People are very strange: murder edition

It’s still okay to kill in the name of religion around here as long as your targets are women and their health care providers.

I would submit that it not okay to kill persons in the name of religion, and it equally not okay to kill people in the name of nations. That prohibition would apply to sanctions as much as to wars. Sanction is a form of blockade, and blockade is an act of war, so…

Ok, I brought up war again, while you are really talking about sanctions. My point is just that you seem to be framing the subject in an oddly simplified way. Presumably the question was not: “should we kill half a million children for fun and profit”, but rather something like: “how can we prevent Iraq from starting aggressive wars with its neighbors”. If sanctions was not the answer, then was doing nothing an acceptable option, or something else? And then, how is your average low-info voter expected to figure out the correct answer in the face of the usual barrage of mass media propaganda?

I always assumed it was a matter of personal benefit. Will this war benefit me? Will it give me something interesting to read about and discuss with friends? Will it make me feel strong, important, moral, successful? Will my company make money off of it? Will it advance my career somehow? My political party? Will it protect me from and punish my enemies, foreign and domestic?

The same person who says that one shouldn’t kill for religion might say that abortion doctors should be killed, women should die in childbirth if it saves the fetus, or that terrorists should be killed there before they kill here.

Wikipedia says (citing the UN resolution) that medicine was excluded from the sanctions.

All medicines classified as “dual use” were restricted. That included every single chemotherapy medicine imported into the country and most antibiotics. A common tactic of the American led sanctions team was to impound these medicines and store them in warehouses where the internal temperature would routinely go higher than 50°C until long after the medicines’ expiry date. At which point they were worse than useless. “Dual use” also included water purification kits and rehydration kits with the inevitable consequences for infant and child mortality.

The UN official responsible for implementing sanctions – UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Irak Hans von Sponeck was so horrified at the savagery with which sanctions were implemented that he resigned in protest.

And yes “savagery” is the appropriate word for the sanctions which caused massive civilian suffering including the reappearance of malnutrition related diseases and water-borne diseases amongst adults and children alike in a country which had not had such deaths for generations. Millions – men, women, and children, suffered both chronic and acute malnutrition. As well as malnutrition and such diseases as typhoid and cholera other diseases such as leishmaniasis which had been eliminated in the country reappeared.

I suppose the most famous measure was the admission by the UN that excess deaths among children reached a total of 500,000 dead children the overwhelming majority of them under the age of 5 as a direct result of the sanctions regime. Most of the key officials implementing that regime were American. No doubt they like their boss Madeleine Albright felt those deaths were “worth it”.

A very incomplete set of reliable references – wikipedia isn’t:

1. M. M. Ali and I. H. Shah. Sanctions and Childhood Mortality in Iraq.
The Lancet  (355):1851 – 1857, 27 May 2000.

2. A. R. Asherio, T Chase et al. Effect of the Gulf War on Infant and Child
Mortality in Iraq. New England Journal of Medicine , (327):931–936, 1992.

3. A. Brady and E. Hilton, editors. Sanctions on Iraq: background, conse-
quences, strategies . Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, Barque Press,
2000. Proceedings from CASI’s 13-14/11/99 conference.

4. Food and Agriculture Organisation. Adverse effect of the drought on do-
mestic food production during 1998/1999 in Iraq Baghdad, May 1999.

Food and Agriculture Organisation, Technical Cooperation Programme.
Evaluation of Food and Nutrition Situation in Iraq: Terminal Statement
Prepared for the Government of Iraq Rome, 1995.

5. R. Garfield. Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children from 1990
through 1998: Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanc-
tions. New York, March 1999.

6. S. Graham-Brown. Sanctioning Saddam: the Politics of Intervention in Iraq . I. B. Tauris, 1999.
7. Harvard Study Team. The effect of the Gulf Crisis on the Children of Iraq.
New England Journal of Medicine , (325):977 – 980, 1991.

8. International Committee of the Red Cross. Special Report. Iraq: a Decade
of Sanctions. Geneva, December 1999.

9. International Study Team. Health and Welfare in Iraq After the Gulf Crisis:
an in-depth assessment from August, 1991. 1991.

10. H.-C. von Sponeck. Speech at ‘A Day and Night for the People of Iraq’.
Public address, 6 May 2000.

11. Unicef. Unicef: Questions and answers for the Iraq child mortality surveys.
Baghdad, 16 September 1999.

12. Unicef. Situation Analysis of Children and Women in Iraq – 1997. New
York, April 1998.

13. Unicef. Child and Maternal Mortality Survey 1999: Preliminary Report.
New York, July – August 1999.

14. United Nations. Report on humanitarian needs in Iraq in the immediate
post-crisis environment by a mission to the area led by the under-secretary-
general for administration and management, 10-17 March 1991. S/22366,
New York, 20 March 1991.

15. United Nations. Report to the Secretary-General dated 15 July 1991 on
humanitarian needs in Iraq prepared by a mission led by the Executive
Delegate of the Secretary-General for Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq.
S/22799, Geneva, 17 July 1991.

16. United Nations. Report of the Second Panel Established Pursuant to
the Note by the President of the Security Council of 30 January 1999
(s/1999/100), Concerning the Humanitarian Situation in Iraq. S/1999/356
Annex II, New York, 30 March 1999.

17. United Nations. Report of the Group of United Nations Experts Estab-
lished Pursuant to Paragraph 30 of the Security Council Resolution 1284
(2000) [sic]. March 2000.

18. U. N. Agencies. Special Topics on Social Conditions in Iraq. An Overview
Submitted by the UN System to the Security Council Panel on Humani-
tarian Issues. Baghdad, 24 March 1999.

19. United Nations Secretary-General. Report of the Secretary-General Pur-
suant to Paragraphs 28 and 30 of Resolution 1284 (1999) and Paragraph 5
of Resolution 1281 (1999). New York, 10 March 200.

20. S. Zaidi and M. C. Smith-Fawzi. Health of Baghdad’s Children.
The Lancet (346):1485, 2 December 199

mfi

As is implicit in many of the comments so far, the modern nation-state is based on its monopoly on the use of violence. You can’t beat up your neighbor for dumping garbage on your lawn, but you can call on government (police and courts) to use force as necessary to stop him and to get you compensation. Private use of force, as in “Stand your ground” permission signals a loss of legitimacy for the state among even lawmakers.

When religion had control of the narrative and was a legitimating force for human action, state violence was used to enforce its precepts. Once property rights fundamentalism became the legitimating force, state violence no longer enforced religious doctrine and practice. Rather it codified and enforced private claims to increasingly arcane rights of control and profit.

Human rights in the U.S. became all the rights you can afford. Yes, you have the right to free speech, which you can exercise in a “free speech zone”. You can, however, make yourself heard by contributing large sums of money to politicians. As with free speech, you have the right to work (the phrase itself means no union shops) but otherwise no right to the means of living. Invasion of another’s property is defined as exercising violence, which the state exists to resist. So if the laws giving control to the rich mean that you have no food, your taking the food constitutes violence which the state will stop. The austerity is just a condition of a peaceful situation. It’s not defined as violence. If you define it as violence, you’re saying that other people can come and take away your stuff! That’s the fear that keeps people from seeing that state laws themselves constitute violence — all those strange people will come and take away my stuff.

As humans, we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these things. We focus on the specific and the known, and react to other things with fear. I think it’s a fear of lack of control. We think we know how to foresee and control the ordinary, so we cling to it in the face of evidence to the contrary. We’re scared witless that a scary stranger will kidnap our kids which virtually never happens, but have no qualms about driving them thousands of miles a year despite the fact that traffic accidents are the top child killer. In fact, we resist traffic calming measures that reduce the accident rate when they also reduce the speed and convenience of driving.

Rationally, it’s strange, and on many topics I wish we were more rational. But emotion and empathy are probably more important, even if they sometimes serve us badly.

@mfi, thanks.

Please adduce evidence to support your contention that “If these sanctions killed so many people, then I think that most people would oppose them, especially in retrospect.”

Obviously I don’t have any, so I’ll withdraw that claim. I haven’t seen any contrary evidence, either, though.

One of the options should have been to demand that those implementing the sanctions were responsible to the UN and not to their national governments.

In other words, the same sanctions, just implemented differently (or by the UN rather than the US). But …

Before, sanctions there were plenty of warnings that the sanctions would have a savage impact on the most vulnerable amongst Irak’s civilian populace.

So the sanctions as proposed were likely to cause much suffering and death, as they in fact did.

Still, the contours of the decision to impose sanctions are not known to me. Given what little I know, the decision to impose sanctions does not seem justified, and the defense of them seems monstrous (“worth it”). And so what? My opinion counts for nothing. Does that mean I think “it is OK to kill people in the name of a nation”?

Like I said, I just don’t follow Ian’s line of reasoning here, or what he trying to get at.

Western (especially US?) exceptionalism/nationalism actually is a form of secular religion, isn’t it? For the citizenry, I don’t think it’s so much that they think nationalistic murder is OK as that they simply don’t imagine it could exist. The US is state as an historical endpoint of evolutionary moral perfection. Equality, the perfection of market economy, freedom, the most (only) advanced nation on earth. And our mission has always been to spread our moral perfection around the world to all the heathen nations who don’t have our freedoms. Most of them don’t even believe that the military is lying when they say “we would never exterminate whole innocent wedding parties”, 95% of all targets we hit are terrorists.

For myself, even though I know what you are saying about the Iraqi children is true and the myth is a complete lie, yet it’s just hard for me to believe that those who made those decisions could have been so evil. The decision makers were just more deeply indoctrinated than I am, enough to rationalize away murder on a large scale even when it’s coming directly as a result of their decisions.

This is the myth of the morally perfect people/nation state we boomers at least were totally indoctrinated with and I doubt if it is different for gen X or gen Y. We believe that we are the perfect nation; all and any of our wars have ever been “wars of liberation”. We saved Europe from the two wars. Even when we had to destroy the villages in Vietnam to save them, those in charge believed we were saving them and could easily sell that to the public. In the bourgeois world mythos, we are as a nation, like Buddhist Bodhisattvas; our very existence is in the name of realizing freedom. We have always been good to the point of being willing to sacrifice ourselves for the freedom of people *around the globe*. We believed this crap; we were children, we were told it over and over, and we fell for it hook line and sinker.

The indoctrination is so complete that it’s hard for most to even conceive of our perfect nation/state doing harm anywhere, except maybe just a little bit perhaps, only in fending off pure evil. This *is* a religious belief.

I’m quite cynical and I never want to believe any of the myth of perfect society requiring my sacrifice if needed to defend against our enemies; I don’t want to believe it at all. But even for me, it’s hard not to experience a state of denial: did we *really* kill all those Iraqi babies? I know we did, but somehow I still can’t wrap my head around it. We just wouldn’t do that.

I knew at the time that I was almost old enough to be drafted for Vietnam that it was a huge lie and I would have done anything not to go. But still when it comes to viscerally believing what I know to be true about the Iraq sanctions, I can’t make myself believe that we were that evil.

I do know how evil the US military was in reaction to 9/11. But maybe it’s because I was already fully conscious of the fact that it was all a horrible lie. I knew we destroyed Afghanistan because I had passed through there in the pre-soviet era and observed all the subsequent history as it happened. But the thought of the Iraq sanctions killing all those children is still something that goes against my deep indoctrination and cultural-cognitive dissidence wants to push that away. That couldn’t have happened; we “as a people” (LOL was pure BS that is, but this is too horrible to shake the indoctrination) are too good to have done anything that bad.

I guess the whole concept of the military being such an effective organization of organized killing is itself really hard to grasp. Independent even of the perfect state myth, I find it hard to conceive of both the pure evil and any such large scale effectiveness. Nothing could be that evil *or* effective in being able to carry it out.

Some excellent comments on this post. To return to the original question, religions are fundamentally optional while states are (with vanishingly rare exceptions) mandatory. By abiding in a state rather than seeking another, we consent(however grudgingly) to the broad policies of said state. We in the West have adopted a sufficiently secular viewpoint that “killing in the name of religion” seems quaint at best, positively atavistic at worst. But in the name of states? Monopolies on (legitimate) violence are what states do. There is much current hand-wringing over “Muslims” beheading people, yet I am old enough to remember when France was still beheading people. Marine Le Pen and her followers seems to think it was a mistake to stop.

@ BlizzardOfOz January 20, 2015

Obviously I don’t have any, so I’ll withdraw that claim. I haven’t seen any contrary evidence, either, though.

A pity, I would far rather live in a world where most people would oppose such sanctions than one in which they either didn’t know, didn’t care, or supported them with only a tiny – albeit vocal minority opposed.

” One of the options should have been to demand that those implementing the sanctions were responsible to the UN and not to their national governments.

In other words, the same sanctions, just implemented differently (or by the UN rather than the US). But …

Before, sanctions there were plenty of warnings that the sanctions would have a savage impact on the most vulnerable amongst Irak’s civilian populace.

So the sanctions as proposed were likely to cause much suffering and death, as they in fact did.”

Not quite, if you think of it as a continuum with there being two sorts of sanctions at either pole:

1. Preventive
2. Punitive

If the sanctions had been preventive I would have had no quarrel with them but it was perfectly obvious to me from the outset that they weren’t preventive they were punitive. It was obvious both from the sweeping language employed and from the fact that the country driving the effort was the USA. The Americans were determined to knock Irak back from being a relatively modern industrialising country to a pre-industrial one and they didb’t give a shit how many Iraki civilians died as a result of the process. They did it by classifying everything as “dual use” – and by everything I mean the whole gamut ranging from schoolchildrens’ pencils to water puriification materiel to chemo drugs to rehydration packs to fertiliser to …

The sanctions were meant to be selective but the Americans by capturing the listing process for what was controlled ensured that they were blanket sanctions that covered everything. They also dominated the enforcement and inspection processes and made very sure indeed that they were enforced with a very heavy hand (and the British in particular and the Western countries in general followed their lead). Anyone in the UN mission to Irak who opposed them was steamrollered and had their UN career wrecked. I’ll give an example of what I mean, one UN official tried to protest that some pediatric medicines were being delayed and would be useless by the time they were released. The US and the UK put massive diplomatic pressure on her home government and very quickly she caved in and went along. It didn’t save her job though the Americans kept up the pressure on her government and she was recalled. I can’t prove that the US and UK ambassadors to Ethiopia threatened to cut or even withdraw all bilateral aid but she told me that’s what they did and I think it far more likely than not.

They also raised lots of bureaucratic fuss in the UN delaying the consideration of such protests until it was too late. Ban Ki Moon actively connived with them at ensuring that the sanctions were as sweeping and as savagely enforced as possible. The “political UN” as opposed to the “technical UN” if I can put it like that has little if any independence and Ban Ki Moon didn’t even pretend to be impartial. I’d hoped for preventive sanctions enforced by rigorous inspections but that would have allowed the Irakis to rebuild their country and that was what the Americans were determined to prevent at all costs using punitive sanctions as their weapon of choice.

Albright was horrified at the reaction to her “worth it” comment and tried to take it back and say she’d never meant it unfortunately for her it was very apparent that had meant it that she’d inadvertently told the truth and that as far as she and a succession of American governments were concerned mass excess deaths were very much “worth it”.

This isn’t to say that the Ba’ath government was blameless – far from it, but the issue at hand is American/Western & UN culpability and compared to the Americans the Ba’ath were and remain, rank amateurs at the business of killing civilians.

mfi

MFI, thanks for making the picture so clear. It doesn’t make living and working with these people here in the Homeland any easier, but it puts it in sharper perspective.

Can these capabilities be properly described as “rights”?

To the degree I believe in rights, they are those codified in law, e.g., Bill of Rights.

A little above my pay grade as to fine differences between rights and powers, war-making might be considered a power, but Obama and/or Congress make war not simply because they can, as a material capability, but because they are legitimated by paper and process. In theory if not in practice. They are protected from at least domestic sanction in very much the way my speech is protected.

I think the question is not so much “why” they kill Iraqi children, or at least not the only question, but how: how do they justify it, how do they get permission, how do they get away with it, how do they defend it. What kind of arguments make it possible.

Propaganda. Human beings are defenseless against it. Religious murders are typically not backed by the state and its powerful propaganda. Nation murders are always backed by powerful propaganda and are therefore accepted and encouraged.

“Propaganda. Human beings are defenseless against it.”–WFMD

By and large, yes. 🙁

To elaborate, we humans have the mental weakness of starting to believe a lie if it is repeated to us sufficiently often.

One of the dangers of this tactic is that the liars are human, also–so even the liars can start to believe their own lies.

One of the many reasons the Axis Powers lost WW2 is that many of their bigwigs started to believe their own propaganda that they had the Biggest Swinging Dicks Ever Seen On Primates, and their sheer macho will power could overcome any merely material disadvantages.

http://my.firedoglake.com/blog/2015/01/21/the-anti-empire-report-136-murdering-journalists-them-and-us/

ISTR back when Greenwald was on Salon he posted a tweet from an American journalist huffily dismissing U.S. assassination of reporters as a justified “anti-terrorist action”. I’ve been trying to track it down but the layout of Salon site makes searching through the archives a Herculean task.

@ someofparts January 21, 2015

If you don’t resist them they’ll wind up doing it to you – because they can. CF The militarisation of American police WAT.

mfi

MFI: Ixquick found it the first time out, thank you.

http://www.salon.com/2009/05/11/journalists_6/

And here’s the tweet in question:

http://twitter.com/EliLake/status/1764511113

Blame is diffuse and I think Kyle is talking about only the people who are directly responsible – who had some role in the decision making. The average US citizen is paying for the wars but has ever more diffuse responsibility, actually imo almost none because the fact is there is little that any individual citizen can do to stop the carnage committed by the state. This is not an attempt to rationalize away responsibility, just a statement of fact. If everybody took just a little responsibility and performed small acts, it might actually add up when multiplied by numbers, but it’s very hard to shame the state or its employees, not clear what sustained action it would take to have any effect.

Like bob mcmanus, I mainly care about the ‘why’ because I care most about what could stop the killing. When I wrote about state myths I wasn’t even addressing appropriation of moral responsibility, I was thinking about nobody can stop the imperial state creating carnage and most of that is because there is little to no feeling of responsibility by the citizens. Both because of being powerless to stop the state, and even before that, because of many believing the myths that the state is actually wonderful and therefore it is absurd to think it is a massive international war crimes machine.

And the moral responsibility is not very clear imo, regarding the citizens. I didn’t support any of the violence. I totally reject both the political aims and the means taken to try to achieve them. Do I really have an iota of responsibility for what the state does? If so, surely due only to lack of enough effort to protest or stop the state.

I’m sure I wasn’t very clear on where I was going, but my main concern was about what it would take to get the citizenry to wake up and protest the carnage and hence actually do something to prevent it.

The deaths caused by sanctions are just as real as those caused by direct violence, however they are harder to be aware of. Lack of public attention is caused by massive lying and covering up by the direct actors, but also in large part caused by belief in the myths, denial of the state being so evil. And when the violence is indirect, e.g. withholding access to medicine, it’s that much harder to break through the lies and the mythology.

So that unfortunately and for various reasons, it’s much easier for the state to get away with killing by sanctions than by killing by more direct violence, though the violence of withholding medicines which is just as deadly, just as “violent”, really. I myself clearly see the US state’s responsibility for the destabilization of Afghanistan and Iraq, therefore the US’s responsibility for not only the people they directly killed, but also for all the victims of the ethnic cleansing that the actions of the US unleashed. But for me (speaking without any deep reflection) it’s actually much harder (again, before any reflection) to feel the US responsibility for the deaths from the sanctions, even though those deaths might even be far more directly attributable to the actions of the US state than the deaths in the communal mayhem the US unleashed by destroying the Iraqi state without a single plan or thought about what to do afterwards (or not — I have a passion for planning and hence find the lack of planning in the invasion of Iraq to be the most culpable and disgusting act of all)

Is responsibility for deaths due to sanctions much clearer than the responsibility for the deaths cause by ethnic cleansing and warlordism? In some ways it’s a no brainer “yes”, but I’m not sure. Emotionally, for some reason it’s harder for me get very angry about the violence of the sanctions vs the more direct and obvious violence. Is that because my own mind is far more susceptible to the myth and the rationalizations of the state and its agents regarding the sanctions than regarding the open warfare? I don’t know.

@ GGG January 21, 2015 – glad that worked out, I find myself using IXquick more and more and not just because of the privacy issues.

mfi

@ Lisa FOS January 22, 2015

You manage to be one of the few people with an even bleaker view of humanity and what we can get up to given half a chance than me.

mfi

Seems to me that the question is formulated wrongly. As structured, it strongly implies that religion should be a co-equal force for legitimating organized conflict. That would be about the last thing we need. Really, the question should be formulated more along the lines of “Why, if we have managed after many years to de-legitimate religion as a basis for large-scale inter-state conflict, have we not de-legitimated inter-state conflict more broadly?” I guess my answers to the above would be: a) “working on it”, and b) inter-state conflict is actually inherently more manageable in the international system than religious conflict (and non-state conflict more broadly).

Wonks should also note that use of state vs. nation terminology in the above can matter significantly, depending on the specific circumstance.

@ Yosemite_Steve January 22, 2015 – You see a moral equivalence between child murder as an instrument of state policy and bailing out banks that made loans on overvalued assets. Thanks for clarifying.

Perhaps you would care to come up with a better diversionary tactic than that sad effort.

mfi

“Or more likely just collapse into chaos, warlordism and all that.”

What Lisa said.

I expect that if our future proves to be a dystopia, it will bear far less resemblance to Orwell’s 1984 than to Mad Max.

@ Tony Rantala
January 23, 2015
Human mind is primarily a reducing agent that only allows a tiny sliver of information in.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
OMG, where to start…
For starters; speak for yourself. Your generalizations are at best erroneous.
The sane ones among us are capable of critical thinking; which your tripe doesn’t even address.
The rest of your screed is best suited for trolling…
Good luck in your continued travels…

V. Arnold Do me a favour and try to account for all the things in front of you. Once you die of old age you will stop posting that sort of idiocy.

Argh! ^ you’re; not your….nuts…

@ Lisa FOS January 22, 2015 Competing corporatisms with competing warlord states on the peripheries would be my guess .

mfi