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  Arthur Kent on the crisis in the Gulf Latest Report All reporters enjoy leafing back through the scrapbook from time to time, recalling old stories and the people and places that made them special. But since September 11th, 2001, the trip down memory lane has often been a depressing experience, especially when it leads to a place like Iraq. It's not just the harsh language of confrontation, the sound of vast armies on the move and the senseless violence. It's more the nauseating predictability of this conflict. The troubled aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War condemned the world to a final reckoning with Saddam Hussein. The only question has been: when ? In February of 1992, one year after the war, I reported in London's Observer newspaper: "The use of economic sanctions to topple Saddam Hussein is an experiment gone disastrously wrong." Even at this early stage it was clear that the Iraqi dictator had been channelling the worst effects of the west's sanctions against his regime onto the backs of ordinary civilians, particularly the mainly Shia populations in the south of Iraq. "There's no question of the embargo producing a public uprising against Saddam," a municipal official told me in a crowded bazaar in Basra. "It has made people even more dependent on him. They spend all of their time and energy searching for food and medicine. There is more anger here, yes, but mainly for the Western countries that are starving us." He saved his harshest criticism until he was certain we couldn't be overheard by agents of Saddam's security service, the Moukhabarat. "You know what we call the Americans ? The blue-eyed Moukhabarat. Because they didn't finish what they started last year." Still now, with their hated dictator shunted from power, many Iraqis believe the U.S., Britain and other western countries conspired, for many years, to prop up the regime. Why else, they wonder, were the sanctions maintained when it was clear that Saddam had all the time been enriching himself and his cohorts by cheating the embargo to fund his weapons program. In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, follow events here as the reckoning unfolds, both for Iraq and its people, and for our own communities and governments in the west. Has anyone on earth been truly liberated ? Or are we all prisoners to a conflict that will shift, country by country, region by region, far into the future ? Click here for my most recent report. |