear that the Iraqis are or were have been so much better off without him as to justify a regime change in that instance.
And I'm and I'm not sure there is an instance where it's so clear that there's that that that someone is is abusive.
Absolutely. That we know for certain that if they are removed, things will be better.
I mean, I don't know who who's lense is objective than that whose perspective is truly reliable in that.
I mean, I know if we look at many, many instances and claims of this around the world, it often goes very, very badly.
Once was, there's been a forced regime change or pressure or regime change under pressure from outside.
And it's I don't know of instances where you can cleanly say it was clear from the
beginning that the population would have been better off without this person.
And once they were forcibly removed, they were clearly better in an enduring way afterwards as well.
Let me let me take some other other questions. It's an interesting exchange.