Vanished Children

Believe that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying.
William Blake

It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!
Luke 17:1

In October 1999, in a ward of dying children, Denis Halliday, the recently resigned Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations said:

The very provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights are being set aside. We are waging a war, through the United Nations, on the children and people of Iraq, and with incredible results. We're targeting civilians...worse, we're targeting children. What is this all about? It's monstrous. The policy of economic sanctions is a sham, is destroying an entire society. Five thousand children die every month. I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide.

Halliday's successor in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck, another Assistant Secretary-General with more than thirty years service, also resigned in protest, as did Jutta Burghardt, the head of the World Food Programme.
Between 1991 and 1998, reported the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the infrastructure of the country intentionally crippled by bombing, 500,000 children under the age of five died as a result of chronic malnutrition, polluted water and lack of medical care. In 1999, seventy members of the US Congress appealed to President Clinton to lift the embargo and end what they called "infanticide masquerading as policy." They were missing the point. In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, had been asked: "We have heard that half a million children have died....is the price worth it?" Albright's reply was "...We think the price is worth it."

As of 2002, more than $5 billion worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN Sanctions Committee and pad for by Iraq, were blocked by the Bush administration, backed by the Blair government. They included items related to food, health, water and sanitation. Saddam Hussein was actually strengthened internally by the embargoes, ensuring direct state control over people's lives through their dependence on the state for survival. In the 1990s, on average, Iraq was hit by the US and Britain with bombs or missiles every three days since the 'ceasefire' that purportedly ended the first Gulf War in 1991. As UN documents show, targets included farming communities, fishing villages and other civilian targets.

The above mostly extracted from John Pilger's introduction to a more in-depth look by other reporters at the policies of 'infanticide' in Iraq even before the current adventure(which of course will have added enormously to our numbers),directly leading to deaths of 500,000 children under the ages of five. If we take the Jewish Holocaust and its figure of something like 6 millions as some kind of template for genocide, then, if we were to abstract this half a million of very young children, the percentages compare very 'favourably'. I suppose, if we were feeling a little poetic, we could imagine a city of some half a million inhabitants- a very respectable metropolis- and all these inhabitants under five years of age- a curious place I admit- and then start cutting off their water supply, starving them, occasionally- though not so 'occasionally'- administering a dose of bombing, prevent some misguided sympathisers from getting aid through...

Who are the kind of people behind these actions, and why are Britain and the US always intimately entangled with each other? One earlier look at how the US appears to be the transmuted on-flow of the British Empire, and the essence of their 'conservatism' here.