As I’ve said, there’s little point to debating a moral illiterate like Gabriel Ash, who writes fan letters to the Iranian Supreme Leader. But his take on Iraqi sanctions requires a brief comment.
Anyone who states, as Ash does, that “the U.S. led sanctions regime consisted in murdering children as a policy tool,” and who holds Saddam’s regime not one bit responsible, is a propagandist. There is a lengthy footnote about the Iraqi sanctions in Jesse Larner’s book Forgive Us Our Spins which illuminates the issue well. It cites a UNICEF study that, according to Larner, “found that if the reduction in infant mortality that Iraq saw in the 1980s had continued in the 1990s, there might have been a total of 500,000 fewer under-five deaths. Certainly sanctions played a part here, but that’s a subtly yet importantly different statement than saying that the sanctions caused 500,000 child deaths.” Larner also cites Richard Garfield’s study, which “estimated 350,000 excess under-five deaths between 1991 and 2002. … Garfield’s analysis suggests a complex matrix of causes, some of which were directly or indirectly related to sanctions, some of which had to do with the lingering … effects of the 1991 Gulf War, and some of which have to do with really bad public health practices under the government of Iraq post-1991. This clearly does not mean that all of those deaths can be attributed to sanctions, nor that the numbers given by the Iraqi government and its activist sympathizers can be accepted without skepticism.”
In addition, readers should consider John Sweeney’s investigative reports on the Baathist propaganda campaign against the sanctions.
For Ash, however, the whole thing is a simple matter of the U.S. sadistically murdering Iraqi babies, and this is the only account that could possibly mesh with his worldview. Anyone who differs is a “holocaust denier.” This from a blogger who recommends the writings of William Blum, a Balkan-genocide denier and supporter of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.
Which brings us to Madeleine Albright. Ash rightly notes that Albright, in her memoir, expressed deep regret over her “the price is worth it” comment:
As soon as I had spoken, I wished for the power to freeze time and take back those words. My reply had been a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy and wrong. Nothing matters more than the lives of innocent people. I had fallen into the trap and said something I simply did not mean. That was no one’s fault but my own.
Ash uses this to argue that her initial statement was “a cut and dry admission of responsibility.” He wishes it were that easy. Albright made the comment having already made clear her (supportable) view that the causes of Iraqi civilian suffering were manifold — something that Ash and his fellow propagandists will never accept, but there you go. Under klieg lights during a television interview, she said something that came out all wrong. To leap from that to painting her as an enthusiastic baby-killer is pure demagoguery, but that’s the only mode of comment Ash knows.
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