39
Revolution was not foreseeable in 1916; in fact, the Russians had just finished giving Austria and Germany a
vicious beating on the Eastern front. It was at least as likely that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be rent
asunder by national revolutions as Russia would fall victim to a class-based revolution. These historical
counterfactuals aside, German leaders simply felt they could not stand aside and do nothing while their
country went down to defeat.
CONCLUSION
Civilian victimization in warfare, it turns out, is not the sole province of autocratic regimes. Rather, it is a
function of leaders’ perceptions of the costs of war. As the price of achieving their ever more ambitious war
aims increased, both the British and German governments took aim at enemy civilians as a way to shorten the
war and win at reduced cost.
207
The British blockade was the more successful of the two in the sense that it
inflicted greater suffering on the German population than did the U-boats, and probably contributed to
Germany’s collapse in 1918. The American entry into the war sealed Germany’s doom, in more ways than
one: not only did American troops eventually help turn the tide on the Western front, but the US abandoned
its championing of neutral rights and vigorously closed up the blockade. Public opinion in liberal
democracies poses no obstacle to killing enemy civilians if doing so promises to shorten the war and reduce
their own side’s casualties, but nor does it force democratic leaders to target noncombatants.
In today’s world, actual naval blockades are relatively rare,
208
but instead take the form of economic
sanctions. The most controversial of these operations was easily the sanctions on Iraq, in place from after
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 until his overthrow by American forces in the spring of
2003. The fact that malnutrition and poor sanitation led to many “excess” deaths in Iraq during the 1990s is
not in dispute.
209
What is disputed is the number of those deaths and the relative responsibility of Saddam
Hussein versus the international community. Careful studies conducted by health care professionals
suggested a total of about 228,000 excess deaths through the first quarter of 1998 and between 344,000 and
525,000 excess deaths of children under the age of five up to 2002.
210
American officials have claimed that
these deaths were solely Saddam’s responsibility for failing to give up his quest for weapons of mass
destruction. But the goal of the sanctions was really to remove Hussein from power, and thus the demand
was for Saddam to commit political—and actual—suicide. That he would not comply was obvious, and since
the horrible consequences of the sanctions were “predictable and inevitable,” and would not have occurred
had sanctions not been imposed, the US and its allies cannot be fully exonerated from some share of the guilt
for these deaths.
211
Madeleine Albright admitted as much in 1996 when she commented that “I think this is a
very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”
212
207
Both sides also explored other methods, such as chemical weapons, tanks, airpower, and infiltration tactics.
208
One fairly recent example occurred in the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), when the Federal forces blockaded the
Biafran coast and attempted to starve Biafra into submission. On this conflict, see John de St. Jorre, The Brothers’ War:
Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
209
See, for example, Mohamed M. Ali and Iqbal H. Shah, “Sanctions and Childhood Mortality in Iraq,” The Lancet 335
(27 May 2000): 1851-57; Richard Garfield, “Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children from 1990 through 1998:
Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions” (unpub. ms., New York, March 1999); and Richard
Garfield and Cheng-Shuin Leu, “A Multivariate Method for Estimating Mortality Rates Among Children Under 5 Years
from Health and Social Indicators in Iraq,” International Journal of Epidemiology 29 (2000): 510-15.
210
For the former estimate, see Garfield, “Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children,” 33; the latter is from an
unpublished study by Richard Garfield and Seiji Yamada cited in Jane Salvage, Collateral Damage: The Health and
Environmental Costs of War on Iraq (London: Medact, 12 November 2002), 4. A widely noted survey published in 1995
estimated that over 500,000 Iraqi children had already died (Sarah Zaidi and Mary C. Smith Fawzi, “Health of Baghdad’s
Children,” The Lancet 346, no. 8988 [2 December 1995]: 1485), but this study was flawed and its findings were retracted
by its authors the following year. Other less qualified authors have suggested a total of 1.5 million excess deaths (*).
211
See, for example, David Rieff, “Were Sanctions Right?” New York Times Magazine, 27 July 2003.
212
Albright, then ambassador to the UN, on the television program “60 Minutes,” responding to a question of whether
the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it, quoted in John Mueller, “Public Opinion as a Constraint on U.S.
Convention