Iraq sanctions killed over a million ordinary Iraqis, not the regime

Evidence

In Iraq the United States (via the UN) imposed a draconian sanctions regime that kept Iraq’s economy close to the preindustrial state in which allied bombing had left it in 1991. The Clinton administration repeatedly stated that sanctions were meant to target Saddam Hussein’s regime and not the Iraqi people. The reality, however, was that ordinary Iraqis suffered most. More than a million died. When Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 1996 about half a million dead Iraqi children, she replied, “We think the price is worth it.” Thus, the humanitarians were quite content to carry out their foreign policy agenda on the dead bodies of children. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 410

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘humanitarian’ sanctions rhetoric as moral cover for state killing — Albright’s ‘price is worth it’ as the tell.
• XREF: Material-interest reading aligns with reader’s guiding question about what material interest each myth protects. — connects to: US sanctions on 1990s Iraq killed over a million Iraqis — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 197