Of all the reasons to oppose a war against Iraq, one of the most compelling is the image of innocent civilian victims. Children will die -- if only because Saddam Hussein won't hesitate to build orphanages atop his weapons labs.

And of all the accusations hurled against the West in its treatment of Iraq, the most damning is the human cost of sanctions. According to many peace groups, humanitarian organizations and politicians, sanctions have killed 500,000 Iraqi children. The total death toll from sanctions amounts to a million and a half innocent people.

Are these figures credible?

Only if you believe Saddam Hussein.

The truth is that these numbers come straight from Iraq's mighty propaganda factory. What gives them credibility is that they were endorsed in a 1999 report by Unicef. What's not so well-known is that the report was co-authored by the Iraqi health ministry, and all the statistics were supplied by the Iraqi government.

The first person to debunk these numbers was an Iraq expert named Amatzia Baram. In a lengthy analysis in The Middle East Journal, he revealed that there was no actual body count. Despite claims that 4,000 or 5,000 or 7,561 children were dying every month from sanctions, Iraqi officials simply made the numbers up. They did it by subtracting the population in 1997 from what they thought the population should have been, and blamed sanctions for the difference. Mr. Baram reached a different conclusion: "Most of the persons missing in 1997 according to the Iraqi claim were never born."

Until the end of the '90s, he observes, there were no independent field surveys of child mortality in Iraq. He also points out that Mr. Hussein stalled for six years before he accepted the United Nations' oil-for-food program, which allowed him to sell his oil in exchange for essential humanitarian supplies. So it's Mr. Hussein who bears most of the responsibility for the malnutrition (and, no doubt, deaths ) of Iraqi children in the past decade.

The suffering of the Iraqi people has been immense. And the main cause is Saddam Hussein. He has tried to manipulate the oil-for-food program to punish regions that oppose him. He has used Iraq's smuggling and tax revenues for guns, not butter. He has sacrificed health and education programs to finance his weapons, then used hungry people and sick children as a cynical propaganda tool. (In 1998 and 1999, despite the urging of the UN, he refused to order baby formula for new mothers.)

When people call him the Butcher of Baghdad, the peace faction wails about demonizing the enemy. But it's the simple truth. He has waged war against his own people for 30 years. He has slaughtered Kurds and Shiites, Christians and Sunnis and Communists. In all his massacres, the children and the elderly, the weak and the sick, suffered most. He used as many as a million of his own young men as cannon fodder in his wars of aggression. He has tortured and killed thousands of real or imagined enemies of the regime in waves of Stalin-like purges, and driven millions more into exile.

In an interview last week, Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, a leading human-rights expert on Iraq, described the suppression of the Shia uprising in 1991. "The Iraqis made people lie down in the streets and then buried them under asphalt. They killed everyone who looked a little religious, because this was a Shi'ite area. It was forbidden to take the corpses from the street." The death toll was 60,000 or 70,000 -- no one knows for sure.

Mr. von der Osten-Sacken, 34, is a German leftist who is not in favour of a war. (He's not confident that the U.S. is committed to establishing a democracy there.) But he thinks the peace faction is blind. "Ten per cent of the Iraqi population has been killed or deported during the rule of Saddam Hussein. That is the essence of his regime. It is not an accident. It is systematic."

I suspect this fact will do nothing to dissuade the gullible and the naive. They will persist in their pathetic pilgrimages to Baghdad, where they will be taken on the obligatory tour of the dismal Saddam Children's Hospital (but not the hospitals of the elite), and will pronounce that the West is to blame.

I have no doubt that Saddam Hussein, like Stalin, will continue to attract his share of useful idiots -- of whom Canada has contributed more than its share. "The way to deal with Iraq is not by killing thousands of Iraqi civilians," say Margaret Atwood and Pierre Berton and David Suzuki piously. What do they imagine Mr. Hussein has been doing all these years? What do they imagine will ever make him quit? How much blood will be enough?

"Saddam is conducting a war against his own people," says Mr. von der Osten-Sacken, "and it must be stopped."
mwente@globeandmail.ca