# Posted 9:27 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE MYSTERY DEEPENS: The WaPo reported on Monday that Saddam's food distribution program is a model of honesty, efficiency and non-partisanship. Yeah, right. This was a job for the web's number one debunkers, Spinsanity.

In response to my anguished cry, Spinsanity's Brendan Nyhan sent over a pair of very interesting links which suggest that there is a lot more to this story than the Post is letting on. First up is a link to a January 2001 CNN interview with Denis Halliday, the former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq.

According to Halliday, the sanctions have

"led to the deaths of possibly more than one million people in ten years. Now that is a tragedy. And that begins to meet some of the definitions of the United Nations Convention on Genocide."

That last word was not an accident. Halliday's observation was a direct response to the CNN moderator's demand that he justify his earlier description of the sanctions as genocide.

As far as Saddam's long term record is concerned, Halliday says this:

"Before the [Gulf] war, all Iraqi children were given breakfast and lunch in the school system. So, the fact is that we, the United Nations of the West, have demolished the human rights of the Iraqi children. There's no history of the Baath Party not meeting the basic human rights of Iraqi children. In summary, I think we have no basis to be suspicious of Baghdad’s approach to its own children."

Hmmm. When it comes to weapons of mass destruction, Halliday also has a somewhat unusual perspective. As he notes,

"According to some of the experts, including Scott Ritter, Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction capability today. Even Hans Blix...has said that he does not believe that Iraq has redeveloped weapons of mass destruction.

I believe that today we see a huge demonization of Iraq, an exaggeration of Iraq's threat "to the neighborhood" and a huge capacity for military aggression amongst the neighbors of Iraq. Today, in fact, it is Iraq that is disarmed and surrounded by countries, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which are heavily armed by Europe and North America. This is not a situation that encourages Baghdad to cooperate."

Folks, you can't make this stuff up. Anyway, getting back to the food program, Halliday comments that

"The Baath Party -- as led by President Saddam Hussein, of course -- handles the entire oil-for-food program. That means they do the contracting; they do the handling and processing of, for example, wheat into flour; and they handle distribution of these foodstuffs in the country. According to my current successor in Baghdad, who is an expert on the world food program, Baghdad does an extremely efficient job of food distribution."

Well, what did you expect him to say? Somehow, I sense that the WaPo shouldn't have trusted the current UN coordinator to provide an objective evaluation of the Iraqi program.

Moving on, we come to the second link sent over by Brendan, which takes you to an 1999 WaPo op-ed by Clinton NSC chief Sandy Berger. He pointed out that

"Currently, the United Nations allows Iraq to spend up to $5.2 billion in oil revenue every six months for humanitarian purposes. Saddam is so indifferent to the suffering of his people that he still refuses to make full use of this allowance. But the food supply in Iraq has grown, and soon will provide the average Iraqi with about 2,200 calories per day, which is at the top of the United Nations' recommended range.

Assuming Berger has the calorie figures right (and if you met the man, you'd know he's no stranger to calories), there shouldn't be anyone starving in Iraq. Yet two years after Berger published his op-ed, Halliday cited UNICEF data which recorded that "some 4-5,000 children are dying unnecessarily each month."

Is there any way to resolve this inconsistency? Perhaps. According to reader LK,

It's actually a common misconception that the main problem with the sanctions regime is malnutrition and starvation--which, though still a major problem, does not compare to the massive malnutrition and starvation that characterized the period before the oil-for-food program was initiated. The program, for all its faults, has helped. A lot. The current problem has to do with Iraq's inability to fix water treatment plants, electrical systems, and other kinds of infrastructure that we who live in developed nations take for granted. Without clean water and
quality health services, tens of thousands of Iraqis die from easily preventable illness every year.

LK also provides this comment from another former UN huminatarian coordinator, Hans von Sponeck, who said that

"What really continues to be a severe problem, with implications for health treatment, healthcare, for electricity and water supply, is [the blocking of] anything that has to do with chemicals, laboratory equipment, generators, chloride, any water purification inputs, communication equipment. For example, it took over a year to release ambulances because they were blocked since they contained, as they should – in America you don’t have an ambulance without communication equipment inside - but they had communication equipment and they were blocked. So the Iraqis did not have access to such an important thing as an ambulance. So it is a saga that is really unbelievable."

That's all I have to report right now. Send in more info if you have it. My spider-sense says that the story isn't over yet. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion