politics: British MP speaks out on sanctions against Iraq
Mohamad El Masri, Peak Staff

The longer the United States' sanctions against Iraq continue, the number of critics weary of their ineffectiveness at removing Saddam Hussein from power grows. Foreign policy ventures by the United States and their Western allies will only serve to further swell the bulge of "hatred and bitterness" towards them in the Islamic and Arab world.

That was the theme last Tuesday at a lecture in the AQ given by George Galloway, a British member of parliament from Scotland and the senior vice chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party Foreign Affairs Committee. Galloway, an active and outspoken critic of the sanctions against Iraq and Western foreign policy overall, spoke to his audience about the realities and consequences of the double standards practised by the U.S. and U.K. around the world.

The lecture by Galloway, sponsored by the Campaign to End Sanctions Against the People of Iraq, addressed the nature and consequences of an 11-year-old sanctions regime placed on Iraq for its role in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Galloway, however, sought to put an old conflict into the context of the current U.S.-led international "war on terrorism," which claims to seek and root out the enemies of peace and freedom.

"The issues of Iraq and the war on terrorism are very definitely linked," said Galloway. "Both feed the problem, an Anglo-Saxon problem, a clash between East and West, the West and Islam. Which underway, is highly dangerous and likely to get more dangerous still."

The U.S. has tried to justify its new war through their claims to "infinite justice" and "enduring freedom," two names already used to identify the international operations being carried out by the U.S. and its coalition members. Galloway, in the context of what he believes are Western double standards and hypocrisy, sought to illustrate this point with reference to the treatment of the Al-Qaeda prisoners currently being transferred to Cuba for incarceration.

"In the name of justice and freedom, we are seeing prisoners in chains with hoods over their faces," said Galloway, who upon reflection became highly emotional. "Some of them with drugs administered against their will, coursing through their veins, shackled into a plane for a 28-hour journey, having to relieve themselves where they sat in their clothes."

Galloway also sought to dispel any myths North Americans and Britons, who he referred to as the "gallery of criminals," may have about the living conditions the prisoners will endure while encamped at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a country that Galloway says "the U.S. has maintained a 40-year terrorist campaign against since the 1960s."

"The prisoners have been put into wire cages open to the elements," he said. "[U.S. Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfield openly announced prisoners will not be treated according to the Geneva Conventions, which means they will be treated less well than British and Canadian prisoners were treated by the army of Adolf Hitler in the Second World War."

Galloway maintains that statistics show that as a result of U.S. sanctions, every six minutes an Iraqi child dies under the embargo, amounting to about 6,000 per month.

"6,000 dead is strangely symmetrical to the initial toll of the WTC collapse in New York," he said, " which was enough to shake the globe. Now the toll is 3,000 and falling. So double the number of the toll in the twin towers of Iraqi children every month for 11 years has taken place virtually without notice."

George Galloway is a British MP who speaks out harshly against U.K. foreign policy on Iraq. He has carried out several unique actions to bring worldwide public attention to the toll sanctions are taking on the people of Iraq. About two years ago Galloway, with a few colleagues, drove a red double-decker bus from Big Ben to Baghdad, stopping for speaking engagements in 11 countries en route. About a year later, he challenged the flight embargo on Iraq by commissioning a plane to fly from England to Baghdad - the only peaceful plane to fly to Iraq from England since sanctions were imposed. This made daily newspapers in many countries around the world. George is also founder of the "Mariam Appeal", an organisation that seeks to illegally provide medicine for children in Iraq. Galloway resides in the U.K. with his Palestinian wife and their two children.

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