uExpress.com: Ted Rall by Ted Rall -- (12/22/1999) JOY TO THE AMERICAN-FRIENDLY WORLD

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12/22/1999

JOY TO THE AMERICAN-FRIENDLY WORLD

Let's End Sanctions

NEW YORK -- Americans attract a lot of attention in Havana. And when I visited Cuba last January, the one question on everybody's lips was about our trade embargo against Castro. "We've been living with 'el blocado' for 40 years," a used-book vendor mused aloud. "What makes you guys think it's going to work now?"

We may not have much of an ideology to export to the rest of the world anymore, but we're still its only economic superpower. We possess the might to put the fiscal squeeze on smaller countries, and in keeping with Machiavelli's advice that power unused is power lost, we do it often. Whenever some unruly foreign leader with delusions of sovereignty gets out of hand, we slap the dude with economic sanctions.

Under the perverse logic of politics, free trade brings democracy to China, but a total absence of trade has the same result in Iraq. Of course, sanctions have never, ever worked as advertised. Saddam Hussein's poll ratings haven't slipped lately. Moammar Gadhafi seems to be getting along handsomely. Slobodan Milosevic hasn't lost much weight. Iranians still keep lighter fluid right next to their supply of American flags. And the Taliban hasn't eased up on stoning adulterers.

Sanctions do, however, often allow violent demagogues to take advantage of the siege mentality created by externally imposed economic hardship to lash out. (Machiavelli again: Never corner your enemy.) Japan bombed Pearl Harbor after a few years of an American naval blockade. Serbian paramilitaries went on an orgy of looting and killing in Kosovo. Libya blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over Scotland.

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Blockades, as has been noted often in the past, don't bug the privileged elites whose behavior offends the State Department, but destroy ordinary people struggling to get by in places where life was already hard to begin with. "My sister sells herself to buy medicine for her sick son because of el blocado," a middle-aged man told me in a shabby clothing shop in Havana. "Castro is stronger than ever. Do you really believe you are helping us?"

I explained my government's logic: Make the people miserable enough and they'll revolt. "That's what Marx said too," he laughed.

In oil-rich, U.N.-embargoed Iraq, an artificially created lack of medical supplies killed 10,295 people in November alone, according to Reuters. This includes 7,234 children under age 5, claimed by diarrhea, pneumonia, breathing problems and malnutrition. In November 1989, prior to the imposition of sanctions, only 258 children died of the same causes.

"Our sanctions are sowing seeds of hatred that will one day flower in acts of terrorism against us," Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan told the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Dec. 16. "When Arab terrorists murder Israeli children, we Americans are rightly filled with horror and disgust. But what do Arab peoples think of us when U.S. sanctions bring death to literally thousands of Iraqi children every month?"

Having traveled extensively in Muslim countries, I can answer that one: They think we're evil, or stupid, or both. Either way, it's only a matter of time before someone a little brighter than the World Trade Center bombers comes looking for payback.

Currently the United States is preventing food, medical supplies and other basic staples of life from entering Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, India, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan and Serbia. If you think about it, our political differences with most of these nations are ultimately so trivial that we ought to be engaging them in constructive dialogue rather than subjecting their populations to this passive genocide. But even in cases like Afghanistan, which is run by fundamentalist madmen who have deprived their entire female population of medical care, sanctions are as ineffective as they are immoral. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans will die this winter because the Taliban won't turn over Osama bin Laden to the United States, but those deaths won't get us any closer to our objective.

So as you stuff yourself silly this holiday season, please take a moment to remember the thousands of people all over the world who are starving to death or dying of perfectly curable diseases because our popularly elected government wanted to make some long-forgotten point. Pray for them, and pray for yourself, because their brothers and sisters are very, very pissed off.

(Ted Rall, a cartoonist and columnist for Universal Press Syndicate, will spend the next two weeks in Israel and Jordan.)