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Denis Halliday on a decade of UN sanctions: April 26, 2001 | Pages 6 and 7 DENIS HALLIDAY is the former UN coordinator of humanitarian aid for Iraq. In 1998, he resigned in protest at the devastating toll of UN sanctions, which have caused the deaths of more than 1 million Iraqis--and still kill as many as 5,000 children under the age of five each month, Halliday says. Halliday talked to DAN TRAUM about the impact of a new U.S. war on Iraq. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - YOU KNOW the impact of UN sanctions firsthand, but U.S. officials now say that they have "smart sanctions" in place to target the Iraqi regime, not to punish ordinary Iraqis. Is this true? SMART SANCTIONS in theory sound very wise, because they focus on the men and women who made the decisions which created the problem in the first place. So it's not a matter of punishing the whole population, but focusing on those who screwed up--to get them to change their policies. In reality, though, smart sanctions have never been implemented very successfully. And in the case of Iraq, it's obviously too little, too late--we're now 12 years into dumb sanctions. The price has been paid and is still being paid by the people of Iraq. And smart sanctions really won't change anything. I'm very skeptical now about all forms of sanctions, because of the incompatibility between sanctions under the United Nations charter and other aspects of the charter which talk about the well-being of humankind and so on. THE BUSH administration is also trying to sell the line that Iraq has continued building up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. What's your view on this? THERE'S NO question that during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraq accumulated massive military capacity and weaponry. And much of this came from either the United States or Europe, purchased by oil revenue. Since the last 10 years of the embargo, there seems to be no evidence that Iraq today has weapons of mass destruction--or any serious military capacity, really. They're much diminished after 10 years without revenue and without new weapons--and all their aircraft were shipped out, largely to Iran, during the Gulf War. Therefore, people like Secretary of State Colin Powell have said very clearly, when it suited them, that "Iraq has no potential and is no danger to its neighbors." So there's a lot of hot air right now, and it's being used as an excuse to justify this attack--this war on terrorism. Which is why Iraq having weapons of mass destruction seems to be talked about as synonymous with supporting and harboring terrorists, which I think is probably garbage.
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