Many will be among Iraq's most vulnerable, babies, children and old people, who are already dying in disproportionate numbers as a result of economic sanctions. The withdrawal of UN humanitarian personnel, including the staff of food, health and children's programs, in response to US military threats, will further erode many Iraqi civilians' already shattered lives. The renewed preparations for military action and increasingly tightened economic sanctions come when the administration has already abandoned serious disarmament and military monitoring efforts. Disarmament is essentially off the agenda. Everyone from former secretaries of state to congresspeople and Clinton administration officials are urging support for air strikes to avoid what Paula Dobriansky of the Council on Foreign Relations called a 'negative impact on US credibility with long-term effects on US leadership in the region'.
Credibility is all.
Politics trumps strategy, and fears of 'losing credibility' with some regional leaders and perhaps losing face at home apparently win out over billions wasted on Tomahawk missiles, perhaps thousands of dead Iraqis and a new generation of Middle Eastern outrage at US callous disregard for Arab lives. What all of this means is that the administration admits it is possible to separate economic from military sanctions - but they're doing it all wrong. Critics of US policy have long called for delinking the economic and military sanctions, but with just the opposite result. The military sanctions, the disarmament effort, supposedly the cornerstone of US policy and UN resolutions, should be strengthened and expanded to include provider as well as recipient companies and countries. One US company, the American Type Culture Collection, just as an example, provided biological weapons material to the Iraqi government under US Department of Commerce license right up until a few months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, including the germs to produce botulism, anthrax, e-coli and many more horrifying diseases.