This is so sad. You are so right in stating that our country is partly responsible for the starvation of the Iraqi people. The embargos restricted food and medicine and helped create a situation where 4-5000 Iraqi children die a month. That is unconscionable. Yet it was not our country alone that believed that sanctions will provoke a people into revolting against their leader (thus saving us the trouble by creating change from within instead of without). Many leaders still believe in this practice. Saddam has proven it false though. Yet, while we share the burden, it is not our responsibility to feed the world and be the sole provider of goods and trade nor did we force Saddam to take oil money for food and use it for his friends and weapons instead. Nor did we force him to hange people who spoke against policy from poles after cutting their tongues out, or to gouge out the eyes of children and return them to their families blind, nor to torture political prisoners in jail. It's a situation where many share the blame and we can now only hope that the worst will be over as soon as possible and Iraq will emerge a healthier, wealthier, and free nation.

>Chris
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>>>If we were going to bomb every country/organization that does nothing in the face of genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, etc., we would quickly run out of bombs.
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>And of course you'd be bombing yourselves too. Today's events force the question: why did we impose 12 years of starvation, misery and neglect on the Iraqi people unless we believed that SH would do as we say while we did nothing about it.
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>And that's the fact. We, did, nothing. All the justifications for war and the rest of it boil down to the fact that we were too busy looking after our first-world selves to remember that an entire nation was embargoed on our orders until such time as our demands were met, a timing which you now say was never going to happen by itself. So why did we do this to the Iraqi people. Why didn't we act on the cancer while it was still small. Why are we surprised that the cancer takes little notice if all we do is scold and wait till it is a huge mess and heroic action is required.
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>We all have a lot of "looking in the mirror" ahead of us.
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>JR