A Call to Action on Sanctions
and the U.S. War Against the People of
Iraq
By Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman,
Edward Said, and Howard Zinn
January 8th, 1999
At the end of 1998, the United States once again rained bombs on
the people of Iraq. But even when the bombs stop falling, the U.S.
war against the people of Iraq continues through the harsh economic
sanctions. This is a call to action to end all the war.
This month U.S. policy will kill 4,500 children under the age of 5
in Iraq, according to UN studies, just as it did last month and the
month before that, all the way back to 1991. Since the end of the
Gulf War, at least hundreds of thousands - maybe more than 1 million
- Iraqis have died as a direct result of the UN sanctions on Iraq,
which are a direct result of U.S. policy.
This is not foreign policy - it is sanctioned mass-murder that is
nearing holocaust proportions. If we remain silent, we are condoning
a genocide that is being perpetrated in the name of peace in the
Middle East, a mass slaughter that is being perpetrated in our
name.
The time has come for a call to action to people of conscience. We
are past the point where silence is passive consent - when a crime
reaches these proportions, silence is complicity.
There are several tasks ahead of us.
First, we must organize and make this issue a priority, just as
Americans organized to stop the war in Vietnam, and to protest U.S.
policies in Central America and South Africa. We need a national
campaign to lift the sanctions.
This kind of work has already begun, and those efforts need our
help. For the past several years, individuals and groups have been
delivering medicine and other supplies to Iraq in defiance of the
U.S. blockade. Now, members of one of those groups, Voices in the
Wilderness in Chicago, have been threatened with massive fines by the
federal government for "exportation of donated goods, including
medical supplies and toys, to Iraq absent specific prior
authorization." Our government is harassing a peace group that takes
medicine and toys to dying children; we owe these courageous
activists our support.
Such a campaign is not equivalent to support for the regime of
Saddam Hussein. To oppose the sanctions is to support the Iraqi
people. The people are suffering because of the actions of both the
Iraqi and U.S. governments, but our moral responsibility lies here in
the United States, to counter the hypocrisy and inhumanity of our
leaders.
Also, there has been a virtual embargo on news of the effects of
the sanctions in the mainstream media. For the most part, the
American people do not know what evil is being carried out in our
name. We must continue to apply pressure on journalists at all levels
- from our local papers to the network news - to cover this tragedy.
We should overwhelm the major press with letters to the editor and
put pressure on journalists to cover the story.
And we must realize this could be a long struggle. Preparations
should begin for all the possible strategies, including civil
disobedience once a sufficient number of people are committed. Direct
action that forces a moral accounting likely is going to be
necessary.
Whatever else we are doing, we should treat this as an emergency
and put it at the top of our agenda. Existing groups can work on the
issue, new groups may need to be formed, and national networks need
to be built. A good central source of information exists on the web
at:
http://leb.net/IAC/
Without action by us, the horrors will go on, the children will
continue to die. We must appeal to the natural sympathies of the
American people, who will respond if they know what is happening. We
must therefore bring this issue, in every way we can, to national
attention. The only way to avoid complicity in this crime is to do
everything we can, and much more than we have been doing, to end the
sanctions on Iraq. This issue must be discussed in every household
and every public forum across the country.
