Intent vs. effect

Bombings and sanctions create humanitarian crisis in Iraq

This is a text adaptation of CNN's Special Report, "The Unfinished War: A Decade Since Desert Storm," hosted by Brent Sadler, which debuted on Tuesday, January 16, 2001, on CNN and CNN International.

The world watched in black and white as Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed

(CNN) -- For the first 33 days of Desert Storm, the war was waged from the air. The brunt of the allied attacks was focused on Iraq's army in Kuwait. One goal of the air campaign was to degrade those forces through a conventional bombing campaign. But the air war had another, equally important goal: the destruction of Saddam Hussein's command and control apparatus. That objective took the battle to Iraq's capital, Baghdad.

Black and white pictures from the alliance underscored the accuracy of so-called "smart bombs," designed to surgically strike pre-selected targets. But smart bombs made up less than 5 percent of all the ordnance used against Iraq during Desert Storm. The dramatic images did not show the impact these bombs had on Iraq's troops or civilians.

Twenty-eight days into the war, it became apparent that even the smartest technology could not prevent civilian casualties. Laser-guided weapons struck a presumed military target that turned out to serve also as a bomb shelter.

Iraq's infrastructure -- bridges, roads, water and electrical power systems -- was severely damaged. Many Iraqis lost services vital to daily life. By the war's end, one of the most prosperous and modern Arab countries in the Middle East lay in economic ruins.

If Iraqis had expected life to improve, they were mistaken. Indeed, 10 years on, the Iraqi economy is barely functioning. The United Nations manages Iraq's oil revenues and strict sanctions remain on what can and cannot be imported.

These trade restrictions have contributed to a spiraling humanitarian crisis for the country at large. A recent UNICEF study, drawing on World Health Organization support and Iraqi data, found that a half million Iraqi children under 5 have died because of the living situation in Iraq. Under pre-war living conditions, they would have survived, the study found.

Few Western observers dispute that the regime's defiant posture towards the U.N. has added to the suffering of its own people. Nevertheless, the sanctions have inspired a bitter blame game.

The attacks left Iraq's infrastructure badly damaged and with little way to repair it

"It's very easy to get emotional about sanctions," warns Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations. "The fact is that the Iraqi government never considered the options in front of them with the Iraqi people in mind."

But the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, Denis Halliday, believes the sanctions are to blame. "The task at hand is to disarm Iraq," he says, "not to kill children and the people of the country, which is exactly what this program is doing."

Halliday is a former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations. In 1997 he was appointed the humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. In 1998, he resigned in protest.

"You've got ten years of sanctions ... where there is massive malnutrition amongst children in particular, including chronic malnutrition, which leaves permanent damage, mental and physical damage, to this sort of 'sanctions generation' that we in the United Nations have created," Halliday complains.

"We cannot have the United Nations, the guardian of well-being, sustaining a regime of embargo or sanctions on a people that impacts only on the people, not on the decision-makers ... not on the government. And more than impacts, it kills the people," he continues. "We are, in my view, guilty through the Security Council of committing genocide in Iraq."

The U.N. denies such charges, as does Great Britain and the United States.

Greenstock refutes the charges, saying, "I don't think it helps to talk in these terms; they don't mean anything.

"Clearly the international community would like the Iraqi economy and the Iraqi people to be restored to their normal operations, the normal talents of the Iraqi people. There's no argument with them; the argument's only with the regime," he says.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch agrees with Greenstock.

"I think the international community is in the lead in trying to ameliorate effects of sanctions and the regime in Baghdad is in the lead in trying to aggravate them on its own people," Welch says, adding that Baghdad "presents this case to the [Iraqi] people, who are well-intentioned but frankly a little soft-minded, and say that it's our fault. I think that is explicitly not true."

Iraq views the actions of the alliance rather differently.

"Their real agenda is not to implement Security Council resolutions on Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. Their real agenda is to topple Iraqi government, to dismantle Iraq and to destroy this country," says Saeed Hassan, Iraq's ambassador to the U.N.

Halliday has also leveled another charge. According to international health experts, epidemics of cholera, dysentery and hepatitis have plagued Iraq. These diseases come from water-borne contamination. Halliday blames this contamination on the targeting of Iraq's infrastructure during the Gulf War.

He points to a recently declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document that was issued at the start of the conflict, laying out Iraq's vulnerable water situation. The document also acknowledges that a shortage of pure drinking water could "lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease."

A generation of Iraqi youth is growing up under the sanctions

"I think there's no doubt whatsoever that the Americans had worked out the vulnerability of Iraq in terms of clean fresh water," Halliday says. "So they set about destroying electrical power capacity, which is essential, of course, for the treatment and distribution of water. "

Welch again refutes this charge. "I can't imagine that people will believe that we honestly do that. We did target Iraqi infrastructure during Desert Storm. We did it for a military reason -- to reduce the risk to us [and] ... to accomplish our objective of liberating Kuwait."

For a decade, Iraqi civilians have suffered under sanctions. The U.N. has tried to address the problem with an "oil-for-food" program that was set up to allow Iraq to sell oil on the international market in exchange for food and medicine. When this program was first proposed, Hussein claimed it was a gross intrusion on Iraqi sovereignty. After five years, he finally agreed to the program.

"I think what the oil-for-food program did, once medicine and food started to flow, which didn't happen until the end of 1996, is that it has reduced some of the acute suffering that was leading to the death of the under five-year-olds," says Andrew Mack, director of strategic planning in the office of the U.N. secretary-general. "But the real problem, I think, is that the humanitarian impact of these sanctions is a much more subtle one. It is the continual erosion of educational systems, of health systems, the inability of the Iraqi economy to revive, and as a consequence one can really begin now to talk about a lost generation."

"If sanctions end tomorrow, you cannot bring back these ten years that have been lost by the young people," says Hans Von Sponeck. In 1998, Von Sponeck became the new head of the U.N.'s humanitarian program in Iraq. Eighteen months later, he, like his predecessor Denis Halliday, resigned in protest over sanctions.

"We can expect people entering adult life much less well prepared than their parents were in facing civic responsibility, in having an ethical and moral grounding -- when they were taught mainly how to survive under sanctions," Von Sponeck says. "The chances are pretty good that we will see a generation that will not be so favorably inclined towards countries in Europe and North America."

Halliday agrees. "These people are no longer focusing on, perhaps, forms of government or changing the system. They're focusing on survival. ... We've demolished that very class, the very people, the very professionals amongst the Iraqi population who were thinking about better systems of government."

But according to the U.S. State Department, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Iraq ultimately should be blamed on Hussein.

"The responsibility is fundamentally the Iraqi government's to take care of its own people," says Welch. "With all the resources going into the oil-for-food program today, if the Iraqi government wants to do something, it can do it. It can build a school, it can supply water, it can address the needs of infants ... and it can also choose not to do it. And all too frequently, it chooses not to do it.

"Lifting the sanctions will not automatically help the Iraqi people because there is something which stands in between, and that is Saddam Hussein," he says.

In fact, there are other obstacles. Iraq's imports are closely monitored by the United Nations for so-called dual-use materials -- goods that have both military and civilian applications. Supplies of a wide range of items, from galvanized water pipes to chlorine bleach have all been tightly restricted by so-called "holds" on contracts.

"We have so many holds imposed on our needs by the American and the British representative within the sanctions committee. There are a lot of delays, a lot of obstacles," says Iraqi oil minister Gen. Amer Rashid. "So we are not really in control of our funds to use them for the interests of our people."

In the end, it is oil that continually refocuses the world's attention on Iraq. And fears that Hussein might once more play politics with oil have returned.

Both the allied strategic bombing campaign and the sanctions were used by Hussein to unite his people against the West -- to portray Iraq as a David forced to do battle with Goliath. So, despite all its economic woes and isolation, Saddam Hussein's rule over his country appears to be as secure as ever.