In an interview in Boulder Weekly, dated Feb. 10, 2005, Pamela White talks to Ward Churchill about his positions on global geopolitics, the terrorist attacks on 9-11, and the U.S. responsibility in the matter. He almost sounds reasonable at times, until you realize that these positions are colored by a myopic worldview, looking through a haze of mistaken assumptions and pre-existing anti-American and anti-capitalist politics.
He states a firm belief that the U.S. had earned the attacks because of the harm our policies had done to so many of the world's downtrodden.
BW: My first thought when I saw what had happened was, "Somebody is going to get their ass kicked."
WC: Well, it occurred to me at the time that somebody was finally kicking U.S. ass for the way the U.S. had been comporting itself. Rather than, "Why do they hate us?" my initial response was, "How could they not?" And as to who was doing it, the problem is how many contenders there are out there. (my emphasis)Well, it was about that time - it was the early afternoon - I got a call from the woman who was the editor of Dark Night Field Notes... She said, "We need a from-the-gut response on this, and we need it in time to post it tomorrow."
Dark Night Field Notes, by the way, is from the far-left of the political spectrum. So of course they would call him for a gut reaction, looking for a notable quote from a "distinguished" academic that agreed with their take.
He goes on to blame the attacks on the sanctions on Iraq after the first Gulf War, and the death of 500,000 Iraqi children.
BW: So the essay started as a "from-the-gut" response. What were your thoughts going into it?
WC: This was absurd what was being said. No one's calling [the reporters] on it for describing it as senseless. You've got a little contradiction in packaging here going on between the official news sources who are proclaiming it senseless and then the more official officials - the official officials - who are proclaiming it things like, "They did it because they hate our freedom," and other really profound and insightful things of that sort. It can't both be senseless and for a reason at the same time.
I don't think I was the only one with a different response from the mainstream. It just happens to be the way I framed it. Where that begins is borrowing from Malcolm X's thing about the chickens coming home to roost.
The essay "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" was written on Sept. 11 and then posted to the Internet that night. Churchill started with Malcolm X's famous quote, likened the roosting chickens to returning ghosts and asked who those ghosts might be.
Well, I see a half-million dead Iraqi children for starters, children that Madeline Albright confirmed she was aware of. This was UN data [on the impact of U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq] in 1996 when she went on 60 Minutes and said, "Yeah, we're aware of it, and we've determined that it's worth the price."
It's worth the price of somebody else's children to compel their government to do what George Bush had issued as the marching orders to the planet in 1991, which is: "The world has to understand that what we say goes."
What we say goes - that's freedom. Do what you're told. And if you don't, basically the way this works out is we'll starve your children to death.
A communiqué from al-Qaeda, in which the relatively unknown group claimed responsibility for the attacks, would later confirm that the plight of Iraqi children was primary on the terrorists' list of grievances against the United States.
This exaggeration, which is in part the basis of his belief in the justice of the attacks, was exposed in a March 2002 piece in Reason Magazine by Matt Welch.
Origins of a Whopper
The idea that sanctions in Iraq have killed half a million children (or 1 million, or 1.5 million, depending on the hysteria of the source) took root in 1995 and 1996, on the basis of two transparently flawed studies, one inexplicable doubling of the studies’ statistics, and a non-denial on 60 Minutes.
In August 1995, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) gave officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Health a questionnaire on child mortality and asked them to conduct a survey in the capital city of Baghdad. (my emphasis) On the basis of this five-day, 693-household, Iraq-controlled study, the FAO announced in November that "child mortality had increased nearly five fold" since the pre-sanctions era. As embargo critic Richard Garfield, a public health specialist at Columbia University, wrote in his own comprehensive 1999 survey of under-5 deaths in Iraq, "The 1995 study’s conclusions were subsequently withdrawn by the authors....Notwithstanding the retraction of the original data, their estimate of more than 500,000 excess child deaths due to the embargo is still often repeated by sanctions critics."
In March 1996, the World Health Organization (WHO) published its own report on the humanitarian crisis. It reprinted figures -- provided solely by the Iraqi Ministry of Health -- showing that a total of 186,000 children under the age of 5 died between 1990 and 1994 in the 15 Saddam-governed provinces. (my emphasis) According to these government figures, the number of deaths jumped nearly 500 percent, from 8,903 in 1990 to 52,905 in 1994.
Somehow, based largely on these two reports -- a five-day study in Baghdad showing a "five fold" increase in child deaths and a Ministry of Health claim that a total of 186,000 children under 5 had died from all causes between 1990 and 1994 -- a New York-based advocacy group called the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) concluded in a May 1996 survey that "these mortality rates translate into a figure of over half a million excess child deaths as a result of sanctions."
So the CESR took the numbers, doubled them and claimed a half a million excess child deaths from sanctions. The reasons to doubt these original figures are numerous:
- These figures were provided solely by officials in Saddam's government, without verification. He, obviously, wanted the sanctions dropped. He also obviously didn't want to do what was actually necessary to get them dropped - comply with the sanctions.
- There has not been, to my knowledge, any information recovered since the fall of Saddam that verifies the numbers.
- What has been found have been the mass graves of those murdered by Saddam's regime. Are these included in the data provided by Iraq?
And so on. And, as Welch points out, Albright's comment was ill-considered, another demonstration of why she was such a weak Secretary of State. It was made during a 60 minutes "gotcha" piece by Lesley Stahl. Welch does point out that UNICEF published in 1999 results of studies which suggested similar numbers only if the worst assumptions are made. The study also pointedly did not isolate blame to the sanctions. However, although UNICEF's data is based on "interviews with 40,000 families", given the nature of the dictatorship it's not clear how the interviews were conducted. There is a large discrepancy even within the borders of Iraq:
Significantly, UNICEF found child mortality actually decreased in the autonomous north (from 80.2 per 1,000 in 1984-89 to 70.8 in 1994-98) while more than doubling in the south (from 56 per 1,000 to 130.6). This is Exhibit A for those who, like The New Republic, argue that Saddam alone is responsible for Iraq’s humanitarian crisis.
Unfortunately, the link to the original UNICEF report no longer works, and as a result I'm unable to verify just how the data were collected. The UNICEF 2000 report on Iraq is here. I've glanced over it, and it's still not clear how the data were amassed - methods of collection were not presented. Some seems to have been provided, again, by the Iraqi Ministry of Health.
In any event, while I'd be willing to concede that sanctions affected the well-being of the Iraqi people and likely resulted in increased child mortality, though not to the degree reported, the original source of the problem would rightly be Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, and subsequent refusal to reform his regime after the 1991 defeat, wouldn't it? And wouldn't Saddam's building of 48 presidential palaces during this time have used money that could otherwise have provided for the people? And aren't these U.N. sanctions, and not just U.S.?
Churchill continues:
BW: Why do people focus on the issue of your Indian heritage?
WC: Everybody knows that this was all Indian land. Everybody knows in some general sense what happened to Indians... The very existence of Indians is a reminder of the theft of a continent and genocide... The problem is that anyone who is identified as or identifies as Indian stands in a position to put that back in people's faces. They've got to destroy it. There's a certain resonance to it by an Indian saying it, as opposed to someone else saying it... They have to invalidate you and make it go away. (my emphasis)
So you don't have to be identified as an Indian to have validity. You simply need to identify yourself as Indian, whether warranted or not, and that gives you the moral authority.
Clearly Mr. Churchill would rather the U.S. simply give in to all international demands, even from rogue regimes like Saddam's, and distribute all wealth to those oppressed by their own government. The plight of all in pain in the world is our fault, for not providing for them in spite of the actions of their own government. Blame America first, and in his case, blame only America.
