COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Can Political Gain Be Worth Such Suffering? : George Bush said he had no quarrel with ordinary Iraqis. So why are they dying?

So George Bush, on the edge of an election year, may deflect charges that he let Saddam Hussein off the hook, poor Iraqis--with whom the President once said he had no quarrel--face plague and starvation. The Bush-inspired embargo is denying them such basic necessities as disinfectant, gauze, penicillin and food.

The Bush people aren’t stupid. They know that pictures of starving Iraqi babies are bad PR. Over the past few weeks they have grudgingly acknowledged the suffering in Iraq, at the same time planting stories designed to show that if there is such suffering among the civilian population, there’s one man to whom all blame should be attached and his name isn’t George Bush.

It’s partially true. Saddam Hussein got his people into the war. George Bush is making sure they continue to pay the price.

The price is a horrible one, and for civilians it is worse than it was at the end of the bombing last February. It will be worse still with every month that passes unless the embargo is lifted. Earlier this month, Alex Rondos of Catholic Relief Services testified in Congress before the House Select Committee on Hunger. His organization has been running a relief program in Iraq since April. “Whatever the political intent of sanctions,” Rondos told the committee, “it is clear they have caused profound human suffering.”

In one province in the south, according to Catholic Relief, there are 2,000 cases of typhoid a day. In Baghdad, 15 million gallons of raw sewage pour into the Tigris River every hour. In one upper-middle-class district in Baghdad monitored by Catholic Relief, mortality among children under 1 year old has gone from 575 between January and September of 1990 to 1,147 in the same period this year. The situation is worse outside the capital.

These people are dying because the U.N. Security Council, prompted by the United States, continues to impose an embargo that, among other things, prevents Iraq from selling oil. So when the same Security Council authorizes food shipments to Iraq it knows very well that no country will export to Iraq without payment, and Iraq is broke because it can’t sell oil. To buy enough food to meet the present crisis, it needs, according to an estimate by a report of the U.N. Secretariat, $2.4 billion.

Even the Security Council offer made in August, and mainly designed to offset the unfortunate impression made by those babies, had starvation built into its terms. Iraq, said the Security Council, could sell $1.6 billion worth of oil. Net of stipulated deductions, this would have yielded $870 million worth of food, which was substantially less than the bare minimum requirements. On top of this, the stipulations on Iraqi sales are so exacting that potential purchasers shun the complications. Any revenue would take months to arrive, while Iraqis continue to starve.

So why have George Bush and his accomplices in the Security Council decided to inflict this profound suffering on innocent people?

The old rationale was that such misery would cause Iraqis to rise against Saddam Hussein. This ceased to be credible after Iraqis did rise up and Bush promptly betrayed the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south.

Embargo, so another rationale goes, is the only way to ensure that every bit of Hussein’s nuclear production line is discovered and destroyed. Since the U.N. inspectors are now in possession of crucial documentation, including lists of suppliers, this is really only another way of saying that so long as there is even a theoretical possibility that Saddam might try to build a nuclear bomb, all Iraqis must starve.

And here we come to the truth of the matter. Bush and his accomplices do want Iraqis to be short of spare parts to fix their farm and sewage machinery, to lack medicines, to starve. This is the condition of the Third World, from which Iraq raised itself up with its oil wealth. As Rondos told Congress, Iraq used to have the best system of medical care in the Middle East. Now it has marasmus, the disease children get when they suffer from acute protein deficiency. Iraq’s punishment is to be driven back, deep into the Third World.

“We must confront the moral question of whether prolonged human suffering should be inflicted on any people, through comprehensive sanctions,” Rondos concluded in his testimony, “because of the international unpopularity of a government which they did not necessarily choose.” Rondos later amplified this to me: “Iraqis face starvation and so governments must provide. The United States has given only a $4-million relief grant and the other allies are just as bad. There is a collective responsibility here that’s not being met and the people of Iraq are being punished.” More crudely, Iraqis face death so that, politically, George Bush may live.