murdered those people. Saddam Hussein killed those innocent Iraqi's, by starving them while he and his cronies had plenty. His personal wealth was estimated at $6 billion by Forbes in 1999. He has something like 50 palaces, many built within the last 10 years.

At any rate, the sanctions have been roundly criticized by many people on all sides, and stringent efforts have been made to improve them. It would be best to abandon them altogether. Bringing them up in the polemics of deciding whether to go to war in 2003 serves no purpose but to cloud the issue. In fact, decrying the sanctions is as powerful an argument for war as it is against it.

Weapons Inspection
The leading argument for the way to avoid war with Iraq is to continue weapons inspection (trying to find and destroy all of the WMD and the facilities Saddam is using to build them). Though it surely deserves a lot more space because of that, I'm going to dispose of it rather quickly by making a conjecture and leaving you to seek out the full argument: I'm guessing that most people who think that weapons inspection should continue and be the alternative to war don't fully grasp the extent to which the U.N. has been trying to carry them out for the past 11 years. Saddam is Lucy perennially pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. He blocks inspections, then offers to start them up again a few months later when force is threatened or applied, only to block them again when the threatening force backs down. Each time, a great deal of money and energy is spent to accomplish nothing. It is convenient for him that the public at large has such a short memory, and keeps crying out "Wait, give him another chance, you oaf!" every time world leaders try to apply force.

That is what is happening now. If this were the case of just two people acting alone, we would call the one who kept forgiving and forgetting a colossal, monumental, amazing fool. But, being that this involves the world, with every new trick and subsequent repenting by Saddam comes a whole slew of people new to the story who think the U.S., the U.N., or the U.K. are being evil war mongers by not seeking the peaceful solution of weapons inspection that Saddam is so 'magnanimously' offering to reinstate. There is much history and solid reasoning behind the U.S.'s current position of not even taking the newest round of weapons inspections as a serious alternative to war.

Nations' memories are often little better than individuals when it comes to prudent Iraq policy. From a review by Brian Urquhart that appeared in The New York Review of Books, a left-of-center publication: "Pollack's book makes it embarrassingly clear that the determining factor in the reaction of governments to Saddam Hussein has always been their own interests." Every major nation on earth, U.S. included, is culpable for turning a blind eye to Saddam when it suited their own, but not the world's, best interests.