In response to how to avoid war with Iraq, the option that kept on coming up was to retain the Containment policy. Continuing the Containment also meant continuing the Sanctions.
What was wrong with continuing the policy of Containment/Sanctions?:
o Sanctions resulted in the death of far too many Iraqi people.
o The results of Sanctions was well publicized in the Middle East and was used to stir up anger against the United States.
While there is evidence that the food for oil program was diverted to Saddam's army and elite, the fact is that Iraqi people died as a result of Sanctions.
When I innitially brought up the negatives on Containment/Sanctions and how it was not a reasonable option on this Forum, this information regarding the deaths of the Iraqi people due to that policy was essentially ignored. What I essentially read was about the "horrors of war" and maintaining the status quo.
The status quo had a huge price in terms of human life and suffering.
That fact is that Saddam's regime based on attrocities, fear and lies needed to be stopped. That serial killer called Saddam no longer rules Iraq. For this I am happy, but there is much more work to do to pacify the civil unrest; insure the Iraqi population gets needed food, water and medical supplies and then commence the transition of turning Iraq into a Free Iraq.
An article, giving the opinions of Rod Driver regarding Sanctions, is shown below.
bob
http://www.sparrowda...om/driver1.htmlMeeting the 'enemy' in a brutalized Iraq By ROD DRIVERRod Driver is a former Rhode Island state representative and a congressional candidate. He is a retired professor of mathematics at the University of Rhode Island.
Norman Finkelstein, son of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz and Maidanek concentration camps, a political theory professor and author of three books on the Nazi holocaust, describes Mr. Driver with the following words: "If more Germans had shown Rod Driver's courage and integrity, there probably wouldn't have been a Nazi holocaust." - Norman Finkelstein, Ph.DFOR 10 YEARS, Americans have traveled by car or bus to Iraq in defiance of U . S . government prohibitions. But the trip I joined in January, organized by Dr. James Jennings, of Conscience International, was the first "airlift" of Americans carrying humanitarian supplies.
Customs inspectors at the Baghdad airport paid little attention to our luggage -- except for those of us with video cameras. We each had to fill out a declaration form listing our camcorders and the number of videotapes we were carrying. (I can't explain why, because I videotaped freely for the next six days; and when we left the country no one asked about the camcorder, the videotapes or the declaration form.)
Visiting Iraq carries risks. You might get seriously ill from drinking contaminated water from Iraq's bomb-damaged water-treatment plants. You might be killed by American bombs or missiles still falling on Iraq several times a week. You might even die in the crazy Baghdad traffic. Or you could be hassled by Washington for traveling to Iraq without U.S. permission.
What Americans don't have to worry about is the reception of the Iraqi people. The Iraqis welcomed us warmly. They seem to believe that the American people are not responsible for the actions of the American government. Maybe their naive concept of democracy arises from their own lack of voice in their government. This warm reception was typified in a tiny rural village called Toq Al-Ghazalat, about 120 miles south of Baghdad. We had gone there to express our regrets to the family of Omran Jawair, the 13-year-old who, last May 17, had been in a field 200 yards from his home, tending his family ' s sheep, when an American missile landed and exploded in the field. It tore off Omran ' s head, maimed his four companions and killed several sheep.
The houses in Toq Al-Ghazalat are built of mud bricks, and no modern facilities are seen for miles around. It is difficult to guess what could have justified the attack that killed Omran. Suddenly, while we were in the village, American (or possibly British) planes flew overhead. They could be heard, but were too high to see. It was the first time I had heard the sounds of air - raid sirens and hostile planes overhead since I lived in London as a child under Hitler ' s bombardment in the 1940s.
Yet the villagers welcomed us Americans without apparent animosity for Omran ' s death or for the planes overhead that might bomb them at any moment. No bombs or missiles fell on southern Iraq that day. But four days later they did, and six more civilians were killed.
In Baghdad itself , we visited the Amariya bomb shelter. That shelter had been filled with women and children on the night of Feb . 12, 1991, when two U.S. missiles tore through the reinforced-concrete roof. The tragedy of 10 years ago is evidenced by the inch-thick reinforcing rods still twisted like spaghetti where the missiles entered the structure, plus photos of some of the 400 who died that night.
As frightening and deadly as the bombs and missiles are, the greatest suffering is caused by the sanctions that deny Iraq many basic essentials of modern society. In 1996, to ease the civilian suffering, the U.N. began allowing Iraq to sell some of its oil to get money for food, medicine and other necessities.
But here's the way it works. Under the "oil-for-food" program, all the money from these oil sales goes to the U.N., which skims off about a third for "reparations" and "administration." The rest is supposed to buy humanitarian supplies for Iraq. Iraq can negotiate contracts with suppliers of these items. But no contract can be implemented without approval from the U.N. Sanctions Committee. And on this committee the United States and the United Kingdom have veto power. More than $3 billion worth of material, including medical supplies, ambulances and repair parts for pumps and generators, are "on hold" because of U.S. and U.K. objections. Some of the requests date back to January 1998. Iraq had excellent schools before 1991. But today, schools from elementary through college level lack modern books, computers and other supplies. Even medical books and journals are denied via the U.S. ban on commerce with Iraq. Before the war, Iraqis had perhaps the best medical care in the Arab world, and it was free. Whatever equipment and drugs they needed, they had. But today the hospitals are at the mercy of the Sanctions Committee. When repair parts for vital equipment are denied, hospital personnel do the best they can with makeshift repairs.
At Al Mansour Hospital -- one of Iraq's best -- the administrator gratefully accepted the meager medical supplies we had brought. Children in that hospital are dying of respiratory diseases because Iraq's bombed oxygen factories cannot meet the needs for oxygen. Other children are succumbing to gastrointestinal disease, malnutrition and even measles. The hospital lacks chemotherapy supplies, antibiotics and even pain killers. Mothers stay in the hospital day and night with their children. The hospital lacks sufficient staff to care for patients without help from the families. We saw one mother connecting a new drip bag to a vein in her daughter's foot.
In the corridor, a man carried the body of his daughter, who had died earlier that morning. He was going from place to place to satisfy the red tape to get a death certificate so that, in the Muslim tradition, he could bury her the same day. Outside the hospital, a woman was led away wailing in distress. Her seven-year-old daughter had just died of a congenital heart defect because the hospital lacked facilities for surgery to correct it.
Anyone who believes that Arabs don't value human life should see the parents in hospitals day and night caring for their sick children. Parents are totally devastated, as you or I would be, when their children die.
Not all Iraqis are Muslims. On Sunday, in Baghdad, several in our group attended the evening service of a large Presbyterian church. Without understanding Arabic, we could appreciate the upbeat music. And once again, we were greeted with warmth and friendship.
SEVERAL TIMES in recent years, Westerly has experienced polluted water. Residents were advised to boil water as recently as December. Pawtucket and other communities have experienced similar crises, especially in the summer.
But imagine that a foreign power had bombed our sewage-treatment and water-purification plants, and then prevented us from buying the repair parts to restore the facilities or the chlorine to operate them properly. That's what Iraq and its 22 million people face.
A major sewage-treatment plant in Baghdad is operating far below capacity because needed parts to repair or maintain pumps are delayed or denied by the U . N . Sanctions Committee. (Translation: The United States uses its veto power to block delivery of the needed parts.) So some of the untreated sewage goes directly into the Tigris River. Downstream, water is pumped back out of the river into a "water-purification" plant. The bomb damage at this plant has mostly been repaired, but chlorine is denied, delayed or restricted by the Sanctions Committee.
U.S. and other foreign visitors in Iraq drink only bottled water and avoid raw vegetables and salads, even at the deluxe Al Rashid hotel , in Baghdad. A 11/2-liter bottle of mineral water costs 30 cents to $1. For a typical Iraqi,that is out of the question. Even a physician or an engineer gets only $3 or $4 a month. So tens of thousands of Iraqi infants and children are suffering or dying from dysentery, chronic diarrhea and the resulting malnutrition, or from other water-borne diseases.
In the controversy over sanctions, supporters and opponents tend to agree on two things: (1) Innocent people, especially children, are paying a terrible price, while (2) Saddam Hussein and his cronies are scarcely inconvenienced. In fact, the greater the hardships imposed on Iraqis from outside, the more that Saddam looks like a hero to them. Some of us wanted to go to Basra in southern Iraq to deliver medical supplies to a hospital there. This meant flying through one of Washington's "no-fly zones." (The "no-fly zones" are creations of the United States and Britain. They are not approved by the United Nations.) We reasoned that American forces would not shoot down another large airliner full of civilians as they did on July 3, 1988. In that incident, the Vincennes downed an Iranian passenger plane, killing the 290 people on board. That tragedy occurred when we were backing Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.
The physician who greeted us at the maternity and pediatrics hospital in Basra gets only one type of antibiotic and not much of that. If six patients need antibiotics, he must choose two who will get it; and they get it for only two days. A girl with a respiratory ailment was receiving industrial oxygen for lack of medically-pure oxygen. And, worse than that, the hospital lacked the appropriate fittings, controls and gauges for administering oxygen. So they had rigged up ordinary plastic tubing held together with tape for insertion into the patient's nasal passages. Then they had to estimate how much they were giving her.
The hospital suffers power failures two or three times a week. By the time back-up generators are started it may be too late for some patients. (Just one power outage in Rhode Island a couple of years ago cost the life of a hospital patient on life support.) Under the term "infrastructure," U.S. and British bombers and missiles have deliberately targeted power plants as well as water-treatment plants.
A tiny boy named Hassan in the hospital in Basra is about the age of my youngest grandson, Austin. Austin is an energetic three-year-old, confident he can do anything. He loves cars and planes and construction. His construction project might include pounding nails in a board or trying to rearrange the gravel in his grandparents' driveway. Austin has been a frequent visitor to the emergency room: When his hammer missed the nail and smashed his finger, when his parents first discovered that he was dangerously allergic to peanuts, when help was needed to remove the head of a deer tick from his arm. But within hours of visiting a hospital, Austin is running around as though nothing had happened.
By contrast, three-year-old Hassan lay helplessly in his hospital bed. His severely malnourished body weighed 15 pounds, less than half of Austin's weight. Hassan's diarrhea and vomiting made food almost useless. Since the veins in his arms and legs were no longer useable, an intravenous line protruded from his forehead for administering medicine. The boy's mother stays in the hospital day and night trying to comfort her son and keep the flies off him. The tiny boy, apparently on the brink of death, tried not to cry as his mother kissed him and offered him a drink.
In a bed nearby, eight-year-old Ahmed was about the age of another of my grandsons. Jason enjoys soccer, computer games and sleepovers with his buddies. Ahmed is blind and suffers from a brain tumor and lymphoma. His family is from an area in southern Iraq heavily contaminated by radioactive dust from the explosion of depleted-uranium weapons used by U.S. forces in the 1991 war. Cancers and grotesque birth defects, virtually unknown before the war, have become epidemic in this area.
Ahmed was singing bravely while both his mother and father stayed at his bedside. Ahmed's cancer has reached the point where food is repugnant to him. Chemotherapy for cancer patients should be administered directly to large blood vessels using so-called "central lines." But the hospital cannot get "central lines." So Ahmed's treatments were being administered through smaller surface vessels. This had become such a painful process that Ahmed started crying when he thought someone was coming to give another dose. Ahmed's father gently wiped the tears from his son's eyes.
When Ahmed got out of bed, another problem was evident. His belly was the size of a large beach ball because of "ascites" -- retention of fluids because of liver damage. A few years ago, I watched my brother suffer similar agonizing symptoms in the final weeks of his battle with liver cancer. (My brother was 58, not eight.) Ahmed's childhood has been taken, and soon the rest of his life will be too.
U.N. humanitarian representatives whom we met in Baghdad have appealed repeatedly to the Sanctions Committee, especially the U.S. representative, asking that humanitarian supplies be released. And since 1998 several high U.N. officials in Iraq have resigned their posts in dismay at what sanctions are doing to the Iraqis and their society.
A spokesman for the U.N. Office of the Iraq Program tells me that a few months ago the Sanctions Committee agreed to allow antibiotics, central lines and blood bags to be approved "fast track" for Iraq, and that chlorine is "slowly being released." However, valves and gauges for administering oxygen and the parts needed to restore the water-treatment facilities are still "on hold."
We are told that Saddam Hussein might be developing weapons of mass destruction and he must be overthrown. We somehow rationalize that the embargo that has killed more than a million innocent Iraqis is not a weapon of mass destruction. And we have forgotten that it was the United States that provided Saddam Hussein with weapons, including chemical and biological, in the 1980s. We have also forgotten that in 1991, at our urging, Iraqis did try to overthrow Saddam. But, when it appeared that the rebellion might succeed, the United States suddenly came to his rescue, sabotaging the rebellion, because we weren't sure his successor would be compliant with America.
I have to believe that the American people wouldn't tolerate the embargo for another week if they could see what it is doing to innocent human beings, especially children who weren't even born at the time of the Gulf War. 
Several days after submitting this editorial opinion to the Providence Journal, Rod Driver learned that Hassan had died.
Edited by bobdrake12, 12 April 2003 - 07:56 PM.
CALLIE SHELL/AURORA FOR TIME 
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