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Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and syndicated columnist. In his article <Horrors in Iraq are nothing new. When will Americans notice? > (http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15494), he quotes: Eman Ahmed Khammas, co-director of the Occupation Watch Center in Iraq, said last week, "The U.N. is not very reputable here. Many people consider the U.N. responsible for the suffering of the last 13 years, the sanctions and the deaths of hundreds of thousands." Plus, "before the invasion, the U.N. was paralyzed and did not stop the U.S. attack. Some people think of it as a department of the U.S. government. Security Council Resolution 1483 basically gave legal cover for the occupation and to legitimize the attack on Iraq," Khammas points out. Former Oil-For-Food head honcho, Denis Halliday says of the U.N. attack, "We all think of the U.N. as this benign entity, but in Iraq it's held responsible for a great deal of suffering of the Iraqi people. The U.N. has been particularly corrupted by the Security Council. (Not to mention) resolutions on Israel go unenforced." In his sanctions article, Rieff makes the important observation that during the sanctions debate of 1990s it was hard to know what the Iraqi people really thought. "This is no longer true," he writes. "And yet what I found was an almost universal opposition to sanctions -- a stern, unshakable conviction that the 1990s were a human and economic catastrophe for the Iraqi people and that sanctions were at the heart of the disaster." An Iraqi physics student told Rieff: "Saddam was a criminal, the biggest. But sanctions were also criminal. There is a huge amount of victims due to illness. You see, sanctions really killed our dreams -- not my personal dreams only, but those of my Iraqi people, all of us." _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk