Having agreed that Saddam is a tyrant, at CT we find ourselves sharing the Arab States' compassion toward the Iraqi people. When the bombing stops, the Iraqi people are invisible once more. 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. 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.