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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The former head of the U.N.'s humanitarian program in Iraq says an American invasion would be an international crime -- and would make the U.S. even less safe.
Mar 20, 2002 | Although it's been four years since Denis Halliday resigned from his post as head of the United Nations humanitarian program in Iraq in protest over what he called the West's "genocidal" sanctions, he is still very much a man with a mission.
After running the "oil-for-food" program, which uses Iraqi oil revenues to distribute basic food rations and medical aid to Iraqi civilians, Halliday turned his attention to spreading the word about sanctions-related suffering.
Despite Saddam Hussein's biochemical assaults on Iranian troops and his own Kurdish population in the 1980s, his invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990, his repeated threats against Israel and the U.S., and his decades-long commitment to building a secret doomsday arsenal, he now poses little threat to the world, according to Halliday. Halliday proposes a nonviolent strategy for resolving tensions between America and Iraq. In addition to catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, he says, an invasion would create long-term problems for the United States in an already volatile region.
Halliday will visit government officials in Spain this May with Hans von Sponeck -- who succeeded Halliday as head of the oil-for-food program and also resigned in protest in 2000 -- to discuss Iraq. Halliday also goes to Cuba this month as a jury member for the World Court of Women, which will examine the impact of sanctions on women in various countries around the world and forward its findings to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
Halliday currently teaches at Trinity College in Dublin (he is Irish by birth) and divides his time between New York and Ireland.
What's missing, in your view, from the national discussion about Iraq?
In the U.S., there are a number of issues not being discussed. One of those is international law. The U.S. somehow doesn't believe that international law applies to this great democracy, to this great empire. We've seen Mr. Bush reject various aspects of international law in the past year. That's a failure on the part of Washington to understand that the U.S. is in fact subordinate to the charter, to the declaration of human rights, to the Geneva Conventions and protocols -- all of which would protect Iraq, a sovereign state and member of the United Nations -- from further harassment, attacks and killings by the United States.
[What's missing is] respect for international law and an awareness that this is not an empire -- that "might" is no longer "right" in the year 2002, and that Mr. Bush does not have any God-given right to attack Iraq or its people without consultation with the Security Council. There is no legitimate way for the U.S. to wage war again on the people of Iraq. That's one huge issue that's missing, in my view.
Another would be the fact that American foreign policy is not understood by the vast majority of American people. And that this is due to a media that in this country is suppressed by Washington and by the owners of this media, who often tend to be corporate entities close to the [White House] and very often are arms manufacturers with a vested interest in chaos [in] the Middle East. And as a result Americans do not actually get both sides of the story.
I believe that Americans are basically decent people. If they understood that Iraq is not made up of 22 million Saddam Husseins but made up of 22 million people -- of families, of children, of elderly parents, families with dreams and hopes and expectations for their children and themselves -- they would be horrified to realize that the current killing of innocent Iraqi civilians by the U.S. Air Force, or what happened in the Gulf War, is being done in their name.
The Bush administration considers Saddam Hussein to be dangerous, because of his massive investment in weapons of mass destruction and his willingness to use them. To what degree is he a threat to the U.S. or to his own neighbors?
Saddam Hussein is not a threat to the U.S., although the U.S., which continues its illegal bombing campaign in the no-fly zone, is a threat to Iraq. Bush's rhetoric is more about domestic politics than any real threat [from Iraq]. The experts say that Saddam doesn't have the capacity to manufacture weapons of mass destruction (WMD) -- and even if he could somehow acquire that capacity, he certainly doesn't have the capacity to deliver them. This has been confirmed by [former Defense Secretary William S.] Cohen when he left the Department of Defense last year, it's been confirmed by Mr. Powell, the current secretary of state, it's been confirmed by people like Scott Ritter. Iraq is no military threat to its neighbors. In fact it's probably the reverse. It's Iraq's neighbors, like Iran and Israel and others, who have the military weaponry, including nuclear weapons, some of which are clearly pointing from Israel at Baghdad itself, thereby justifying the anxieties and concerns of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi leadership.
