On May 23rd of this year the British Defence Minister Geoff Hoon was questioned in the House of Commons about the pattern of Anglo-American attacks on Iraq. He replied:
Between 1 August 1992 and 16 December 1998, UK aircraft released 2.5 tons of ordnance over the southern no-fly zone at an average of 0.025 tons per month. We do not have sufficiently detailed records of coalition activity in this period to estimate what percentage of the coalition total this represents. Between 20 December 1998 and 17 May 2000, UK aircraft released 78 tons of ordnance over the southern no-fly zone, at an average of 5 tons per month. This figure represents approximately 20 per cent of the coalition total for this period.footnote1
In other words, over the past eighteen months the United States and United Kingdom have rained down some 400 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq. Blair has been dropping deadly explosives on the country at a rate twenty times greater than Major. What explains this escalation? Its immediate origins are no mystery. On 16 December 1998 Clinton, on the eve of a vote indicting him for perjury and obstruction of justice in the House of Representatives, unleashed a round-the-clock aerial assault on Iraq, ostensibly to punish the regime in Baghdad for failure to cooperate with UN inspections, in fact to help deflect impeachment. Operation Desert Fox, fittingly named after a Nazi general, ran for seventy hours, blasting a hundred targets.
The fire-storm continued through the following year, unhindered by NATO’s Balkan War. In August 1999 the New York Times reported:
American warplanes have methodically and with virtually no public discussion been attacking Iraq. In the last eight months, American and British pilots have fired more than 1,100 missiles against 359 targets in Iraq. This is triple the number of targets attacked in four furious days of strikes in December . . . By another measure, pilots have flown about two-thirds as many missions as NATO pilots flew over Yugoslavia in seventy-eight days of around-the-clock war there.footnote2
In October American officials were telling the Wall Street Journal they would soon be running out of targets—‘We’re down to the last outhouse’. By the end of the year, the Anglo-American airforces had flown more than 6,000 sorties, and dropped over 1,000 bombs on Iraq. By early 2001, the bombardment of Iraq will have lasted longer than the US invasion of Vietnam.
Yet a decade of assault from the air has been the lesser part of the rack on which Iraq has been put. Blockade by land and sea have inflicted still greater suffering. Economic sanctions have driven a population, whose levels of nutrition, schooling and public services were once well above regional standards, into fathomless misery. Before 1990 the country had a per capita GNP of over $3,000. Today it is under $500, making Iraq one of the poorest societies on earth.footnote3 A land that once had high levels of literacy and an advanced system of health-care has been devastated by the West. Its social structure is in ruins, its people are denied the basic necessities of existence, its soil is polluted by uranium-tipped warheads. According to UN figures of last year, some 60 per cent of the population have no regular access to clean water, and over 80 per cent of schools need substantial repairs.footnote4 In 1997 the FAO reckoned that 27 percent of Iraqis were suffering from chronic malnutrition. UNICEF reports that in the southern and central regions which contain 85 percent of the country’s population, infant mortality is twice that of the pre-Gulf War period.