Sir, - Sir Ivor Richards states (August 2nd) that Hans Von Sponeck has "missed the point". I fear it is Sir Ivor that has failed to grasp a fundamental point with regard to the 11 years of UN Security Council sanctions against Iraq - which is that no one who has studied the history of Iraq would expect the Iraqi regime to respect the fundamental human rights of its own people.
What people do expect is that an organisation such as the United Nations, which was established to protect the most vulnerable in our world, would retain enough integrity not to become the instrument of Britain and the United States in their bid for world economic dominance.
Death, starvation, disease and abject poverty are being inflicted on innocent Iraqi children who were not even born when the invasion of Kuwait took place. The children whom I have seen dying in agony, with no form of pain relief, from curable and preventable diseases such as typhoid, polio and dysentery in Iraqi hospitals, are dying because the UN Security Council, dominated by Britain and America, has not allowed chlorine, vital for water sanitation, into Iraq. So the water system, once the most sophisticated in the Arab world, is now the major cause of death to children under the age of five.
Sir Ivor states that "we want to achieve our objectives with the minimum effect on ordinary Iraqi people getting on with their lives". Firstly, at a conservative estimate, 1.5 million "ordinary Iraqis" who were getting on with their lives despite the Iraqi government and the sanctions regime are dead as a direct result of the sanctions. How could this represent "minimum effect"? Secondly, what are these objectives? Iraq and its people have already been bombed and starved back to a "prehistoric age", while its substantial oil resources remain in the control of the UN Security Council.
Sir Ivor says that "sanctions protect Iraq's neighbours and they protect us". I would remind him of the close ties which Britain and the US enjoyed with Iraq during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a time of financial and military support for a regime which was helped to its rise by the very countries which are now justifying sanctions for our own protection and that of Iraq's neighbours.
The grotesque irony is that both America and Britain have made billions of dollars from the sale of weapons of mass destruction to Iraq's neighbours; Saudi Arabia, a rich country, is now in debt due to its avid buying of weapons from Britain and the US, among others. I put it to Sir Ivor that the major threat to "regional security" is not Saddam Hussein but the current arms race which the British arms trade has had a major hand in creating.
If this is the "liberal Western" morality that Sir Ivor speaks so eloquently about, then God help us. - Yours, etc.,
Suzie Flood, Campaign to End Iraq Sanctions, Foxhill Park, Dublin 13.