Free Republic

UNITED NATIONS -- Iraq wants the United Nations to lift all sanctions and stop using the country's oil revenue to pay compensation to victims of the 1991 Gulf War and the salaries of U.N. weapons inspectors, Iraq's U.N. ambassador said Tuesday. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie called sanctions "anachronistic and inappropriate" and said it's time for the Security Council to recognize that Iraq is a "much more internationally friendly" country that wants to be at peace with its neighbors. No longer needed, he said, was the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which was responsible for dismantling Iraqi programs to build chemical...

"U.S. economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein have caused the death of a million Iraqi children!" It's not surprising that this claim has been trumpeted by the usual cabal of America-hating lefties like Robert Jensen, Edward Said, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. But when the mainstream media pick up the chant and repeat it, it's no wonder many people accept it as fact. In the March issue of Reason magazine, columnist Matt Welch does yeoman's work in ferreting out the derivation of this wildly inflated statistic. In summary, he traces the original assertion to a New York-based advocacy group called the...