...K P F T news

BRIEF: U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Texas Republican, made headlines this month when he told reporters the United States had no business attacking Iraq without sufficient provocation. Armey was later joined by Democratic Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who told reporters that he believed Saddam Hussein posed no serious threat to the United States. He challenged the Bush Administration's narrow approach to a complex conflict, and then he made a chilling comment:

"Containment is working." "Containment" is the new code word for sanctions, a policy that has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and the destruction of a once thriving society.

This week marked the third year since the United Nations Children's Fund published results of its study of child and maternal mortality in Iraq. This study, the first of its kind since before the Gulf War in 1991, pronounced "an ongoing humanitarian emergency."

According to the report, if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998. Speaking to the press, then executive director of UNICEF Carol Bellamy pointed to a recent statement of the Security Council Panel On Humanitarian Issues in Iraq which explained, "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war."

That was three years ago. The sanctions were 9 years old. Now they are 12, and the "humanitarian emergency" continues in Iraq. More children have died as a result of the sanctions than died in the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

E-mail Shalini Tripathi at shalini_tripathi@att.net .