Iraq War’s Lessons Lost on US by Ramzy Baroud — Antiwar.com
http://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2011/10/28/iraq-wars-lessons-lost-on-us
In her introduction to former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s important book, “The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq: The Children Are Dying,” Sara Flounders wrote, “Sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction. Since sanctions were imposed on Iraq, half a million children under the age of five have died of malnutrition and preventable diseases. Sanctions impose artificial famine. A third of Iraq’s surviving children today have stunted growth and nutritional deficiencies that will deform their shortened lives.”
In 1999, I was one of those who directly witnessed the impact of the sanctions on Iraqi children. I came back from the country with heaps of photos and memories that haunt me to this day. Oddly enough, it was not sanctions as “a weapon of mass destruction” that inspired action to end the siege, but alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that invited another disaster to an already devastated nation.