With the start of the US assault in Afghanistan, it became the second nation to face regular American air attacks this year. US planes attack Iraq about once a week, contributing to miserable living conditions.

As of October 1, American and British planes attacked Iraq on 40 days in 2001, according to Department of Defense spokesman David Lapan. The bombings, designed to enforce a military no-fly zone, which covers about three-quarters of the country, have been a feature of Iraqi life since the Gulf War ended in 1991. Last year, Iraq was bombed on 80 different days.

Unlike the UN Security Council's ban on almost all non-food trade with Iraq, the UN hasn't endorsed the bombings. Instead, says Lapan, the US and its allies decided to enforce a UN Security Council resolution demanding an end to Iraqi repression of Kurds and other groups by establishing the no-fly zone. Ironically, the Providence Journal reported earlier this year, while the US prevents Iraqi planes from bombing Kurds in northern Iraq, it allows Turkish planes to bomb the same areas.

Using bases in nearby Kuwait and Turkey, the US attacks Iraqi military targets only when provoked by anti-aircraft fire or military flights, says Lapan. But Anthony Arnove of Providence, editor of Iraq Under Seige: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (South End Press), says US bombs have hit Iraqi civilians. In March 2000, Arnove visited the partially destroyed Iraqi home of Iqubal Fartous, whose son, Hyder, was killed in a US bombing. In addition, her surviving son still has visible shrapnel embedded in his body, Arnove says.

The US bombings damage Iraqi municipal water and sewer systems, encouraging the spread of water-borne diseases like cholera, he notes. Half a million tons of raw sewage are dumped into bodies of fresh water every day in Iraq, according to a July 2001 UNICEF report.

Conditions for Iraqi children have also considerably worsened since the Gulf War, according to the report. The average child under five suffers from diarrhea 14 times a year, UNICEF found, and mortality among young children has more than doubled since 1990. Twenty percent of children in southern and central Iraq are so malnourished they need "special therapeutic feeding," UNICEF concluded, and one third do not attend school. "An entire society is living without structure and being destroyed," observed French UN delegate Jean-David Levitte during a 2000 UN General Assembly debate.

While UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy also blames the Iraqi government for not spending more on public health, she stated in the report, "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."

Iraq's misery has damaged America's standing in the Arab world, say Arnove and others. "What goes through the mind of an Iraqi woman holding her child, who's dying of dysentery over several days?" asked former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter in an interview with the Evangelist of Albany, New York. "Is there love in her heart for America?"

Issue Date: October 19 - 25, 2001