Antiwar activist Bert Sacks died in May 2025 at age 83 through VSED — voluntary stopping eating and drinking. He had Parkinson’s disease. “I can feel my body shutting down,” he said. “I’m losing words. My thought processes are confused. I can feel myself getting weaker.” As his death approached, I was approached to contribute some thoughts about him. This was posted on Post Alley, May 30, 2025.
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Bert Sacks came to me 25 years ago. I was an opinion columnist on the Seattle Times editorial page. I had been arguing that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were wrong to propose a second war against Iraq. Bert thought so, too, but his viewpoint was different. Instead of looking at the power politics — Saddam Hussein did this, Bush did that, the United Nations Security Council did the other thing — Bert talked about Iraqi children.
Under Saddam, Bert said, Iraq had used some of its oil money to build treatment plants for drinking water. During the First Gulf War, the United States had bombed the treatment plants. The Pentagon had done this intentionally, using smart bombs. After the war ended, the Clinton administration had prevented the plants from being repaired. The repairs required imported parts, and the sanctions blocked the imports. The Clinton people did this to put pressure on Saddam. The sanctions hadn’t worked very well; they often don’t. What the sanctions had done over the course of the 1990s, Bert said, was to sicken millions of Iraqi children who were drinking unclean water. If you looked at Iraqi population figures, five hundred thousand children were missing. They had died, Bert said, of waterborne diseases. Morally, it was as if they had been killed by the government of the United States.
Bert Sacks was not the only one making that argument. It was out there, on the left, which is not where I was. I trolled the internet for counter-arguments and found none. Bert told me that Lesley Stahl of CBS “60 Minutes” had asked Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeline Albright, about the dead children — whether the 500,000 deaths were “worth it,” and Albright had said that yes, it was worth it. It was an appalling answer, and Albright later regretted saying it, but there it was. The Clinton people were not arguing that the 500,000 figure was a lie, and that people like Bert Sacks were making it up. It wasn’t what they cared about. It wasn’t one of their “talking points.” They were holders of political power, and they thought and spoke in terms of power relations.
I wrote an editorial for the Seattle Times using Bert’s argument about the 500,000 children. The editorial made Bert very happy, but he did not stop. I didn’t agree with all Bert’s views, and I didn’t always use his arguments in my writing for the Times, but I listened to him. I told Bert to think of me as his “long-term investment.” He liked that. I also took some flak for the times I quoted him. Some people said I should stick to to more mainstream sources, safer sources, such as the voices of my own government. I thought that a number of my government’s statements were lies. Bert didn’t lie.
Newspaper people talk a lot to people who stick their necks out, and Bert stuck his neck out further than most. In 1997, he and three others carried satchels of medicine to Iraqi hospitals, where they talked to doctors treating the sick kids. His trip violated federal law. The violation wasn’t that he’d traveled there. It was that he’d engaged in forbidden commerce with the regime of Saddam Hussein by such things as paying for taxis and buying lunch. In 2002, George W. Bush’s Justice Department hit him with a $10,000 fine for his intentional flouting of the law. Bert was living quite frugally, and I don’t know if he had $10,000, but he had plenty of friends. He could have paid it. He refused to pay it. He invited the government to take him to court. He wanted them to take him to court, because a federal courtroom would give him a public platform for making a stink about their sanctions. In 2011, Barack Obama’s Justice Department did take Bert to court, but the judge dismissed the case and the government never did collect its $10,000.
Bert took political arguments as seriously as anyone I ever met, but he did not demonize his opponents. He was not one to accuse any person of evil. He didn’t talk about Madeline Albright that way, or Bush and Cheney, or even Saddam Hussein. He would say, “People have reasons to do what they’re doing. We need to understand what they are, even if we don’t agree with them.” To Bert, casting out one’s opponents as evil was choosing not to understand them. It was the first step to war and the consequences of war. And Bert didn’t draw a distinction between the intended and the unintended consequences. If you went to war, you were responsible for both. If you supported the Iraq war, the 500,000 dead children were on you. Bert wanted to make sure you understood that.
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©️ 2025 Bruce Ramsey