Denis Halliday worked for the U.N. for over 30 years. He was an Assistant Secretary-General of the U.N. and the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq until he resigned in protest of the continuation of economic sanctions. Phyllis Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. The following is a transcript of their talks given at the University of Washington, in Seattle, on February 15, 1999. (Skip ahead to Bennis's talk)
Denis Halliday:
The timing of tonight's meeting is very important. Because I believe there is a crisis, a both domestic and international crisis. And the United States is in difficulty, and it needs your help. You are after all the United States. The guys in Washington are there on your behalf. And you have some work to do to have them speak on your behalf. And we're here, I'm here, to try to help you tonight as an Irishman – there's a bit of irony there perhaps – to try to help you get a better feel for what is happening in Iraq, what we are doing jointly to the people of Iraq, so you can feel armed and secure going out and in a friendly way harassing your congressman, your senators, those who would represent you in Washington and elsewhere. That, I think, is the name of the game. I think there is also a crisis of confidence. I'm afraid the United States is losing worldwide through its actions in Iraq, the current illegal bombing of the no-fly zones, is seen to be a very unfortunate development. It is not serving any known purpose. Neither Blair nor Clinton were very articulate in explaining why. In the meantime, we're making Saddam Hussein stronger. Every time we bomb Iraq of course he gets a boost, a boost not just in the country but in the neighborhood so to speak. He is now more of a hero in the Arab world than before these latest military strikes began in December.
Now, I think we have a task to do. And as I've said we are responsible, we are jointly responsible, and if you wish we can share the responsibility with Saddam Hussein. But we have no influence over him it seems. But we certainly have influence over ourselves and over those we choose to represent us. And somebody said recently – I was down in Princeton – that we're not subjects, we're citizens, and that's what it's all about in making change. And as we sit here rather snug in our democracy, in our universities, in our homes, with our opportunities, and our educations, and our futures, and our human rights intact, we are responsible for a policy in Iraq which is taking away from the people of Iraq not only their very lives but the lives of their children and the lives of the next generation. We are seeing children suffering from chronic malnutrition in Iraq today who are going to be mentally and physically stunted for the rest of their lives. And we are responsible. That's the point.
What are we doing about it? Well, here in the Northwest I must say Phyllis and I, in our very short visit, have been very impressed. We had some very interesting call-ins this morning on the radio show. We met with some very interesting people this afternoon, with good ideas, highly committed. Some are going out to visit, and some are right in front of me, are going to visit Iraq shortly. Some are from the Voices In The Wilderness, who have been to Iraq several times, outstanding people in your own community. If you're not already supporting them, they need your support. And if you're not already harassing your congressman, that needs to be done also, because we can not afford to hide behind the United Nations. The United Nations is not the fig leaf for Washington policy. And likewise we can not hide behind Saddam Hussein. Yes, he is a miserable dictator. He has done some appalling things. None of us would apologize or want to apologize for that. But the fact that we can not communicate with him, the fact that we can not make any progress in our dialog with him, does not allow us, does not empower us to kill the children of Iraq. It's as simple as that. And like you, you and I together, we don't want to be held responsible for, for lack of better word, what is genocide in Iraq today.
Sanctions. Well, sanctions have turned out to be the most devastating tool the United Nations member states could have devised in Iraq. It came on top of the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War and the destruction of the economy, the infrastructure, and the probably one million Iraqi deaths leaving behind many families with single mothers, single parents. It then came on top of the invasion of Kuwait and the forces of the coalition group who wrecked on Iraq the most incredible devastation, targeting rather specifically the civilian infrastructure. I mean the schools, the hospitals, the water treatment plants, the electrical power production capacity, sewage systems, all of the facilities we take for granted and which are so essential to the well being of a people. This was done in the full knowledge and of course directed by George Bush, who at the time called for nothing less than the Stone Age, putting Iraq back into the Stone Age. It was done in knowledge that it was a complete breach of the Geneva Convention and Protocols, which specifically excludes the targeting of civilians and civilian needs. Nevertheless that was done. So, sanctions for eight years on top of those three issues – Iran, Kuwait, and then the coalition forces – is part of the devastation that we've seen in Iraq, which is unique. There's nothing else like it. And it's a total and complete embargo, on communications, on any access to the outside world, in addition to supplies, food, medicine, all those basics that make life worth living.
Now in response to this crisis in the 1990's finally after painful negotiations, the Security Council did indeed set up an oil-for-food program. This program allows Iraq to sell a certain amount of oil, the revenues for which then go into U.N. coffers. From those coffers, direct payments are made to the contractors, who have been assembled by the Iraqi authorities to deliver both food and medicines in particular. They have signed contracts with the United States, with Australia, with Vietnam, with Thailand, with various European countries, for basic supplies of rice, sugar, tea, cooking oil, wheat, pulses [beans], milk, and so on. Likewise with basic drugs and medicines. When these contractors deliver the goods to Iraq, they get paid by the United Nations directly. No money goes through the hands of the government. And then I had a team on the ground in Baghdad. And that team of course continues now to observe exactly how that foodstuff is delivered throughout the country. We built on a system that the Iraqi government already had. And it works extremely well. And we have reported to the Security Council for the best part of two years that in fact the Iraqi people are receiving the foodstuffs, the medicines, that are intended for them. There are two hundred observers reporting now. They're all over the country, with complete access, interviewing recipients, warehousers, agents, and others involved in the process.
Recently, there has been misinformation about hoarding medicines or hoarding of foodstuffs. I think this is not correct. Indeed, there has been a build up of cheese. For the first time animal proteins are included in the food basket. They will be released next month. If you can think through the logistics of having a half-kilo package of cheese available for 23 million people on any one or two, three days of March, you can visualize that warehouses may well indeed be full or look like they're full of cheese together with other produce. So this drama of Saddam Hussein storing foodstuffs and not distributing them is only so much rubbish. The fact is the program has worked.
The tragedy is however that it's grossly under-funded. It has not produced the necessary dollars to buy the meats, canned meats, adequate cheese, adequate animal proteins, so what we've done is – it's true – we imported something like nine million tons under this program. But the Iraqi people are suffering from a very high level of child mortality. We have continued malnutrition, and a range of other difficulties which I'll now explain. So as where the oil-for-food program exists and continues to function, it is a failure. Any program that sustains mortality rates and malnutrition like we have in Iraq today can be nothing less than a failure.
Let me give you some impression of what that is. And I know I am speaking to some who know this as well and better than I do, but perhaps some of you are not fully on board. We have a situation in Iraq today through seven, eight years of inadequate nutritious dieting, together with water-born diseases due to the fact that the coalition forces destroyed the water treatment, water distribution plants, destroyed the electric power necessary to drive those systems of water distribution, which leads to diarrhea, to some very basic water-born diseases, the combination of these two facts and mothers who have a very low level of nutrition themselves. Infants are dying at an appalling rate. Together with other children and those under five, thousands of Iraqi children under five are dying every month, and it's directly attributable to the sanctions regime that we established under the Security Council and we have sustained under the Security Council, knowing full well, as Madeleine Albright announced – I think a year or two ago on CBS, 60 Minutes. Knowing full well that thousands are dying, this is being considered and has been sustained as a program worthy, in some way, of containing Saddam Hussein, something I find unjustifiable, impossible to accept. And I hope that many of you would feel the same way. There has got to be another way. We can not punish the children, the people of Iraq because we can not communicate with Saddam Hussein.
The situation in terms of malnutrition is no better. It's running at least 30%, possibly higher. And much of that is chronic malnutrition, which as I said early, leads to mental and physical lack of development. We have acute malnutrition in Iraq today. You know in the 1980's the main problem for doctors in terms of young children in Iraq was obesity. Iraq was so prosperous, the standard of living was so high, public health was so good. The quality of education was equally outstanding. The services provided by the Ba'th Party were so comprehensive, this was a country of great prosperity, comparable and better, richer than many of the Southern European countries of that time. But we have reduced Iraq to a situation where child mortality is comparable now to Sudan. And you can appreciate how difficult it is for mother, for fathers, for parents to see their children suffering from malnutrition or worse, getting leukemia, get diseases for which we are not providing, can not provide for lack of funds, adequate medical care. Preventive care has collapsed in Iraq today. It's just not there. Sophisticated drugs are simply not available. And this is not because of any policy of the government or Saddam Hussein. It's because we have not funded the situation, we have allowed this situation to continue.
Another aspect of sanctions impact is on the social scene. The social consequences are perhaps equally devastating, but not so tangible, not so appalling. And by that I mean we have in Iraq today many families who are already in great difficulty due to absent fathers, who either have walked away from their responsibilities, are overseas professionals – maybe two million of them – trying to make a living or those who were killed in the Iran-Iraq War, families who have had difficult times and are subsidized by the government. They now are faced with even more difficult circumstances. The dinar has been heavily devalued, inflation has been rampant, and the buying power of everybody including the middle classes has been diminished tremendously. The result is that Iraqis have been obliged to sell their property, sell their houses, sell their books, sell all their personal possessions sometimes, available for sale in the auction houses on the streets of Baghdad. On Friday mornings for example there's a whole street dedicated to selling books. It's quite tragic. Many have been obliged to take their children out of school. The drop out rate is over 30%. These children are now in the streets of the cities of Iraq begging. Now those of you who know the Islamic world well will appreciate begging is not normally acceptable behavior. I myself used to go home in the evenings and find three little girls, maybe three, maybe four, maybe seven, who would wait for me – they would recognize the car – and I'd always have some money for them, and always some food, because the food was for them. The money I know went to somebody else, hopefully their parents or mother perhaps. And this was a very common problem throughout Baghdad and other cities.
Another even worse development has been crime. Street children have developed in Iraq. This also was just inconceivable some years ago. And very violent crime has also developed. I was telling somebody today that when we thought of evacuating Iraqi staff of the United Nations in '98, before the Secretary-General arrived, I was encouraging them to take a week off and go to the country and leave their houses and look after their lives, they informed me they could no longer do that, because they were afraid of looting, something they were not afraid of in 1991 when Baghdad was largely evacuated, by many people who walked away confident that when they'd come back everything would be in place. Some families amongst the poorest have been obliged to choose amongst their daughters and send one out into prostitution, simply to bring money into the family; thing's are that desperate.
So you can imagine the damage that we are doing through sanction to the Iraqi family, the extended family, that Islamic system which is so important and of such high value. It's going to take a long time to rebuild this essential part of Iraqi life. We have a situation now where young men, young women are no longer able to contemplate marriage. There isn't the money for it; there's nowhere to live. People are desperate. Young women, professional women are being obliged to give up often their professional careers because the salaries paid to teachers, to civil servants, to others, are simply not adequate for them to go to the office. It costs more to go there than the income paid at the end of the month. Some of the women I know working in foreign affairs or elsewhere are working there because their parents can afford to subsidize them so they can go to work. Others in this flight have ended up going into sweatshops, again to make money sewing or something like that. These are people with master's degrees, Ph.D.'s from North America, from this country, or from Europe. It's a crazy situation, in a country where women have made major contributions for well over 20 years in all aspects of Iraqi life.
Another area where I'd just like to talk briefly is the political side. We are in a position now I think of pushing Iraq to the limit. There are young people in this country now who are the smaller politicians within the Ba'th Party, people who are coming up behind the names that we recognize, the people we see on CNN. They are going to run this country in 10 years perhaps. They find that the line of Saddam Hussein, and Tarik Aziz, and al-Sahaf, and these men to be too moderate. They want to be more extreme. They are ready to kick out the United Nations, Oil for Food, whatever else we could come up with. They're sick and tired of their leadership compromising itself in order to keep the United Nations, the United States happy. They're ready for something more dramatic. We're pushing Iraq into a sort of situation we had after World War I when the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany led to a national depression and ultimately a total collapse of the economy. And we know what happened. We ended up with the Nazis and the Holocaust and all those appalling things. That's a danger we're now going to face in Iraq if we're not very careful. It'll be different of course. Maybe it'll be more rightist fundamentalist politics, or it'll be an Iraqi form of the Taliban movement which we have in Afghanistan. It's something we do not need, and it's something we do not want. It certainly wouldn't auger well for the future.
So that is sanctions. That's what sanctions are doing to this country. It is killing the people, destroying the society, damaging the culture, destroying a great country with a great future – I hope – but right now they are in deep, deep trouble; and we folks are responsible for that. I think what we've got to do – so many of us who are pacifists, who are interested in this sort of need – is to classify sanctions as a form of warfare. There really is no other way to describe it, when you have a policy that ends up with the death of thousands each month, possibly a million deaths since 1991. If that's not warfare, I don't quite know what we would call it. Now if it is warfare, it's warfare that is focused on civilians. The Geneva Convention, again, proscribes that sort of activity. So we are breaking the rules here many times around. And the rules don't really matter. It's the results of course, that matter. But I think those of us in positions to have influence or speak up, have got to come forward and do just that. And I think that is what it's all about.
The United Nations itself I think is deeply threatened – and Phyllis will speak to that – by the unilateral actions of this country and the United Kingdom. We see the resolutions of the Security Council undermining the Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights. And a suggestion that some of us are making is that an international panel of jurors should be established in order to review the resolutions of the Security Council, to bring it back into control, to at least insist that the Security Council resolutions are compatible with the Charter of the United Nations, with the Declaration of Human Rights, with the Convention of the Rights of a Child, with the Convention on the Rights for Economic and Social Activity. That's all we are asking. And that seems to be the difficult thing to come about.
So what do we do? We have a role to play. There are no simple solutions. This is a complex situation. I think there are three issues:
[1] One is to introduce comprehensive international arms control, not just for Iraq but for the entire Middle East, which is part of the original resolution. To ensure that those countries which manufacture and sell arms have some self-imposed discipline to stop that practice, again not just for Iraq but the entire region.
[2] That we raise economic sanctions and allow Iraq to regain some of its sovereignty, dignity, self respect and open up the economy to additional monies hopefully to start rebuilding the infrastructure and rebuilding the civilian infrastructure in particular. This is not going to work, it's not going to make a big difference right now because oil revenues are very low. Iraq's capacity to produce is greatly diminished. The price of oil is very low also. I am advocating that there must be massive credit made available to Iraq for recurring budgetary expenditures: to sustain people, to get people back on their feet, to create jobs, to pay the civil servants, to rebuild the cities, to make the services work. But perhaps more critical is the need for massive capital investment. $50 or $60 billion U.S. dollars would be required to rebuild the major infrastructural needs of domestic agriculture, electric power, the health system, and so on.
[3] And lastly I think most fundamentally – and it's something that as a foreigner it's difficult to comment – but the Arab world – the world of Iran, the Israelis, and the Arabs, the Middle East – needs to start working towards a spirit of community, some sort of union, some sort of way to live and work together, because that is the only solution for the future. If Saddam Hussein were to leave us next week, it really won't perhaps solve things because somebody will emerge with the same sort of ambitions, the same sort of frustrations, with access to oil, with access to the Gulf, with access to the Shat al-Arab, whatever it may happen to be. Those issues have got to be resolved. They can only be resolved by the people of the Middle East, not by us, not by military force, not European intervention. We've got to stand back and let the people of these states begin to resolve their own problems.
I think we all need to think about that, the other ways of dealing with the future, taking some risks. By not taking a risk now, we are killing thousands, for which we are responsible. There are many issues here. It's an extremely complex situation, and I hope maybe Phyllis will make more sense of it than I have. But I've just delivered what I think are some of the issues, and she will now take over and do more. Thank you very much.
Phyllis Bennis:
Thank you all for coming. You know I was a little disappointed when Professor Goldberg tonight said there wasn't going to be a test at the end, because then I thought, well nobody is going to pay attention if there's no test at the end. But then I remembered that there are more things in universities and more things to being a student than tests. And it's very good to see you all here. It's been a rather extraordinary beginning for Denis and I for this tour that lies ahead of us. Seattle is the first in a tour of 21 cities that we're going to. And I think that if all of the people that we find are like the people that we've found today in Seattle, we'll be well on our way to helping to build this movement to stop what the U.S. is doing in Iraq and in the region.
There's a problem in this country very often that we tend to lose sight of history. This is a young country relative to many other parts of the world. And maybe it's because of that that we don't often take history very seriously. But the consequences of ignoring history are very severe, not just in the notion that those who forget about history are doomed to repeat it, but in the context of not having a context. And I think that's very much at the root of part of our problem in looking at U.S. policy in Iraq. We forget what the context of U.S. involvement has been. We forget that throughout the 1970's and 1980's the government of Iraq, which was the government of the Ba'th Party, led by Saddam Hussein, was an ally of the U.S. Maybe it wasn't quite a partner, but it was a junior partner. It was a military ally, and it was a major recipient of military intelligence, military goods, weapons; and in the context of today's world, it was the recipient of massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction, most notably biological weapons stocks, which first arrived in Iraq – well, I don't know if it was first, I shouldn't say that, but where we know of – arrived in Iraq beginning in the 1980's sent by a company outside of Washington, the American Type Culture Collection, which sent to the Iraqi military under license of the U.S. Commerce Department the biological material necessary for Anthrax, E. Coli, Botulism, and a host of other diseases for military purposes. Now again this wasn't a rouge company, this wasn't some hidden away secret agency. There was a debate about it, and in fact there are some indications that some in the Pentagon felt that even though the U.S. had been providing already weapons and material and intelligence to the Iraqi forces in there fight against Iran – this is the 1980's remember – that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to send such really bad stuff off to Baghdad, given that this was a pretty unaccountable regime. And a few people in the State Department also seemed to be a little queasy at the idea. But what a surprise, the Commerce Department wins out, markets trump disarmament, and the license was granted.
Now, given that history, what does it say about the fact that suddenly in 1990 – because remember this kind of shipment went on right through 1989, which means after the Iraqi regime used chemical weapons against the Kurds in its own country and against Iranian troops, in thorough violation of a host of international laws. Nevertheless, the U.S. continued sending this kind of military equipment, military support, and military stocks. And yet six months later when Iraq became even less accountable to U.S. interests and went into Kuwait, occupied Kuwait clearly in violation of international law, the U.S. suddenly announced that this was a government on the par of Hitler, that this was another Hitler. This wasn't a new government. There hadn't been a coup in Iraq. This was the same government that we had been sending these weapons to for the last twenty years.
And I think what happened after that was indicative of how the U.S. views its relations with other countries and fundamentally its relations with the United Nations in a thoroughly instrumentalist way. And particularly what that means is that when the invasion of Kuwait happened this was something that was originally a regional crisis. It could have been a containable regional crisis. The U.S. made the decision to make it into a global conflagration. When the invasion took place, the Arab League said, "This is an inter-Arab issue, and it's up the Arab League to try and solve it. Give us time." The U.S. response was, "You've got 48 hours." Now the Arab League, for those of you who know anything about Arab politics, couldn't agree on lunch in 48 hours. So, to no one's surprise, it didn't work. Now, would it have worked in a week? Maybe. I don't know. Would it have worked in a month? I'm not sure. We'll never know, because President Bush was not about to let it happen. At the end of the 48 hours, when George Bush's good friend King Hussein of Jordan and his other good friend Hosni Mubarak of Egypt called him and said, "We need more time." He said, "Sorry, you've had your time. We're sending the troops." That was the decision that made the invasion of Kuwait into an international conflagration that it did not need to be.
Why did the U.S. do this? In my view, it was partly for regional considerations. The U.S. was concerned that it remain the guarantor of access to oil for its allies, Germany and Japan. It didn't need the oil so much for itself, but it wanted to be in charge of making sure its allies had to go through the U.S. to maintain access to that oil. But it had a broader international reason as well, and that had more to do with the Cold War than what became the Gulf War. The Cold War was ending, had just ended. And what was the U.S. going to do? Its superpower partner had collapsed. It no longer had a superpower enemy. And I think a lot of people in the world were thinking maybe the U.S. would close its superpower tents and go home, maybe it would start acting like just a normal country. And the U.S. was very determined that no one get that foolish idea through their head. But rather there was an effort to say, whatever happened to the Soviet Union, we are going to remain a superpower. And the Gulf War was going to be the way to do it.
And that was why, among other things, all of the efforts towards diplomatic solutions to the crisis that took place in the last months before the war broke out in January of 1991 were rebuffed by the U.S. Many of them were foolish efforts, probably would've gone nowhere. But there were one or two that probably had a chance. Primakov, the then Foreign Minister, now Prime Minister in the Soviet Union, who was a former Arabist, a former ambassador to Baghdad, went to Baghdad, negotiated a withdrawal agreement with Saddam Hussein, came back, presented it to Washington, and Washington said, "Don't be ridiculous. We're going to war." This was a war Washington wanted to fight. And it still has made the decision on a political basis. Opposition interestingly came from the Pentagon. The Pentagon didn't particularly want to fight this war. But there were political pressures to fight it.
And what we had then was a situation where the U.S. made a decision to use the United Nations to create an international impramatur, an international credential, to go to war. And it created that international credential to justify a unilateral action. And it did so by bribes and threats and punishments. So, China for example who had threatened to veto the U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force was promised two things that it quite desperately wanted. It wanted diplomatic rehabilitation in the wake of isolation it had suffered after the Tienamen Square massacre, and it wanted new economic assistance, development assistance which it had been denied also after the Tienamen Square incident. It had gotten only emergency humanitarian aid, no development aid. What a surprise: the U.S. just before the vote announced a huge new package of development aid to China, and the day after the vote, when China abstained rather than vetoing, the U.S. invited the Chinese Prime Minister to come to the White House for a high profile diplomatic visit, essentially rehabilitating China back into normal diplomacy. A number of poor countries on the Security Council – Columbia, Ethiopia, a few others – were offered cheap oil, new packages of aid including military aid, which some like Columbia had been denied because of their human rights records. Suddenly it was made available. And these were countries poor enough that they did not feel they could afford to turn down those kinds of bribes. They all voted with the U.S. Yemen, the sole Arab country on the Council, voted against the authorization to use force. And at the end of the vote when Abdullah Alishtal, the Yemeni ambassador had just taken down his hand, one of the U.S. representatives walked over to him and said, "That will be the most expensive no vote you'll ever cast." And it was, unfortunately for the U.S., broadcast over the U.N. radio system which happened to have an open mike. It may have well been deliberate. It's not at all clear that it was such a bad accident from their vantage point. They wanted people to know about it. No one ever tried to deny it later. And sure enough three days later, they cut the entire aid budget to Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. It was a tiny budget anyway, only $70 million. Quite shameful, but nonetheless, it was cut.
That's the history that we don't hear very much about. That's the history that gets lost in this country. What it has laid the ground work for is the ability of the U.S. to carry out illegal, unilateral military actions in thorough violation of United Nations resolutions and have very few voices rise in protest. And none of those voices are in Congress. The U.S. claims that Resolution 678, that was passed on November 29, 1990, somehow justifies unilateral military strikes almost a decade later. The problem is that 678 authorized, despite the problems in how it was passed – it was in fact passed – but it authorized the use of military force to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait. There have been no Iraqi troops in Kuwait since March of 1991. That resolution no longer applies. Resolution 1154 that was passed in February of this past year [1998], when Kofi Annan was able to avert at the last minute another strike against Iraq and the Security Council passed a resolution supporting his work, that resolution spoke of severest consequences – then U.S. ambassador Bill Richardson was very proud of that language – severest consequences if Iraq should violate its agreements again. And indeed Iraq did violate agreements again in the future. But the problem is the Security Council had been very cognizant that that could happen and they were very clear of what the consequences should be, that severest consequences did not mean the right to a unilateral U.S. strike but that the Security Council would have to be reconvened to discuss what those severest consequences would be. The U.S. lies, and these are lies with far greater seriousness, far greater consequence than lies about sex and who slept with who. These are lies that are really impeachable offenses.
What we have now is a replacement of the earlier policy of dual containment with a policy of a kind of brutal, unilateral, militarized containment with the continuation of brutal, killing sanctions in Iraq. There has been an abandonment by the Clinton Administration of its early claims to support aggressive multilateralism. This is no longer part of their lexicon. The United Nations has been as much a victim of U.S. policy in Iraq as has been the people of Iraq. And I think that when we look at what has to change in U.S. policy, number one is the United Nations must be put back as center stage of U.N. policy, not to be hijacked by U.S. power. This is unacceptable. It's unacceptable as a legal proposition, and it's unacceptable as a moral reality. When the United States says, "Well, we're not going to go to the United Nations because we can't get the votes there," there's a reason for that. The United States is wrong. And when the United States is wrong, we need to look to the rest of the world to hold it accountable, to make sure it doesn't act on those errors. And we have to be part of that. As Americans and people who live in this country, our tax money goes to implementing that policy. And whether that policy is one of accepting the wider, relatively more democratic positions of the United Nations or whether it is implementing the unilateral, undemocratic policies of the United States, it's our tax money that pays the bills. We have the responsibility, not just the right, to say no to policies that are illegal and immoral. And the U.S. policy in Iraq is both, and we have to stand up and say it.
When we look at what has changed in the region, as this policy has changed from one claiming to be multilateral to one being proudly unilateral, what has not changed is the arms glut in this over-armed region of the world. The U.S. is responsible for 60% of the international arms trade. The permanent five members of the Security Council – the U.S., with it's allies in France and Britain and China and Russia – together are responsible for 85% of the world's arms trade. What a surprise that UNSCOM, when it was created, was ordered not to reveal what it found out in Iraq about the sources of Iraq's weapons systems. UNSCOM is not allowed to go public with that material, because everyone in the Security Council knew that if that wasn't written into the authorization bill, no one would sign on, because they wouldn't want their own companies to fall victim to being made public. So, we don't know whether the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Maryland is still sending biological seed stocks to Iraq. We can assume it probably isn't, but that's not a hell of an assumption that I'd want to make. We don't know because we're not allowed to find out. UNSCOM knows, but they're not allowed to tell us. This is something that has to change. The arms glut in the region cannot be separated from the fact that this is one of the least democratic and most tenuous, in terms of stability, of all regions of the world. This is a nuclear flash point. There is a nuclear power in the Middle East. It's not Iraq – it's Israel. But a nuclear arsenal is a guarantee of instability.
Resolution 687, ironically enough, the U.S. drafted and orchestrated its passage, focusing on the Iraqi sanctions that would be imposed with it. How many people here have heard about the contents of Article 14 of that resolution that talks about the creation of a nuclear weapons-free zone throughout the Middle East? Not too many. It's not a surprise. No one talks about that. That same resolution that imposes sanctions against Iraq also calls for the creation of a weapons of mass destruction-free zone throughout the Middle East, not just in Iraq. And it says that Iraqi disarmament must take place in the context of regional disarmament, not by itself. We don't hear about that. Madeleine Albright doesn't talk about Israel's nuclear arsenal as a destabilizing influence in the region. President Clinton doesn't talk about the Saudi weapons systems, the Saudi missile systems, and the Saudi chemical weapons as a destabilizing factor in the region. We hear about Iraq. We hear once in a while about Iran. And every once in a while we hear a little bit about Libya, although there's not much to say about it, so we don't really hear very much. Mostly, we hear about Iraq, as if Iraq lived on another planet, rather than in a very unstable neighborhood.
We saw at the funeral of King Hussein two fascinating phenomena. One, a very dangerous reality that King Hussein is only the first of his generation of rulers who is passing from the scene; and that kind of generation-wide instability, when new rulers come about in many countries at the same time, is not recipe for stability, let only a recipe for peace. Because remember Martin Luther King's definition of peace: "Peace is not just the absence of war, but the presence of justice." And that brings us to the second part of what we saw with King Hussein's funeral, the passing of the torch from one absolute monarch to his son, another absolute monarch. And here we have the leaders of the democratic countries of the world bowing in homage to the passing of the torch from one absolute monarch to his son, the next absolute monarch. The king is dead. Long live the king. Cheer on the democrats. This was a shocking sight. It's the only region left in the world where absolute monarchies not only exist – there are absolute monarchies elsewhere – but it's the only region of the world where absolute monarchies are cheered by U.S. presidents and British prime ministers. It's an astonishing thing.
So, what do we have to do about all of this? I only want to talk another minute and then open this up for questions and discussion. The first thing we have to do, as Denis Halliday has said, is that we have to end the economic sanctions. They are killing people. They have no impact on the military capacity of Iraq, but they are killing 200 children today. They will kill 200 children tomorrow. They will kill 200 children the day after. We cannot be a party to that.
We have to reassert the centrality of the United Nations. The U.S. does not have the right, by law or by right, to make unilateral decisions about what should happen in or to other countries of the world. It may be the most power nation in the world; it does not have the moral right to exercise that power unilaterally.
We have to expand within the United Nations [the question of] who deals with Iraq. It can no longer be in just the Security Council where the U.S. and its allies have the veto. We have to support a greater role for the Secretariat, for the especially the Disarmament Committee of the General Assembly, a far more democratic agency, the Conference on Disarmament based in Geneva, the Conference of State's Parties that have signed the conventions on chemical and biological weapons. There's a host of other agencies far better situated to take up the question of disarmament in Iraq and the region.
And the next thing we have to do is to regionalize even how we conceptualize the issue of disarmament in Iraq, that it must be region-wide disarmament, according to Resolution 687. The U.S. signed that resolution. We have to hold it to the signature. They are on record supporting the creation of a nuclear weapons-free zone and a weapons of mass destruction-free zone throughout the region. We have to remind them of that and hold their feet to the fire until they implement it.
And the last thing, we have to target the suppliers; and that means our suppliers here in the U.S. as well as the suppliers in Russia, in France, in Germany, in whatever countries they may exist. The U.S has just given another $110 billion of our tax money to the Pentagon. What better use of that money than using some of it, for example, use some of it to pay for disarmament in Russia, where the government may well not have the money to buy up the spare nuclear and chemical and biological components floating around the country? Or to pay off the nuclear and the chemical and biologically trained scientists who are now thinking about going off to other countries to work where maybe they would get a paycheck? Why not use some of that $110 billion for real disarmament?
If we're serious about what the U.S. role has been and what it has to be, I think we can look at ancient history for some examples. In ancient Rome, when the Romans sacked Carthage, the writer Tacitus described the invasion, saying that "the Romans brought devastation, and they called it peace." This is what the U.S. has done in Iraq, and it's time it stopped. Thank you.