Every month, 6000 Iraqi citizens die due to diseases - diseases that in the US can be cured with a single shot. Every ten minutes, an Iraqi child dies due to malnutrition. However, the United States government is nice enough to give each Iraqi citizen 20 cents each day for their food and medicinal needs.
The statistics I just mentioned are all due to the UN-placed and US-enforced sanctions on Iraq. As for some history on the sanctions, they were put in place on August 6th, 1990 due to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The sanctions were designed to keep Iraq from manufacturing and using biological and nuclear weapons, largely by reducing, and in some cases, eliminating foreign trade. While intending to just keep Iraq from attacking other nations, the sanctions had even farther-reaching effects than the UN could have foreseen.
Before sanctions were placed, Iraq had an army of nearly four million men, and was a world leader in health care and education. After NATO troops left Iraq, the nation's educational and medical worlds were left in a standstill. Nearly just three months after the first sanctions were put in place, economic sanctions were enforced to completely cut all foreign trade except for the extremely basic necessities: primitive medicine, and small amounts of food. The US agreed on a "food-for-oil" program in 1996 that would allow Iraq to sell its oil in the open market, but only for food in return. As Iraq is a corrupt dictatorship, nearly none of the food got to the citizens. According to UNICEF reports an estimated 4-5,000 children in Iraq die each month.
The coalition of governments originally assembled to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait has crumbled over the issue of continuation of economic sanctions. Many governments oppose economic sanctions because their effects are felt directly by the civilian population. Many governments have split on the issue of economic sanctions because they view economic sanctions as unfairly causing needless suffering by innocent civilians.
