No News is Good News

‘The country they liberated, Kuwait, and the aggressor country, Iraq, are both tonight in a worsening state of chaos’

‘This is the first sight of the uprising that's raging inside Iraq.’

‘The likely armed rebels can demonstrate defiance of Saddam Hussein, but their leaders accept they have little chance of toppling him, unless they can get outside help.’

‘I think the whole of sanctions should stay while Saddam Hussein is in power, because the Iraqi people […] have to have an incentive to stand up to him and get him out.’

[Said Arburish]
‘The opposition within the country of course, listened to the West, and rose against Saddam Hussein, only to be confronted by the United States in particular helping Saddam Hussein against them.

They actually stopped rebels reaching arms depots. They flew over his helicopters as his helicopters attacked them. They gave his Republican Guard safe passage through their lines to attack the rebels. They did everything, except join the fight on his side.’

‘But if you’re going to sustain cheap and plentiful supplies of oil, you’ve got to have a regime there to ensure you can provide it.’

‘A special United Nations envoy is warning that Iraq is facing a catastrophe unless food and fuel are allowed into the country...’

[Reading from the report by Marti Ahtisaari, UN Development Officer]

"You asked me to travel, as a matter of urgency, to Iraq. It should be said at once that nothing that we had seen or read had prepared us for the devastation which has befallen the country. Most means of modern life have been destroyed. The authorities are as yet scarcely able to measure the dimensions of the calamity, much less respond to its’ consequences. The conflict has wrought near apocalyptic results. Iraq has been relegated to a pre-industrial age."

[GHAZWAN]
‘You people didn’t leave anything that you did not target your planes on it.’

[NASRA]
‘Everything was bombed. Schools, churches, roads, mosques, factories, farms, homes, everything…’

[GHAZWAN]
‘And throughout day and night, day and night, the bombing continued.’

[NASRA]
‘Cats were frightened, and their noises with the planes... it was something… very disturbing. It brought everything ugly to your imagination. And I think this is the real war.’

‘To prevent future wars, and to maintain American influence, many more arms must be sold to these countries in the years ahead.’

[US GENERAL HOWARD FISH]
‘When you're dealing with friends and allies, if you provide the equipment, you have, a, er, string on it, which means you, probably, can, contaminate their thinking with your values!’

[GHAZWAN]
‘You people watched us, you people watched our country being demolished. You watched us in your living room through the gun sight cameras….’

[NASRA]
‘….without asking any question: where do these bombs fall?’

Article 48 of the Geneva Convention states:

[DR. MICHAEL VIOLA]
‘It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population […]
And this is precisely what was the target of many of our smart bombs.’

‘We must ask ourselves: did the war have to be fought in this way?’

The same question was put to a Pentagon planner.

"What were we trying to do with the sanctions? Help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on the infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of sanctions."

In April new Security Council Resolutions were tabled.

A UN Special Commission - UNSCOM - was given unprecedented power to seek and destroy Iraq’s weapons capability. Sanctions, levied to force a withdrawal from Kuwait, would now be used to ensure Iraq’s compliance with UNSCOM.

[DOUGLAS HURD]
‘Sanctions are now, in these new circumstances, a vital lever in making sure that Iraq complies with 'her' international obligations.’

[JAMES BAKER]
‘The time has come to try and change the destructive pattern of military competition and proliferation in this region and to reduce arms flow.'

‘But even as James Baker was speaking, elsewhere in the administration very different plans were being laid.’

‘The post war arms deal to the Gulf States worth between 50 and 150 billion dollars.’

[US CONGRESSMAN LES ASPIN]
‘We will also still be controlling the economic sanctions, and particularly preventing the export of oil. In other words: Iraq cannot recover from this war, with that situation.’

[ZEINAB]
‘I saw a baby with a big tummy, and legs like sticks. His mouth was bleeding, his hair was falling. We were just shocked because we didn’t saw such a thing before. We asked, what’s this case? They said this is kwashiorkor.’

‘Children who get to this stage of nutritional deprivation are found throughout all of Iraq and rarely survive.’

Kwashiorkor had not been seen in Iraq for three decades.

The Security Council removed foodstuffs from the list of embargoed items, and established a sanctions committee to screen goods coming into Iraq. Food and medicine were now officially exempt but…

[GHAZWAN]
‘How do you buy the food, how do you pay for it? If they freeze your assets and they don’t permit you to export, where do you get the money to buy it? That’s a fallacy! The West is playing on words.’

In July, a second UN envoy warned that without 7 billion dollars of aid, Iraq faced ‘massive starvation’. The Security Council offered a single oil sale of 1.6 billion, of which two thirds would be paid to Kuwait. The Iraqi government rejected the terms.

It was, a Bush official said:

"A good way to maintain the bulk of sanctions and not be on the wrong side of a potentially emotive issue."

By the end of the year, 100,000 civilians had died.