WASHINGTON: If American forces topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq, the United States and its allies will take on responsibility for a population severely weakened by two major wars, suppression of a post-Persian Gulf war uprising, 12 years of United Nations-imposed sanctions and Iraqi government mismanagement.

Over the past decade, Iraq’s crippled economy, degraded water and sewer systems, erratic food supplies and poor health care have contributed to widespread poverty, disease and malnutrition, sharply increasing childhood death rates, lowering levels of education and devastating a once-large middle class.

In his speech to the nation on Oct 7, President Bush pledged that if war comes, “the United States and our allies will help the Iraqi people rebuild their economy and create the institutions of liberty in a unified Iraq at peace with its neighbours.”

The form an occupation would take is uncertain and would depend on the amount of unrest in Iraq after a war, which other countries would participate and how strong a role Iraqis would be ready to play in running their country.

But the leading role played by the United States in maintaining harsh sanctions, drummed into the population of 23 million by the Saddam government’s propaganda, probably will make ordinary Iraqis dubious about US intentions.

Iraqis have seen that sanctions “didn’t hurt the regime; it hurt the regular Iraqi,” said Rahman al-Jebouri, spokesman for the Uprising Committee, an anti-Saddam Iraqi exile group. A US pledge of liberation “is not going to fly on the Iraqi street,” he said. “They want to see that it’s practical.”

The sanctions, on top of the US refusal to back the popular anti-Saddam uprising in 1991, have stirred anti-Americanism even among the many Iraqis who want to be rid of Saddam’s cruel rule, said Phebe Marr, a historian of Iraq. “People are really unhappy with sanctions and want a return to normalcy” she said.

By most available measures, conditions have improved in Iraq since the United Nations eased sanctions by introducing the oil- for-food programme in early 1997, allowing Iraq to sell oil and use some of the proceeds for food, medicine and other humanitarian goods.

This year, the UN Security Council liberalized the sanctions further by allowing the import of all non-military goods.

But UN agencies operating in the country continue to paint a bleak picture. In its latest report, the UN’s Office of the Iraq Programme notes a “high incidence of waterborne diseases” caused by “the poor state of water and sanitation networks in the country.”

Of a half-million children screened, 20 per cent were found to be malnourished. Power blackouts continue, food rations remain short of recommended levels of calories and protein, and the country still faces shortages of medicines and vaccines.

Teachers earn $3 to $5 a month; doctors, $20 to $30 a month; and most of the population is dependent on food handouts, said Carel De Rooy, the Baghdad-based representative for UNICEF. Unable to get enough protein, more than half of Iraq’s women suffer from iron deficiency, and the result is that one-fourth of babies are born underweight and vulnerable to disease, he said.

“We still are in a humanitarian crisis,” De Rooy said.

With its immense oil wealth, Iraq enjoyed relatively high standards of prosperity, health care and education well into the 1980s, when the eight-year Iran-Iraq war began to take its toll on the population, causing rising malnutrition, medicine shortages and the destruction of some health and social facilities.

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 prompted the Security Council to impose a comprehensive economic embargo intended to block all trade with the Iraqi government, exempting only medicine and humanitarian food aid.

Many thought that the sanctions, by cutting off oil revenue, would prompt Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait or cause his government to crumble.

Iraq was particularly vulnerable to a trade embargo because it had allowed its domestic agricultural sector to deteriorate and by 1990 was importing about 70 per cent of its food. Food prices skyrocketed.

US and allied bombs during the 1991 gulf war compounded the hardship, knocking out roads and bridges needed for internal trade and electrical power stations that kept water-treatment plants and sewer pumps operating.

More destruction occurred during the government’s suppression of the uprisings that occurred in the Kurdish north and the Shia south immediately after the war.

By mid-1991, humanitarian groups were witnessing a surge in diseases such as cholera, typhoid, dysentery and infectious hepatitis, as well as malnutrition among many Iraqi children.

The next five years saw a bitter standoff between the Security Council and Saddam’s government.

Led by the United States, the council refused to lift sanctions as long as Hussein failed to come clean on his weapons of mass destruction.

Through the 1990s, sanctions became a source of controversy. Critics reported staggering death tolls that, on close scrutiny, seemed to draw heavily on statistics supplied by the Iraqi government or data obtained with its help. Independent information-gathering is extremely difficult in Iraq.

Supporters of sanctions denied that they were the cause of Iraqi hardships. “Iraqis are indeed suffering, but not because of sanctions. The role of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is the problem,” Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy wrote in February 2000.

While the debate raged, more accurate measurements of the human toll in Iraq emerged. Two that have been widely accepted as the best available are an extensive UNICEF survey of deaths among children and mothers, and an analysis drawing on the UNICEF data by Richard Garfield, a public-health expert at Columbia University.

Surveying 24,000 families across Iraq in 1999 and comparing the results with those of earlier surveys, UNICEF reported that the infant death rate had more than doubled since the late 1980s and that the death rate among children younger than 5 had gone up nearly 2 1/2 times, from 56 per 1,000 to 131 per 1,000.

Iraq cooperated with the UNICEF survey, but the agency said it oversaw every aspect, using female Iraqi medical doctors to conduct interviews.

Experts and Iraqi exiles have faulted the Iraqi government for, among other things, poor management and favouritism in the distribution of aid supplies, using money from oil sales for sophisticated medical equipment instead of basic health care and supplying infant formula, which is often mixed with contaminated water, instead of encouraging breast-feeding.—Dawn/The Los Angles Times/W.P/The Baltimore Sun News Service (c) The Washington Post.