be just

Dr. Khair El-Din Haseeb Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like first to thank Dr. Michael Hudson for inviting me to talk to you this evening, and also to thank the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. There are certain aspects of the invasion of Iraq which probably most of you know. It was an illegal war; there was no decision from the Security Council. It can't be justified by Chapter Seven of the United Nation’s charter as self-defense because Iraq didn't attack the United States, and didn't constitute an imminent danger for the United States, so there was no justification for the preemptive war. No weapons of mass destruction were there; no link with Al-Qaeda terrorists was proven. Lastly, they said it was about democracy, to make a model of democracy in Iraq, which was to be initiated in the Middle East........ First, there was the looting of Baghdad, starting with the National Museum, in other words, the looting of Iraqi history and records, regardless of who got hold of...

Consider the economic toll alone. Prior to the sanctions, 60 percent of Iraq's GDP came from oil exports, which meant that an export ban immediately reduced the country's economy by more than half. To put this in perspective, in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, U.S. GDP had fallen only 27 percent from its pre-depression levels. A study published in 2005 estimated that by 1993, three years into the sanctions, real per capita GDP in Iraq--adjusted by real value of the Iraqi dinar--had fallen by 98 percent, from $718 in 1990 to just $13........ Indeed, between 1990 and 1994, the incidence of typhoid went from 11.3 to 142 per 100,000 and cholera grew from zero cases to 7.8 per 100,000. .... The FAO casualty estimate became a kind of rallying cry for sanctions opponents, and was forever immortalized in 1996, when "60 Minutes" asked then-U.N. ambassador Madeline Albright about the death toll of 500,000 children. She responded: "I think this is a very hard c...