'Internationally Sponsored Genocide'

Editors have a mantra, do not look back, move on, write what is current. But sometimes looking back is vital. Those who ignore even the recent past are doomed to understand nothing, sink deeper into quagmires - and bleat again : 'Why do they hate us'?

Looking through material for the book that has been far too long in the making, I found a copy of a letter which I sent to a prominent (UK) Member of Parliament. It is dated November 1993 and clarifies for ever why the invaders were never going to be greeted with 'sweets and flowers'.

Near exactly fourteen years ago - three years and three months in to the embargo
- I wrote:

" Meridian Hotel, Baghdad, 4th November 1993.

"As you know, when I was here in April/May 1992, I thought things could get no worse. Yet in July this year, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations note in a Report: '..with deep regret', all the: 'pre-faminine indicators being in place'. Further that an appreciable proportion of the population now had less calorific intake than the most famine stricken parts of Africa. That was July. This is apocalypse. This is internationally sponsored genocide.

"Food has risen in real terms, one thousand percent. Some most basic of staples have risen eleven hundred times. This morning a breakfast for three, of three black cofees, two orange juices and an omlette cost, what would have been, in 1989, the equivalent of one thousand three hundred US dollars. With US dollars, one can buy stacks of black market Iraqi Dinars, an inches high wad for fifty dollars, chillingly redolent of Germany after the first world war. Most Iraqi people have no dollars. More...