But they weren't killing anyone, is that your point?
From your link:
"In mid-1999, UNICEF released its first country wide survey of infant and maternal mortality in Iraq since 1991. The survey took a number of precautions to ensure that the survey results would not be altered or modified and UNICEF is confident that the survey information is accurate. It showed that infant mortality in the southern and central sections of Iraq (under the control of the Iraqi government) rose from 47.1 deaths per thousand live births during 1984-1989 to 107.9 deaths per thousand during 1994-1999. The under five-year-old mortality rate rose from 56 to 130.6 per thousand live births in the same time period. According to the report, this increase in mortality resulted in about 500,000 more deaths among children under five than would have been the case if child mortality trends noted prior to 1990 (imposition of sanctions) had continued. In northern Iraq, the mortality rate has declined over the same period: infant mortality dropped from 63.9 per thousand live births in 1984-1989 to 58.7 in 1994-1999 and under five-year-old mortality dropped from 80.2 per thousand live births to 71.8 per thousand.""
To get the sanctions lifted altogether. If it had not been for 9/11, I firmly believe that the sanctions would have been lifted.
Also from your link:
"The smart sanctions plan was intended to defuse criticism by several governments, including permanent members of the U.N. Security Council France, Russia, and China, that the United States was using international sanctions to CRS-10 promote the overthrow of the Iraqi government or to punish Iraq indefinitely for the invasion of Kuwait. These governments appeared to believe that no amount of Iraqi cooperation with the United Nations would be sufficient to persuade the United States to lift sanctions on Iraq, and they and other governments moved unilaterally to skirt or erode the sanctions regime."
Essentially yes. Your quoting of the bogus UNICEF study was just part of the propaganda. The UN was making a fortune on the Oil for Food program via their administrative fees. They had a vested interest in painting the bleakest picture possible to keep the program going. Claudia Rosett did a fantastic job of uncovering the scam and the UN's complicity. The rise in infant mortality rates, if true, can be laid at the feet of Saddam, not UN sanctions.
Realizing, though, that they were inflicting punishment on Mr. Hussein's people rather than the dictator himself, the member nations of the Security Council offered in Security Council Resolutions 706 and 712 (adopted in August and September of 1991 respectively) the regime a chance to sell limited amounts of its oil abroad for the purchase of critical supplies. Mr. Hussein, demanding instead that all sanctions be lifted from his country, refused both offers of aid and was content to allow his citizens to starve while blaming the international community for their abject living conditions.
"The smart sanctions plan was intended to defuse criticism by several governments, including permanent members of the U.N. Security Council France, Russia, and China, that the United States was using international sanctions to CRS-10 promote the overthrow of the Iraqi government or to punish Iraq indefinitely for the invasion of Kuwait. These governments appeared to believe that no amount of Iraqi cooperation with the United Nations would be sufficient to persuade the United States to lift sanctions on Iraq, and they and other governments moved unilaterally to skirt or erode the sanctions regime."
That is exactly what I have been saying. France, Russia, China, and others wanted to lift the sanctions.
Rosett: "But in 1996, with the aim of providing for the people of Iraq while still containing Saddam, the U.N. began running its Oil-for-Food relief program for Iraq. Under terms agreed to by the U.N., Saddam got to sell oil to buy such humanitarian supplies as food and medicine, to be rationed to the Iraqi population. But the terms were hugely in Saddam's favor. The U.N. let Saddam choose his own business partners, kept the details of his deals confidential, and while watching for weapons-related goods did not, as it turns out, exercise much serious financial oversight. Saddam turned this setup to his own advantage, fiddling prices on contracts with his hand-picked partners, and smuggling out oil pumped under U.N. supervision with U.N.-approved new equipment. Thus did we arrive at the recent General Accounting Office estimate that under Oil-for-Food, despite sanctions, Saddam managed to skim and smuggle for himself more than $10 billion out of oil sales meant for relief."
"Later in 1998, Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors, and he would keep them out for the following four years. The U.N. in 1999 lifted the ceiling entirely on Saddam's oil exports and expanded the range of goods he could buy. It would keep his deals confidential to the end, and it let Saddam do business with scores of companies in such graft-friendly climes as Russia and Nigeria, as well as such terrorist-sponsoring places as Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Sudan, and such financial hideouts as Liechtenstein, Panama, Cyprus, and Switzerland.
"Much of Saddam's illicit Oil-for-Food money has yet to be traced. There are now at least eight official investigations into various aspects of Oil-for-Food, but none so far that combines adequate staffing and access with a focus on Oil-for-Food itself as the little black book of Saddam's possible terrorist links. The same kind of bureaucratic walls that once blocked our own intelligence community from nabbing al Qaeda are here compounded by the problem that Oil-for-Food was not a U.S. program, but on U.N. turf. And though the U.N. is the keeper of many of the records, Kofi Annan has displayed no interest in investigating the possibility that Oil-for-Food might have funded terrorists."