SANCTIONS ARE THE REASON THIS WAR WAS RIGHT

I have a tendency to get frustrated with people who think the war in Iraq was unjustified. Maybe that's a bit unfair. The case actually is a fairly complex one, like putting together the pieces of a puzzle: the cost-benefit analysis, the issue of the UN/international law, the weight of Iraqi freedom vs. weapons proliferation vs. terrorism vs. oil, the other dictatorships which we have no plans to topple, the plans for winning the peace. There are some bad arguments for the Iraq war, some of which were actually made by war supporters, more of which are caricatures by war critics; the bad arguments do not weaken the good ones, but they may distract people from them.

To my mind, the biggest piece in the puzzle is one which goes strangely unmentioned: SANCTIONS. Here's a quote from the writer Arundhati Roy about them (from her article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," written after September 11th):

"In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact htat 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was 'a very hard choice', but that all things considered, 'we think the price is worth it.' Madeline Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die."

Arundhati Roy is not a person I trust. I like her work on Indian dams from the 1990s. But like so many others, she took the wrong path after September 11th, forsaking the high road of liberty and going astray into left-wing paranoia, and her writing has become increasingly mendacious as she continues to blind herself to her own mistakes. I don't recommend anyone to read her except for the reason that an ancient king, Mithradates, once drank small doses of many different kinds of poisons: in order to build up your resistance. And yet, while I haven't checked her facts here, I have heard this kind of thing in other places. My point is, as far as I know, her facts are right, and if her facts are, her indignation certainly is.

500,000 Iraqi children. Dead. Children continuing to die. The highest body count I've seen for the war, occupation and so on is a little over 10,000. I opposed the sanctions as soon as I started hearing statistics like this. It is because I opposed the sanctions that I supported the war. If Roy is right, the war was extremely humane by comparison to the sanctions; the sanctions took 50 times as many human lives.

It's easy to think of the options of Bush and Blair in dualistic terms: war or peace. But really they had three options: war and regime change; peace with continued sanctions; or lifting the sanctions.

Now that WMDs have not been found, a lot of people seem to think it would have been better to have foregone the war and, presumably, to take the middle option of continuing the sanctions. It does now appear that the sanctions were working to control Iraq's WMDs-- but at what price?! "Children continue to die." I think maybe, even if they never exactly put it that way, Bush and Blair decided they disagreed with Albright. They didn't think the price was worth it.

So what options does that leave? War, or lift the sanctions. But when THOSE are the options, the national security questions become different. Maybe Saddam wasn't able to continue building weapons while under the sanctions. Fine. But if the sanctions were gone, it would become a lot easier. The problem was not that Saddam posed a threat, imminent or otherwise. The problem was that the way we were preventing him from posing a threat was killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. He still wanted WMDs; the labs we have found have made that clear. And it now seems that he was working with al-Qaeda at least a little. If we had lifted the sanctions, I think the threat of Saddam-cum-bin-Laden nuking New York would have become real within a few years.

There had to be a better way, and there was. If Roy's figures are right, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq is 1,000 times fewer than the children killed by the sanctions; the number of Iraqis dead, 50 times less. Meanwhile, Iraqis enjoy a new freedom and hope for the future. I think (relative) prosperity and democracy are in the cards, too. The mass graves are no longer being filled. They can set an example for the world's least free region.

Listen, if there's anyone reading this blog who still opposes the war... Please. Talk to me. You have a problem. Anytime, day or night. I'm here to help.