this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad

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They're just so wonderfully full of "The ends justify the means" aren't they? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Who cares about all the people he'll hurt along the way amiright? ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Casualties for the entirety of the 'War On Terror', including seriously wounded (and including part of the period, likewise, 'beyond the 20 year cutoff'), usually hover around 1.5 million.

4.5–4.6 million+ people killed[note 3][a] (937,000+ direct deaths including 387,000+ civilians, 3.6–3.7 million indirect deaths)[note 4][b] At least 38 million people displaced[c] -Wikipedia

If it wasn't for America, Iraq would've been enjoying the full fruits of international cooperation just like it did before.

Absolutely not, but the sanctions were excessively brutal considering that "The original stated purposes of the sanctions were to compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, to pay reparations, and to disclose and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction (WMD)".

The only mention in the article of hunger as a goal comes from the US ("Those in the U.S. who supported sanctions believed that low agricultural production in Iraq (coupled with sanctions) would lead to "a hungry population", and "a hungry population was an unruly one"), who is also the Western country that cares the most about the Middle East in the first place. Now that I think about it "solely due to US diplomatic and economic clout" was an exaggeration, but America still bears a lot of responsibility for the humanitarian effects of these sanctions.

How the fuck so? By your own admission, it was over in three weeks. If Europe had completely embargo'd the US, it still wouldn't have changed opinions inside of three weeks.

Public opinion wouldn't have needed to change, because just the threat of sanctions would've been enough to prevent Bush from lying to start the war in the first place.

First you're in support of sanctions on aggressive hypermilitarized genocidal states, now in opposition because of the human cost of sanctions.

I support sanctions only to the extent they can achieve the desired effect without causing large amounts of harm to unrelated people. The Iraq sanctions had multiple UN officials resigning specifically because they weren't that. There was no need to kill half a million children to prevent Iraq from rearming itself. This isn't exactly a controversial position.

In a 2015 article in the journal International Affairs, Francesco Giumelli noted that the UNSC had largely abandoned comprehensive sanctions in favor of targeted sanctions since the mid-1990s, with the controversy over the efficacy and civilian harms attributed to the Iraq sanctions playing a significant role in the change:

Fucking lol.

I mean he literally backed down today (or was it yesterday in America?), so clearly he's not unafraid of the economic effects of his policies. Or this is all just a front for insider trading. Probably the latter.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Casualties for the entirety of the ‘War On Terror’, including seriously wounded (and including part of the period, likewise, ‘beyond the 20 year cutoff’), usually hover around 1.5 million.

Your own fucking source:

937,000+ direct deaths including 387,000+ civilians,

Would you like to remind me what 937,000 is lower than? Perhaps a number like... 1.5 million?

As I said, if you want to discuss indirect deaths, that's going to lead to significantly increased numbers for Russia as well.

Absolutely not, but the sanctions were excessively brutal considering that “The original stated purposes of the sanctions were to compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, to pay reparations, and to disclose and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction (WMD)”.

Again, from your own fucking cited source:

There is a general consensus that the sanctions achieved the express goals of limiting Iraqi arms. For example, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith says that the sanctions diminished Iraq militarily.[25] According to scholars George A. Lopez and David Cortright: "Sanctions compelled Iraq to accept inspections and monitoring and won concessions from Baghdad on political issues such as the border dispute with Kuwait. They also drastically reduced the revenue available to Saddam, prevented the rebuilding of Iraqi defenses after the Persian Gulf War, and blocked the import of vital materials and technologies for producing WMD."[26][27][28] Saddam told his Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) interrogator[29] that Iraq's armaments "had been eliminated by the UN sanctions."[30]

Some commentators blame Saddam Hussein for the excess deaths reported during this period. For example, Rubin argued that the Kurdish and the Iraqi governments handled OFFP aid differently, and that therefore the Iraqi government policy, rather than the sanctions themselves, should be held responsible for any negative effects.[58][59] Likewise, Cortright claimed: "The tens of thousands of excess deaths in the south-center, compared to the similarly sanctioned but UN-administered north, are the result of Baghdad's failure to accept and properly manage the UN humanitarian relief effort."[27] In the run-up to the Iraq War, some[60] disputed the idea that excess mortality exceeded 500,000, because the Iraqi government had interfered with objective collection of statistics (independent experts were barred).[61]

The Iraq Inquiry led by Sir John Chilcot examined a February 2003 statement by then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair that "today, 135 out of every 1,000 Iraqi children die before the age of five". The inquiry found that the figure in question was provided to Blair by Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) based on the 1999 ICMMS study, but an internal caveat from the FCO and the Department for International Development (DFID) to the effect that the ICMMS was of questionable reliability because it had been "conducted with the Iraqi regime's 'help' and relied on some Iraqi figures" was not communicated to Blair by a 10 Downing Street official. The inquiry noted "The level of child mortality in Iraq estimated by the ICMMS was significantly higher than that estimated by later surveys," citing "estimates that the under‑five mortality rate in Iraq was 55 per 1,000 in 1989, 46 per 1,000 in 1999, 42 per 1,000 in 2003, and 37 per 1,000 in 2010 (when Mr Blair gave his evidence to the Inquiry)."[73]

I support sanctions only to the extent they can achieve the desired effect without causing large amounts of harm to unrelated people. The Iraq sanctions had multiple UN officials resigning specifically because they weren’t that. There was no need to kill half a million children to prevent Iraq from rearming itself. This isn’t exactly a controversial position.

Clearly it is, as your own fucking source notes that it's controversial, both in terms of child mortality and in terms of efficacy.

I mean he literally backed down today (or was it yesterday in America?), so clearly he’s not unafraid of the economic effects of his policies. Or this is all just a front for insider trading. Probably the latter.

The latter. If Trump was 'afraid' of the economic effects of his policies, the entire tariff conversation would look nothing like... well, what it does.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago

As I said, if you want to discuss indirect deaths, that's going to lead to significantly increased numbers for Russia as well.

By how much?

Clearly it is, as your own fucking source notes that it's controversial, both in terms of child mortality and in terms of efficacy.

Wait what? Nobody's arguing that they weren't effective, but that they were too much. Also while there's controversy about the scale of child mortality specifically, there's none about the idea that widespread civilian harm was caused. I mean more than half the country lost access to clean drinking water because of that shit.

In 1993, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that the sanctions "have virtually paralyzed the whole economy and generated persistent deprivation, chronic hunger, endemic undernutrition, massive unemployment and widespread human suffering."

Also again, the UNSC mostly doesn't do general sanctions anymore specifically because the Iraq sanctions were such a shitshow. If they were only controversial you'd see more like them, but you don't because they were too much for what they were ostensibly trying to do.