In both places the tyrant himself is not feeling much pain. The economic sanctions which the UN, at the insistence of the US and the UK, has been imposing on Iraq for more than eight years, and the continuing US bombing, were designed to move the people of Iraq to rise up and declare a democracy and to stimulate the disarmament process which is the region's only hope for peace, but both policies have further entrenched the regime's hold on the population. The World Health Organization, UN relief agencies, the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the group of Nobel Peace Laureates who recently went to study the humanitarian situation in Iraq, and other observers agree that the sanctions and the bombings have killed more than a million people there, from starvation and from the fact that, without medicines, treatable people have been dying from treatable diseases. They agree that 4500 to 5000 children die there from these causes every month. There has been almost a complete collapse of medical services and public utilities for sanitation and clean water supplies.
Raw sewage floats in the available water.
Most of the population of Iraq is under 15 years of age, so most Iraqis know of the US and the UK only as people who are bent on destroying them. They will not want to model their society on ours. The ordinary citizens of our country were able to bring the war in Vietnam to an end by pressing our elected representatives to end it. Let us do that again, with diligence, and bring the people of Iraq back into the community of nations.