CONTAINMENT
The past 11 years have seen a policy of containment that has resulted in endless work and frustration for the U.S. and the U.N. and abject poverty and countless deaths among the Iraqi populace. The frustrations have come from the constant vigilance that must be paid to Saddam and from the cat and mouse game of weapons inspection and dismantling; the deaths have come from sanctions.

Sanctions
I do not buy the rhetoric that blames the U.N. and particularly the U.S. for the deaths of Iraqi civilians under the sanctions (the U.N. controlling goods that flow in and out of Iraq to encourage Saddam's compliance with U.N. resolutions). It was a bad course of action to be sure. A better course of action would have been to depose Saddam in 1991. That course was not taken because the U.S. didn't want to be responsible for setting up another government in Iraq at the time; they wanted to leave it to the people. There was no decision maker in the U.S. at the time that expected Saddam to still be in power in 1992 and therefore there was no thought given to a contingency plan for how to deal with him if he was. When the time came that it was obvious he had to be dealt with, the world's hands were somewhat tied. There was no way to wage another war. The choice was made to curtail Saddam's power with weapons inspections and sanctions.

Saddam was able to control the sanctions by turning them on his own people. When international relief came in the form of food and medicine, he stole it and sold it on the black market to neighboring countries. Since he personally didn't care what happened to the Iraqi citizenry but knew that the rest of the world would, he used this for political clout, reporting any suffering that took place within Iraq that could be blamed on the sanctions, and additionally making up many things that never actually happened. Many ate it up, including the World Health Organization, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and the press. They essentially took Saddam's propaganda at face value and dutifully reported it. Moreover, this suffering wasn't unprecedented. In 1987, Saddam's neglect of the people in order to focus on the war with Iran led to similar though lesser suffering, but he hid it to make Iraq look like a strong country to the outside world. The chief difference in 1997 was that he could profit from advertising it rather than hiding it.

Of course, the sanctions were aimed clearly and distinctly at the Iraqi government and their attempts to build WMD, and many efforts were made to protect the Iraqi people from the negative effects. It was doomed to failure, with someone as ruthless and uncaring as Saddam. The U.S. and the U.N. gave Saddam a weapon and he used it; the sanctions actually put more of the economy in Saddam's hands than he'd ever had before. For that they should be blamed. But it is twisting the issue to speak of it as if the U.S. or the U.N.