Chicago Symposium Considers Gulf War and Its Aftermath

by Raeshma Razvi

As someone once said, Truth is the first casualty of war. Five years after the Gulf war, discussions of its causes, not to mention its tragic effects, still proceed on widely varying assumptions.

The small urban campus of North Park College in Chicago was the site of one such recent Gulf war symposium on March 2, commemorating the fifth anniversary of the cease-fire.

Co-sponsored by the College’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the American Friends Service Committee, the all-day program attempted to reconcile the U.S.-led coalition’s proclaimed mission going into the conflict with the war’s disastrous aftermath for Iraqi citizens.

This dichotomous view of the conflict was evident in the staging of the conference, particularly in the first keynote session, a debate between two political science professors.

Dr. Larry Adams, professor of politics and government at North Park, began the session with an examination of post-Cold War global politics. He spoke of “standards of international relations” and the increasing “internationalization” of economies, resources and political maneuvers. The end of the Cold War gave us, said Adams, “an environment in which to test old principles—of collective security, non-aggression, territorial sovereignty—and beyond that to see what new principles to now apply.” As a result, the present is “very fluid; it’s hard to make cut-and-dried judgments about any particular situation.”

Shaping his general thesis into one applicable to the origins of the Gulf war, Adams stated that the U.S. ultimately was guided by principles and fulfilled a “just” mission in the Gulf by coming to the aid of a small imperiled country, restoring the status quo, and working in coalition with other world powers.

If any new global principle emerged from the Gulf war, it was that “any use of force from now on will be collective.” By stressing the global context and the complexity of available political options, Adams emphasized that the war can’t be looked at “as a good or bad thing without looking at these other issues.”

Dr. Ghada Talhami, who teaches political science at Lake Forest College, examined from a Middle East perspective some of the “other issues” that call into question the U.S.-led coalition’s war against Iraq.

She reacted strongly against Dr. Adams’ statements that the U.S. simply rode a wave of national and international support. The war, she said, was “well-managed,” with U.S. control of the media “worthy of a totalitarian state.”

She posed two questions: 1) Was there justification for the initial Iraqi actions? and 2) Are American interests better served now after the war? Yes and no, respectively, were her short answers. Following through with a Middle East-centered analysis of the tensions and loyalties of the region, she maintained that: “Third World politics are different than First World [politics].”

Part of the genesis of the conflict over Kuwait was the result of the Iraq-Iran war, Talhami said. “Iraq fought Iran to keep the Gulf Arab with Saudi and Kuwaiti money. Afterward, Kuwait asked for its money back, but Iraq said, ‘We paid in our own blood,’” Talhami said.

Dr. Talhami invoked Arab nationalism as “simply a self-protective principle” that should have been the proper framework for dealing with the Gulf conflict. The Arab League should have acted effectively, “to defend the integrity of the area, not to defend Saddam.” But before this was possible, U.S. troops already were on the way.

The symposium’s later speakers all chose to shade in the details of a “two wrongs don’t make a right” scenario: Iraq’s invasion, coupled with the U.S.-led war and sanctions, have left Iraqi society devastated with human suffering.

Implicit in these talks was the idea that the U.N. sanctions against Iraq are not an after-effect of the war but a continuation of it. The figures reported are startling, and echo the report by Mary C. Smith Fawzi and Sarah Zaidi in the January 1996 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Dr. Louise Cainkar, recently in Jordan on a Fulbright grant, pointed to black and white photographs of Iraqis on the walls around her as she rattled off a barrage of horrifying statistics:

567,000 Iraqi children have died due to sanctions since 1991;
30 percent of Iraqi children under five years of age are malnourished;
70 percent of pregnant women in Iraq are anemic;
Stunting of children has doubled in Baghdad, giving it a rate comparable to that of Zaire or Sri Lanka.

Given that 40 percent of Iraq’s total population is under 14 years of age, the physical and psychological effects on an entire generation are incalculable. Some of these statistics mean that Iraqis, who once enjoyed a relatively high standard of living, have been “rendered into the worst of the Third World categories,” said Cainkar.

Oddly enough, she continued, the amassed statistics and reports come from the humanitarian wing of the U.N.the same body whose Security Council imposes the economic sanctions. These sanctions, Cainkar stated, “are akin to an occupation. We have no standards by which to protect the Iraqi people.”

Moreover this state of affairs in Iraq has “broken down the society’s moral fiber.” Cainkar said that street crime, previously unheard of, now is skyrocketing. It’s unsafe to walk anywhere at night. There also are reports of increased prostitution, of “families reduced to selling daughters” just to survive.

Other speakers included: Kevin Martin of Illinois Peace Action, speaking about U.S. military sales abroad and the post-Gulf war arms-buying spree that has engulfed the Gulf with guns and debt; Ray Parrish of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, chronicling the effects of modern warfare on veterans; Ben Daniel of Assyrian Guardian newspaper, describing the “double standards” against minorities such as Assyrians and Kurds who suffer from Iraqi government restrictions as well as those affecting the whole country; Jennifer Bing-Canar of American Friends Service, who described the activist’s plight with the U.S. media during the war; Siham Rashid of the Arab-American Community Center, who noted the rise in Arab bashing in the U.S. during the war; Kathy Kelley of Christian Peacemaker Teams, supporting the delivery of medical supplies and goods to Iraq; and Dr. Jim Jennings of Illinois-Chicago Medical Center, who said the dire medical and social needs of the country make Iraq a “Rwanda in slow motion.”