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                                 May 2, 1999, Sunday, FIVE STAR EDITION

 SECTION: WORLD, Pg. A-6, ANALYSIS

 LENGTH: 1951 words

 HEADLINE: IRAQ 'UTTERLY RUINED' BY SANCTIONS;
 A ONCE-PROSPEROUS NATION BEING DRIVEN INTO THE DARK AGES

 BYLINE: DAVID SHARROCK, THE GUARDIAN

 DATELINE: BAGHDAD, Iraq

 BODY:
 Taking a walk in this benighted city is a lesson in modern warfare. What may happen tomorrow in the Balkans was tested
 first in Iraq. You only need to take a few steps down any Baghdad street to feel the changes - feared by the majority and
 exploited by the profiteering few - creeping into every facet of life.

 It is clear that something sinister and irrevocable is under way. Beneath the outward calm, chaos is bubbling. "Everything
 you see points to Iraq falling apart," says a Baghdad veteran. "This country is becoming a Third World nation."

 Grubby street children sell bubble gum or beg at traffic lights and prostitutes walk the major roads; this in a country which
 has undergone a religious revival.

 "Iraq used to be a secular society with an educated population and a growing middle class," says one Baghdad
 professional. "It is simply impossible to believe what is happening. Tribalism and religion are asserting their old
 dominance. Urban society has been ruined, people are returning to the countryside to find food. We are utterly ruined."

 Go and ask the traders on Rashid Street, known as the "thieves market," what is going on. Or wait until they ask you -
 once they believe that the secret police are not listening to their small, brave acts of independence to explain the
 "Anglo-American plan" for their liberation.

 You can find most things in this souk, from a video player to a corkscrew; everything that would have been commonplace
 in an average Baghdad household before the Gulf war. Now no item is too small for resale if it brings in a few U.S. dollars.

 Here I met Karim, a slight figure whose impeccable English betrayed his British university education - civil engineering at
 Birmingham. He was trying, without conviction, to sell black market cigarettes. "Please, I would like to ask you a question if
 I may," he said hesitantly.

 "You are from England? It is a country I love. I made many good friends. I found they were gentle people. I want to know,
 do they know what is happening to Iraq? Do they know that our leaders are not getting hurt by the embargo, that it is
 only the ordinary people you are harming?"

 Quite simply, the West is conducting a monstrous social experiment on the people of Iraq. A once prosperous nation is
 being driven into the pre-industrial dark ages. It will take years to fathom the harm being done to the lives of 21.7 million
 people here by a policy intended, according to its shapers in Washington and supporters in London, to bring Iraq back into
 the international community of nations by toppling Saddam Hussein.

 Karim is typical of thousands of members of the Iraqi middle class. He studied in Britain and then returned home to pass
 on his knowledge. "My professor begged me to stay, he said I reminded him of [his] own son and that I could make a
 better life in England," he says. "But I was young and idealistic, I wanted to fight to improve my country. I now know it
 was the worst mistake of my life."

 Karim married and found a job as a university professor with a salary of around $ 2,400 a month. That was plenty to raise
 his four children on before the war, when a quasi-socialist system and vast oil wealth gave Iraqis one of the highest
 standards of living in the Middle East.

 As long as the oil flowed and you kept your nose clean, the excesses of President Saddam's regime - the all-enveloping
 security services and the war with Iran - could be managed with little discomfort.

 Nobody anticipated that Saddam would invade Kuwait in August 1990, still less the consequences of his defeat. The West
 had long been an ally, arming Iraq for its proxy war with the Shi'ite fundamentalists in Iran. Even in 1988, when sarin and
 mustard gas were rained on the Kurds, killing 5,000 at Halabja in a day, Western protests were muted.

 But by challenging the regional order and threatening the status quo of the world's oil market, Saddam was transformed
 overnight into public enemy number one.

 United Nations resolutions demanded that the Iraqi regime destroy its weapons of mass destruction, but Washington,
 with London's support, had bolder plans. Robert Gates, a deputy national security adviser under President George Bush,
 said that "Iraqis will pay the price" while Saddam was in power.

 This presupposed that the Iraqi leader cared for his people. The economic blockade on Iraq was only partially relieved in
 1996 by a U.N. oil-for-food program after the World Health Organization reported that most Iraqis had been on a
 "semi-starvation diet for years."

 Within a year of the invasion of Kuwait, food prices in Iraq increased by 2,000 percent. Hyper-inflation turned Karim's
 comfortable salary into the equivalent of $ 4 a month and everything was sold, even his wedding ring. The experience has
 left him deeply suspicious of the U.S. and Britain.

 "Do they really want to get rid of our friend [the euphemism employed by Iraqis when they talk about Saddam] by killing
 all of us first? Perhaps they are actually helping to keep him in power," he says.

 The strict rationing has certainly strengthened Saddam's control over his people. On the eve of the 1995 referendum
 which asked: "Do you agree that Saddam Hussein should be president of Iraq?" security officers visited the 8 million
 eligible voters and asked two questions: "Do you know how to vote?" and "Are you receiving your food rations?" Saddam
 won 99.96 percent of the vote.

 Off Saadoun Street is a pharmacy run by Dr. Yussuf Kassab, who should have retired after a lifetime's work at the ministry
 of health. He is forced to work because his sons, one a dentist, the other an engineer, cannot afford to live independently.

 Many of his clients leave empty-handed, unable to obtain even such ordinary items as antihistamines and cough linctus.

 The situation has improved slightly over the last six months, but Kassab says: "There is a restricted amount of many of
 these products in circulation, so the patients ... will just keep going round the city looking. Maybe they will be lucky."

 The question of just who is to blame casts a long shadow over Iraq's slow-motion catastrophe. It is pointless to ask any
 Iraqi interviewee to admit who she or he thinks bears the greater responsibility.

 A recent U.N. Security Council report notes that as of late January, $ 275 million of supplies and medicine purchased under
 the oil-for-food program had accumulated in government warehouses - more than half of the supplies which have arrived
 in Iraq. Under the program, Iraq is in charge of distribution. "According to information provided by United Nations
 observers only 15 percent of all medical equipment received by the warehouses had been distributed," it says.

 One officer in the relief field comments: "Two months ago, I would have said point blank that I did not believe that the
 Iraqi government was deliberately starving its people or depriving them of essential medicines, but I'm coming round to
 the view that, as part of their plan, someone somewhere is not rushing these things through as much as they might."

 Dennis Halliday, an Irish Quaker who was the U.N. humanitarian coordinator, resigned from his post last summer, bitterly
 observing that by his estimate, sanctions have killed a million Iraqis, including 500,000 children.

 But when this statistic was put to the U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, in 1996, when she was U.S. ambassador
 to the U.N., she replied: "I think this is a very hard choice but the price - we think the price is worth it."

 Today, 4,000-5,000 children are dying every month because of the poor water supplies, an inadequate diet and a lack of
 health care.

 Pierrette Vu Thi, a planning officer for UNICEF, has a different spin on one of the U.S. military planners' favorite buzzwords
 - "degradation." While advocates of the military option talk about "degrading" Saddam's capacity to threaten his
 neighbors, Vu Thi says that the real "degradation" is occurring in Iraq's social fabric.

 Half of the country's schools are not fit for occupation, 10,000 teachers have given up their jobs because they cannot
 survive on the salary of $ 3-10 a month and 30 percent of children have dropped out of school.

 "The oil-for-food program has not addressed this degradation," she says.

 Crime is rising as Iraq's infrastructure crumbles. Electricity supplies are running at only 40 percent of their pre-war levels.
 Up to $ 60 billion is needed to restore adequate supplies of water, electricity, education and health care.

 Meanwhile, continuing bombing raids in the "no-fly zones" in the north and south of Iraq are the heart of the latest phase
 in the U.S.-British war on Iraq.

 A U.S. assertion that around 200 bombs have been dropped in "self-defense" on Iraqi military installations since Operation
 Desert Fox ended is "far below reality," according to one independent observer. "The Iraqi claim that 3,200 sorties have
 been flown by the Americans and British since Desert Fox is accurate. It's very nearly the same number as in the whole of
 the air campaign during the Gulf war. They are fighting a low-intensity, high-technology, undeclared war."

 Another Western source agrees, but doubts that the Americans and British are any nearer to removing Saddam from
 power.

 "The Americans are gaining much more by chipping away every day at his military infrastructure than with a four-day
 intensive blitz as in December," he says. "The air- strikes are happening on a daily basis but are going virtually
 unreported."

 The Iraqi people usually know what's going on, thanks to the Voice of America, the BBC World Service and the bush
 telegraph. They have just been told that the United States is not at war with Iraq but rather, in the surreal phrase of
 Thomas Pickering, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, in a "state of animosity" with Baghdad.

 Intriguingly, Pickering also told the U.S. Senate that the oil-for-food program is a linchpin for Washington's efforts to
 maintain sanctions.

 And according to the junior foreign office minister Tony Lloyd, the British government "has decided to launch a new policy
 of better targeted, "smarter sanctions" which will ensure that "the people who are hit are the ones who should be hit".

 "Ah, your Mr. Robin Cook," said Karim, catching sight of the British foreign secretary on an Iraqi television news program.
 "He said he was going to give Britain an ethical foreign policy, didn't he? Can you ask him for me, what is there ethical
 about what he is doing to me or all the other ordinary Iraqis?"

 At the Saddam Hospital for Children, there is ample opportunity to study the consequences of this foreign policy. Ayat
 Abbad is a year old yet weighs just over 7 pounds.

 Like thousands of other babies she is suffering from marasmus, a type of malnutrition which was unheard of in Iraq before
 the sanctions, and has suffered gastroenteritis and pneumonia

 The duty doctor holds out little hope for her survival. "She will either die before the end of the year or she will live and
 grow up stunted and with low intelligence," he says. "It is not just the lack of medicines, they have created an entire
 culture of embargo... we are not receiving new-generation drugs, advances in medicine, science, food, anything."

 Besieged by U.S. and British policy and by a government which treats its people as bargaining chips, the only real
 casualties of this unending war are those who can least afford to pay the price.
 
 What poses the greater danger to the west's "vital regional interests" in the future?: the survival of Saddam or a
 generation of Iraqis made bitter by the indifference of Western nations?