The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (91 page)

SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAQ

Death toll:
350,000
¹

Rank:
94

Type:
international standoff

Broad dividing line:
Iraq vs. the world

Time frame:
1990–2003

Location:
Iraq

Major state participants:
Iraq, United States

Major non-state participant:
United Nations

Who usually gets the most blame:
United States, Saddam Hussein

Economic factor:
oil

Gulf War

Foiled in his attempt to expand into Iran, Saddam Hussein turned around and conquered Kuwait in August 1990. Almost immediately, the UN imposed trade sanctions, while the United States flew troops into the region and issued an ultimatum: Saddam had to be out of Kuwait by January 15, 1991, or else. As the deadline approached, pacifists begged the United States to give the sanctions more time, but President George Bush (the elder) was in no mood to wait. When the appointed day passed, the American-led coalition opened an air attack, and two months later, a ground attack.

The war went precisely according to plan, and the Iraqis were quickly driven back into their own country. The coalition stopped short of invading Iraq and deposing Saddam because no one wanted to spend long bloody years occupying a hostile country.

The Gulf War killed perhaps 25,000 Iraqi soldiers and a couple of thousand civilians, which isn’t enough to make my list.
²
Iraq’s industrial infrastructure had taken a beating in the air war, but it wasn’t anything that a healthy economy couldn’t repair. It never got the chance.

Peace Returns

Under the terms of the 1991 cease-fire, economic sanctions would stay in place until Saddam dismantled his ability to threaten his neighbors. Saddam was supposed to surrender or destroy all of his facilities for producing and deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). He had to shut down his chemical weapons labs and surrender his surface-to-surface missiles. Naturally, as a warmongering dictator, Saddam stalled as long as possible, nurturing the fear and respect that big weapons give a little country.

The blockade was enforced by coalition warships patrolling the Persian Gulf, which inspected all cargo heading for Iraq.
³
Meanwhile, with no oil exports, the Iraqi economy collapsed. Education became sporadic. Medicine became rare. People died in hospitals from trivial shortages of common supplies. With no jobs available, professionals like lawyers and architects drove cabs. Massive unemployment destroyed the standard of living. Iraq had once been among the richest and most cosmopolitan Arab countries, but now it became the most ragged and outcast.
⁴

In August 1991, when it became obvious that the sanctions were devastating the ordinary people of Iraq, the UN offered to let Iraq export oil in exchange for credit that could be spent only on food, medicine, and other civilian necessities. Saddam refused to agree to these conditions until 1995. He personally was not starving and the shortages gave him a useful tool for controlling his people and rewarding his cronies.
⁵

As with all famines—even artificial famines like this one—the powerful continued to live quite nicely. While his people suffered, Saddam sacrificed none of his comfort. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars “on palaces—building about a dozen since the sanctions started. . . . [H]e opened a new vacation village with an amusement park, stadiums and a bronze statue of himself. Saddam’s police [got] brand new Hyundai patrol cars and the street signs [got] brand-new, well-lighted portraits of the president.”
⁶

Saddam stalled and shuffled his contraband one step ahead of the UN’s weapons inspectors like a three-card Monte game. Finally, he kicked out the UN inspectors in 1998. The Americans then launched air strikes, which destroyed the last WMD facilities. No one outside Iraq knew the threat was actually gone, and Saddam wasn’t about to admit his impotence to the world at large, so the sanctions remained in place. The standoff dragged on until Saddam was deposed by the American invasion in 2003.

Analysis

As with many deaths by hardship, we can’t easily point to individuals and say he died, she died, he died, and so on. It’s not like deaths in battle, where you just count the bodies strewn about. Instead, we see an increase over the ordinary death rate, and all we can say is that some of these people would have died anyway, but some would not have. It’s a matter of statistics.

Over the years, the Iraqi government issued a series of escalating death tolls to highlight their suffering, from 700,000
⁷
to 1 million
⁸
to 1.5 million.
⁹
Each new claim was dutifully repeated by the press and international agencies, but there’s no reason to believe any of them. We can be polite and point out that these high estimates “are based on faulty baseline statistics for prewar childhood mortality in Iraq,”
¹⁰
or we can impolitely suggest that bureaucrats in the pay of a dictator made them up. Various estimates by impartial outsiders are as low as 110,000
¹¹
and top out at 500,000.
¹²

Sanctions are a tempting form of nonviolent coercion, but in practice, sanctions mean bringing an entire country under siege and starving it into submission, and the process is never as clean as its proponents suggest. At the end of World War I, Germany was losing more civilians to starvation than soldiers in battle. By some estimates, the number of Japanese civilians who were dying because of wartime shortages and the American blockade in 1945 far outweighs the number killed by the atomic bombs.

Sanctions aren’t really a replacement for war; they are just war fought by other means.

SOMALIAN CHAOS

Death toll:
500,000
¹

Rank:
70

Type:
failed state

Broad dividing line:
everyone vs. everyone

Time frame:
since 1991

Location:
Somalia

Minor state participants:
United States, Ethiopia

Major non-state participants:
Somalis

Who usually gets the most blame:
warlords

Another damn:
African civil war

W
HEN A MILITARY UPRISING IN SOMALIA IN JANUARY 1991 CHASED AWAY
the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, the last effective government fell with him. In Somalia people identify more with their clan than their country, and the country quickly broke into loose territories run by local warlords. The economy sputtered to a halt, and armed bands seized all of the food supplies that were on hand, leaving the unarmed population to starve. After an estimated 50,000 Somalis had been killed in fighting and 300,000 had died of hunger, the UN negotiated a cease-fire in March 1992 between the principal warlords in order to bring food into the country.

A multinational (mostly American) peacekeeping force arrived in December 1992 to guard the food supplies that were being imported by international charities. In October 1993, a unit of U.S. troops was trapped and cut to pieces in Mogadishu while trying to capture associates of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. In the grand flow of history, it was a minor battle, but it made the American leadership so gun-shy that they vigorously avoided intervening in the Rwandan genocide the next year. The Americans pulled out of Somalia in 1994, and the UN left the next year.
²

A new wave of intensified fighting erupted in 1996, but after General Aidid was killed, the top three remaining warlords agreed to a mutual cease-fire. Outside of warlord territory, the northern wing of the country has achieved stability as two new independent nations, Puntland and Somaliland, although no one officially recognizes them as such.

Years of war have left Mogadishu looted and battered, and many of its 1.2 million people live in rubble and tents. Schools and businesses have long ago shut down. Most young men can find steady employment only as gunmen for the local warlords, trading their muscle for food and khat, the local narcotic. Armed men easily rob, rape, and kill without consequences.
³
Somalia has also become a safe haven for pirates who hijack ships going through the Suez Canal.

Warlords come and go, and presumably they engage in rivalries that mean something to the participants, but these have never caught the attention of outsiders. Whenever anyone bothers to distinguish between the various warlords, they are usually classified by the degree of Islamic fundamentalism they want to impose on the country. In 2006, Ethiopian troops occupied Mogadishu in order to install a UN-approved national government, but this did little more than create yet another ineffectual local faction.

Death Toll

The only authoritative estimate floating around is the UN report that 350,000 people had died in the first year and a half of chaos. As the fighting continued, it became obvious that the growing death toll was leaving the old estimate behind. When no updated estimate appeared, reporters decided to unofficially upgrade the number, so it has become more and more common to vaguely suggest that a half-million to a million people may have died.