Bombing is nothing.
Maybe it hits a few military buildings, but it doesn't really affect ordinary people. The sanctions hurt a hundred times more. In much of the outside world, the U.S.-led bombing campaigns against Iraq that have been launched periodically since the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991 are viewed as devastating though perhaps necessary assaults. Many Westerners assume that when this country is not being bombed, it enjoys relative tranquillity. Iraqis assert just the opposite.