It was pretty much crap before we got there.

Under the direction of Ambassador Amorim, the humanitarian panel reported that Iraq had experienced "a shift from relative affluence to massive poverty". It also confirmed that the disturbing figures given by United Nations agencies on the nutrition, health and social situation of the country are reliable and exact.

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the mortality rate for children under five rose from 56 per 1,000 in the period 1984-1989 to the current 131 per 1,000. The infant mortality rate is among the highest in the world. One dramatic statistic in a recent British parliamentary report deserves mention: if the progress in health observed during the 1980s had been maintained through the following decade, 500,000 children would have survived.

The situation is scarcely better in the educational sector. According to UNICEF, the school attendance rate fell by 20% between 1991 and 1999. The UNICEF representative who spoke to the Committee on Monday pointed out that education had lost value in Iraq today as the country's young people see their parents forced to accept jobs at a lower level than their studies had prepared them for. This "embargo generation" is a lost generation.

In the area of social services, the situation has also deteriorated. Only 41% of the population has regular access to clean water, the quality of which has also deteriorated, according to the World Health Organization. Power cuts are frequent and growing longer. Iraq's health-care system has suffered greatly from the shortages of clean water and electricity. At this point, it is in a decrepit state, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Lastly, the almost daily bombardments have had negative humanitarian effects on the civilian population. According to our information, these military actions killed 144 civilians and injured 446; 42% of the victims in the air raids have been civilians.

An entire society is today living without structure and being destroyed. This will have long-term consequences for Iraq and for regional balance as a whole. Admittedly, the Iraqi Government bears a heavy share of the initial blame for this disastrous situation. But the Security Council can no longer disregard its own responsibility in the matter, which is indisputable and increasingly condemned by international public opinion.

The 1999 ICRC report is here.

You can find a lot of other U.N. and other documents of this type around this time period, when the prime objective was getting rid of the sanctions on Iraq.

Keep in mind that the Conventional Wisdom now is that "sanctions and no-fly zones were working" and should have been maintained.