By Jo Wilding
July 18th

So the Butler Report came out. This, for the benefit of those who may have missed it, is the report of the committee convened to decide whether the Prime Minister, the intelligence services, the Joint Intelligence Committee or anyone else lied about the evidence relating to Iraq’s alleged weapons which were, in case anyone forgot, the alleged reason for the all-too-real bombardment and invasion of Iraq.

Not too complex a brief, one might suggest. Still, to make sure that only the finest minds were applied to the task, Tony Blair himself handpicked the committee. I’m sure that, as with the Hutton Report on whether the government, the BBC, the deceased’s immediate superiors, the tooth fairy or anyone else bore any responsibility for the death of weapons expert David Kelly, someone will send me an explanation of who Lord Butler is and how close and cosy are his ties to the Prime Minister.

By Joy Gordon
Middle East Report

Joy Gordon, author of numerous articles about sanctions on Iraq, teaches at Fairfield University.

Rep. Ralph Hall opened a set of Congressional hearings on July 8 with a dramatic flourish, denouncing “the deaths of thousands of Iraqis through malnutrition and lack of appropriate medical supplies.” “We have a name for that in the United States,” the Texas Republican told a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “It’s called murder.”

The target of Hall’s accusation was not the UN economic sanctions that, according to a 1999 UNICEF study, had helped to double the rate of mortality among children under five in central and southern Iraq over the preceding decade. Rather, the Congressman was introducing yet more hearings to air broad allegations of incompetence, manipulation and personal corruption in the so-called Oil for Food program established by the UN Security Council in 1995 to ameliorate the humanitarian emergency in Iraq. According to these allegations, UN mismanagement allowed Saddam Hussein to pocket billions of dollars in oil sales at the expense of the Iraqi people. Benon Sevan, former head of the Office of Iraq Program, which housed the now dissolved Oil for Food program, has been named as one UN official who purportedly took what amount to bribes to look the other way.