Much of Iraq’s economic infrastructure was damaged from lack of resources due to the sanctions. Iraq's ability for aggression was also destroyed. The purpose was to coerce the Iraqi government to cooperate with the United Nations, to initiate an improvement in Iraq's previously aggressive foreign policy, and reduce human rights abuses.
Critics of the sanctions say that over a million Iraqis, disproportionately children, died as a result of them, [6] although other researchers concluded that the total was lower. [4] [7] [8] UNICEF announced that 500,000 child deaths have occurred as a result of the sanctions.[9] The sanctions resulted in high rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, and diseases from lack of clean water. Chlorine, was desperately needed to disinfect water supplies, but it was banned from the country due to the potential that it may be used as part of a chemical weapon. On May 10, 1996, Madeleine Albright (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations at the time) appeared on 60 Minutes and was confronted with statistics of half a million children under five having died as a result of the sanctions. She replied "we think the price is worth it", though in her 2003 autobiography she wrote of her response (answering a loaded question): [10]
I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it. … I had fallen into a trap and said something that I simply did not mean. That is no one’s fault but my own.[11]
Denis Halliday was appointed United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, Iraq as of 1 September 1997, at the Assistant Secretary-General level. In October 1998 he resigned after a 34 year career with the UN in order to have the freedom to criticise the sanctions regime, saying "I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide"[12] However Sophie Boukhari an UNESCO Courier journalist reports that "Some legal experts are sceptical about or even against using such terminology." and quotes Mario Bettati (who invented the notion of "the right of humanitarian intervention") "People who talk like that don’t know anything about law. The embargo has certainly affected the Iraqi people badly, but that’s not at all a crime against humanity or genocide." and reports that William Bourdon the secretary-general of International Federation of Human Rights Leagues said "one of the key elements of a crime against humanity and of genocide is intent. The embargo wasn’t imposed because the United States and Britain wanted children to die. If you think so, you have to prove it."[13]
Halliday's successor, Hans von Sponeck, subsequently also resigned in protest. Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq, followed them. According to von Sponeck, the sanctions restricted Iraqis to living on $100 each of imports per year.[citation needed]
[edit] Infant and child death rates
Iraq's infant and child survival rates fell after sanctions were imposed.A May 25, 2000 BBC article[14] reported that before Iraq sanctions were imposed by the UN in 1990, infant mortality had "fallen to 47 per 1,000 live births between 1984 and 1989. This compares to approximately 7 per 1,000 in the UK." The BBC article was reporting from a study of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, titled "Sanctions and childhood mortality in Iraq", that was published in the May 2000 Lancet medical journal.[15][16]
The 2000 BBC article reported that in south and central Iraq, infant mortality rate between 1994 and 1999 had inclined to 108 per 1,000. Child mortality rate, which refers to children between the age of one and five years, also drastically inclined from 56 to 131 per 1,000.[14]
The 2000 BBC article also reported, "However, it found that infant and child mortality in the autonomous, mainly Kurd region in the North of the country, has actually fallen, perhaps reflecting the more favourable distribution of aid in that area."[14]
In the spring of 2000 a U.S. Congressional letter demanding the lifting of the sanctions garnered 71 signatures, while House Democratic Whip David Bonior called the economic sanctions against Iraq "infanticide masquerading as policy
. That's another topic I guess. 
