Right now, Paul and his family are dealing with some scary shit of their own. After being diagnosed with bowel cancer, having sections of his bowel removed and enduring six months worth of chemotherapy, he has recently discovered he has spots on his liver. Paul has met this news by reloading his guns and is going to fight it with two other forms of chemotherapy for cancers like his, combined with a monoclonal antibody called Avastin. Avastin, however is not part of Medicare or the private health system’s funding at this stage. It costs $20,000 to do it.

The ART THAT SCARES YOU auction is now live at <lj user=”artscaresyou”> until 9pm AEST, 28 August 2008. We are accepting donations and pledges of art, books and auctionable goodies right up until the last day. Some auctions are ending early, so come check us out now!

How to Bid
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The Paul Haines fundraising tally recently hit the $16,000 mark which is fantastic, but we’re not there yet. If we should overshoot this target before the end of the ART THAT SCARES YOU auction, any extraneous donated funds will also be passed directly on to Paul and his family to help with the other costs they need to cover right now. Email artscaresyou@gmail.com with any queries about the auction.

In the meantime, if you’d like to make a general donation via Paypal click here for the link via Tansy Rayner Roberts’s LJ. (For some reason direct linking seems to fail for both Cat Sparks and myself!).

But there is another report in the same NEJM that deserves our attention. A team of researchers collected data on 651 children treated for a type of leukaemia before the invasion, and showed that the economic sanctions had a devastating effect on chances of survival.

It would seem that the economic sanctions against Iraq, by interrupting the availability of chemotherapy, were directly responsible for the deaths of many children with acute lymphocytic leukaemia. And these deaths came from one disease in one Baghdad hospital. During the UN sanction period, drug shortages were a frequent occurrence in Iraq and often included antibiotics and other critical medications. Apart from medical supplies, the sanctions also interrupted the supply of clean drinking water and other public necessities. In short, the sanctions became a humanitarian disaster that is today almost impossible to quantify.

What I find particularly sad is that nobody comes out well from these findings. While the US and the UK were the most forceful proponents of the sanctions, they exempted medical supplies from the embargo. So Saddam Hussein has his own part to play in deliberately distorting the sanctions in order to make his own people suffer. If Hussein had complied with the rules of the sanctions, most of this misery would have been avoided. Does this get the pro-sanction nations off the hook? Of course not. The rationale behind the sanctions was that Hussein was an egotistical dictator who would stop at nothing to increase his wealth and power. To apply sanctions in such a way as to allow Hussein to manipulate them for his own political goals is like giving a loaded gun to a desperate man holding hostages. You don’t get to absolve yourself if things go wrong in such circumstances.

And the blame doesn’t stop there. It should be recalled that the UN Security Council, which refused to approve the 2003 invasion, had approved the sanctions — and kept them in place for 13 years. Apart from Germany, which I believe had a genuine moral opposition to the Iraq invasion, there is little doubt in my mind that most other opposing nations were quite happy to impose sanctions to so long as they got their cheap Iraqi oil and kept their Iraqi investments intact; for these nations, I believe their real opposition to the Iraq invasion was not humanitarian but because they feared a loss of influence in a post-Baathist Iraq.

I wish I could take something good from all this, but it is hard for me to escape the conclusion that tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died in the interbellum period because political leaders around the world decided their lives were not all that important.