Editorials
Lesser evils War fever waxes and wanes in the Middle East. For the moment there is less talk of a quick fantasy war with its surgical strikes against Iraq's military installations and the deft...
...It occupied thirty-four column inches of space...
...But in any case, the questions are real ones...
...Under Saddam Hussein's rules of war, food and medicine exempted from the embargo without supervision are not likely to wind up succoring noncombatants, but nourishing the Iraqi military...
...These figures are cited in a New York Times story (September 4) on a United Nations conference taking place in Paris at which efforts were made to set new guidelines for foreign aid from the industrialized nations to the LDCs...
...And at this burning moment, it is imperative to hasten the flight of those still trapped in no-one's land...
...The processional has begun to wend its way down the aisle, trailing clouds of incense as the altar server passes by...in the soaring space beneath the great Gothic arches....Finally Cardinal O'Connor himself appears, resplendent in cream-colored vestments embroidered with gold...
...This time they poured into the lethal Iraqi and Jordanian deserts, like water into the sand...
...The United Nations Security Council has acted prudently in providing for humanitarian exceptions to the food embargo but only in genuinely extreme cases, under its own monitoring, and by means of international agencies like the Red Cross...
...For the moment there is less talk of a quick fantasy war with its surgical strikes against Iraq's military installations and the deft "taking out" of Saddam Hussein...
...some Scandinavian countries, 0.20 percent...
...If there is to be a new era of worldwide cooperation to counter international violence and piracy, the world's governments will have to anticipate the needs of those like these "hostages of the desert," displaced by such international crises...
...That leaves the UN trade embargo and economic sanctions against Iraq as the primary alternatives to a shooting war, although they, too, have provoked second thoughts...
...Those second thoughts have been focused, above all, on the matter of exempting food and medicine from the embargo...
...In fact, the current aid level averages .09 percent...
...average per capita annual income is $227...
...Unlike Tariq Aziz, Iraq's foreign minister (speaking in an interview with Charlene Hunter-Gault on PBS), we do not reject the distinction between combatants and civilians as morally insignificant...
...Even though vast amounts of equipment and soldiers were efficiently transported into the region, transport for those displaced was scarce...
...That in itself would say a great deal to Saddam Hussein about the world's new cooperation and its resolve...
...the mass of Egyptian workers in Iraq and Kuwait return roughly $2 billion a year to Cairo...
...OUT OF THE FIRE We were all surprised...
...They must not be pondered, however, in some totally abstract fashion removed from the real world of the Gulf conflict and of what is at stake...
...Here is how she sets a didactic scene in her August autopsy of New York's archbishop, Cardinal John O'Connor ("God's Man in New York...
...Alexander's runs twelve stores.der's runs twelve stores...
...food stockpiles are estimated to be good for some months...
...But let us be clear: a food embargo is not tantamount to a strategy of starvation...
...3.2 million Afghans in Pakistan...
...half a million Salvadorans gone north...
...Experienced in displacement, but not armed invasions...
...On the other hand, we are not so blind as to imagine that any use of economic sanctions rather than armed force can leave civilians entirely unspared...
...The U.S...
...Gregory Lobo, a thirty-two-year-old Indian who had lived for thirteen years in Kuwait, put it plainly: "If the planes of George Bush are coming, all the people here will not forget...
...If the Iraqi government blocks that provision, or diverts the food to the military, as Aziz suggested, the moral onus falls on Hussein's head...
...Eternal truth be told, fretting so extravagantly over the power of Catholic prelates seems even more anachronistic than the incense in their cathedrals or the scarlet upholstery in their parlors...
...Such implicitly anachronistic piety is juxtaposed to O'Connor's purchase of a new sound system for the cathedral and to his headline grabbing Sunday press conferences (recently discontinued), felicitously referred to as a "real gang bang" by one anonymous reporter...
...It is past time the world community overhauled international refugee services...
...Other objections have been more measured (see Bryan Hehir's column, page 536...
...It is time to begin anticipating the inevitable displacements resulting from regional wars...
...Touring the area, Jordan's Prince Hassan confirmed the images: "As the downtrodden, the plight of these persons...
...On average, life expectancy in these countries is forty-nine...
...We are obliged to make provision for that eventuality, as the UN has done...
...In the meantime, the United Nations ought to consider exceptions permitting passage of foodstuffs or medical supplies of little interest to the military...
...And in applying economic pressure to the broad population, the burden of suffering will fall first and heaviest on the young, the old, the sick and vulnerable...
...gives .04 percent...
...Whichever way you approach it, it smells...
...In this case, home governments did not quickly respond...
...Unlike oil or peace, the world is awash in human refugees...
...Their families and governments had looked to them and their wages from abroad as sources of bread, and even chocolate...
...Patrick's Cathedral...
...Comparable figures for the developed world are seventy-three and $15,610...
...Indeed, during eight years of war with Iran, Hussein showed an unrelenting callousness not only to the enemy, but to his own people and even to his soldiers and officers...
...You know the ritual...
...Before the perverse obstinacy of the church's presence in the world's most sophisticated city, she and her sources, many of them Catholic, mumble the sacred words of exorcism: "dogmatic," "unyielding," "authoritarian," "fanatic," "religious zealot," "homophobe...
...Roughly 15 million, in every corner of the earth: 800,000 Mozambicans in Malawi...
...So deep and low it seems to be emanating from the bowels of the earth itself, the basso profundo rumble of the massive organ resonates throughout St...
...To carry a food embargo past the draining of stockpiles, rationing, belt-tightening, and severe deprivation to the point of mass starvation is another matter, and merely to spell out the distinction underlines how miserable a business it is to engage at all in calculations about degrees of suffering...
...has evoked only the faintest of responses from the world community...
...Indeed, her piece often reads like the inventory of a suspicious IRS agent...
...Even as the Security Council was debating the inclusion of food in the embargo, Hussein was using food as a weapon, withholding ration cards from citizens of India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines-countries that have had virtually nothing to do with the conflict...
...civilian and military transports to evacuate refugees even as the numbers kept rising...
...ET CETERA VANITIES OF VANITY Let it not be said that Leslie Bennetts of Vanity Fair magazine takes a backseat to Jimmy S waggart when it comes to depicting the lurid allure and unholy scandal of that superstition known as Catholicism...
...In the 1980s, economic growth in the poorest countries averaged 2.3 percent...
...At the first such conference, held in 1981, the affluent countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.15 [fifteen one-hundredths of one] percent of their gross national product...
...The Bush administration refused to use U.S...
...They have a total population of 400 million, or 8 percent of the world's, though one in seven children dies before the age of two...
...Hundreds of thousands of instant Bedouins, economic refugees-some, several times over-from most of the poorer Arab countries and much of South Asia...
...populations grew 2.6 percent, so that per capita income fell by 0.9 [nine-tenths of one] percent...
...Iraq was food self-sufficient until Saddam Hussein diverted resources to his military machine in the war with Iran...
...Infant formula, for example, could mitigate damage to the most vulnerable and signal that the world's quarrel is not with the citizens of Iraq-however unfortunate their support of a cruel and self-destructive regime-but with Saddam Hussein...
...The whole reading experience is embroidered with glossy ads for clothes, booze, cars, and cigarettes while the magazine itself is sanctified by that modern joss stick, Eternity For Men by Calvin Klein...
...They constitute the lesser of two evils...
...400,000 Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Burmese in Thailand...
...The Times article appeared at the bottom of the first business page, page 53 of that day's paper...
...But this is an old and feeble canard: Catholicism's hypocrisy is as obvious as the polish on the chalice, didn't you know...
...Japan, .07 percent...
...Bennetts's intellectual argument is equally sophisticated...
...Wasn't that always the point made by opponents of sanctions against South Africa about the black victims of a stagnant economy...
...Next to it ran a fifty-two-inch story about a new corporate strategy being considered by Alexander's, a department store chain in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey...
...Finally, by the inevitable but inevitably unanticipated: the flood of human refugees...
...Each Bengali expatriate supports eleven people at home...
...nor did those nations that had called for a unified UN action...
...If we go home, we don't forget George Bush or American people, never...
...Before the UN acted, a number of voices were raised rejecting the food embargo as immoral, and they will be raised again not only in objection to the UN plan but in debating specifics of its application...
...First by the invasion's speed, then by the immediate casualties and the rush to take Western hostages...
...Those who fled to the Jordanian border found not an oasis but a hellish limbo created by unresponsive governments, UN ineptitude, and rivalry among helper agencies...
...And once there, they waited in no-one's land, seized by the desert itself and ensnared by international protocols...
...O'Connor's "imperial" residence could be the hideaway of a brigand: "jewel-toned Oriental rugs, scarlet upholstery...ornate gold-framed portraits., .amethyst Venetian-glass goblets thickly encrusted with elaborate ornamentation...rococo wood paneling...
...Anything less, however, is an abdication of moral seriousness, at least for those who genuinely believe that Hussein is an economic and military threat to millions and who genuinely want the embargo and the sanctions to prove an effective alternative to a shooting war...
...Stones do not fall into a pool without the waters being moved...
...France, about 0.15 per cent...
...This journalistic mugging is part of a regal procession of Vanity Fair's own, where readers wend their way past those Hollywood prelates Marlon Brando and Harrison Ford and a smattering of less resplendently remunerated altar servers...
...Bennetts casts an especially polemical eye on the cardinal's incriminating worldly surroundings...
...then by the rocketing price of crude followed by the falling markets...
...BOTTOM LINE NUMBERS By United Nations criteria, there are forty-one nations in the world qualifying as "least developed countries" (LDCs...
...Calculations of a real war have brought sobering second thoughts-about the unpredictable consequences of chemical weaponry, the likelihood of civilian deaths, and the destruction of Kuwaiti, Iraqi, and Saudi oil-producing capacities...
Vol. 117 • September 1990 • No. 16
