"We heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?"

"I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."

-Madeline Albright (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, now Secretary of State) responding to Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes (May 12, 1996)

"We are in the proccess of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. it is illegal and immoral."

-Denis Halliday, Former U.N. Assistant Secretary General, and Humanitarian Aid Coordinator for Iraq, in his resignation speech, September 30, 1998.

"The sanctions were failing in the purposes they were set up for back in 1990-91. They weren't leading to disarmament and, second, the cost of sanctions was completely unacceptable - killing 6,000 to 7,000 children a month. Sustaining a level of malnutrition of about 30 percent for children under five leads to physical and mental problems. It's incompatible with the U.N. Charter, with the Convention on Human Rights, with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and probably with many other international agreements. I just found that impossible to accept as the head of the United Nations in Iraq."

-Denis Halliday

"We call on the president of America, the vice president and the congressmen to come to Iraq and see the little children, and Tony Blair, the U.K. government and Kofi Annan to come and to go to the cancer ward and give us an answer: what was their crime?"

-Adolfo Perez-Esquivel of Argentina, Noble Peace Prize laureate, on a visit to Iraq as part of a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegration.

"As a U.N. official, I should not be expected to be silent to that which I recognize as a true human tradegy that needs to be ended. How long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent in all this, be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done? The very title that I hold as a humanitarian coordinator suggests I cannot be silent over that which we see here. My support, my commitment is for the Iraqi people as a group of deprived people whose tradegy should end."

-Hans Von Sponech, Former Humanitarian Aid Coordinator for Iraq, February 13, 2000. Two days later he resigned in protest. On February 14, Dr. Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq also resigned.