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Let us declare at the outset: Saddam Hussein is a despicable despot, not to mention a polecat and a poltroon. A mid-January commentary from the official Saudi news agency called him the "Baghdad tyrant" and urged an Iraqi revolution to overthrow him because he has killed and tortured thousands of his own people. About the same time, the Egyptian foreign minister said Saddam is "shaming the entire Arab region through his politics."

Clearly, Saddam, who doesn't love his neighbors, is not loved by them. Nevertheless, just one day after they called Saddam the "Baghdad tyrant," the Saudis led the foreign ministers of six Persian Gulf states in a statement of cautious support for lifting the embargo on Iraq, except for goods that can be used for military purposes. (True to form, Saddam immediately rejected the overture because it was the Saudis who suggested it.)

Having agreed that Saddam is a tyrant, at CT we find ourselves sharing the Arab States' compassion toward the Iraqi people. They continue to suffer a slow and agonizing death—of their country, their culture, their children, and their future—eight years after the end of the Gulf War. But although the Clinton administration drew our attention to Iraq with a brief December display of raw power—designed, many say, to distract us from the Commander in Chief's impeachment hearings—we are likely to see the fickle news media ignore the ongoing suffering. When the bombing stops, the Iraqi people are invisible once more.

A strategy that misfires
Because of the United Nations sanctions imposed on Saddam, and held in place at U.S. insistence, sewage-treatment facilities and water-treatment plants are broken and cannot be repaired, chlorine for water purification is banned, and thus the nation's drinking water is contaminated. Diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, and malaria—once nearly eradicated in Iraq—are once again spreading through the population. Medicines, many of them inexpensive and plentiful in the West, are rare. There is an outbreak of childhood leukemia, a disease that has a 75 percent survival rate in the U.S. and UK, but that has only a 10 percent survival rate in Basra, largely because needed medications are impossible to obtain. Ambulances go unrepaired for lack of spare parts. Hospitals have no sheets, no disinfectants, little refrigeration for drugs. Medical records are written on scarce scraps of paper and go astray.

Observer teams from the West tell stories of personal tragedy and pain: a baby born with hypoglycemia dies because a simple hypertonic solution of glucose, salt, and water is unavailable; a mother loses all five of her children to gastroenteritis; a woman undergoes a hysterectomy without anesthesia.

As a direct result of the sanctions, unicef estimates, 5,000 to 6,000 children die each month from preventable malnutrition or disease. Over the course of eight years, that is more than half a million children above and beyond so-called normal mortality rates. Add the deaths of the chronically ill, the elderly, and other vulnerable people due to the deprivations caused by the sanctions, and the total is somewhere around a million and a half. In addition to death, the sanctions have brought an enormous increase in the rate of birth defects. They have also brought grinding poverty and the presence of street children to Iraqi cities, a phenomenon largely unknown in Baghdad and Basra before 1990.

The economic sanctions, which the un imposed in August 1990 in response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, have been applied far beyond what is necessary to curtail the tyrant's military strength. Finally, in 1996 an exception was made that allowed Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil in exchange for food purchases and reparations payments to Kuwait. That food consistently reached the civilian population it was aimed for, says Ashraf Bayoumi, who headed the World Food Programme Observation Unit until last May. He carefully tracked food shipments and saw that they reached hungry people. Recent claims by the Blair and Clinton governments that oil-for-food was really oil-for-tanks were sheer lies, he says. Nevertheless, the food made available through the program was woefully inadequate.

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February 8 1999, Vol. 43, No. 2