One of my least favourite memories of the Margaret Thatcher years is of that old Tribune hand and "inveterate peacemonger", Michael Foot, banging the drum of war in support of the Iron Maiden's Falklands adventure. One of my least favourite moments of the New Labour government to date was the sight of so few Labour MPs (a couple of dozen, all of them the "usual suspects") going into the Noes lobby in the vote on bombing Iraq.

At least Michael Foot's intervention on behalf of the war party in 1982 could be excused on the grounds that the success of the Falklands task force helped to bring down a nasty military dictatorship. (Foot's rhetoric was always as much about "fighting fascism" as it was about flying the union flag.) If we had gone ahead with chucking some more cruise missiles in the direction of Baghdad, however, it's unlikely that it would have done anything worse to Saddam Hussein's regime than to cause some temporary delays in the construction schedules on his presidential palaces.

It would also, of course, have resulted in the inevitable "collateral damage" and heaped further misery upon the ordinary people of Iraq. All of which might have been defensible if the effect had been to bring down Saddam, but which would have had little justification as a short-term gambit to get him to admit UN inspectors to places from which any connection with weapons of mass destruction will have been long since erased by the time they get to visit them anyway.

There is no easy answer to the problem of what to do with Saddam. Those of us who opposed a renewed bombing campaign against him can no more supply a simple solution to his iniquities than those who put their faith in "smart weapons". In particular, the peace party must address the unpleasant reality that many times more people have died in Iraq as a consequence of "nonviolent" sanctions against Saddam than did in the Gulf war proper -- or would have done as a result of a new bombing onslaught.

The figures bear repeating, not least because there exists a kind of state of denial about what is happening in Iraq with every day that the seven-year-long impasse with Saddam is permitted to continue. The avoidance of war should not be confused with the onset of peace; in Iraq, it simply means that people will continue to die in ways other than by bombing.

And they are dying in extremely large numbers. The most widely quoted statistic suggests that more than one million Iraqis may have died as a direct consequence of damage done during the 1991 war and the impact of UN sanctions (and Saddam's diversion of available resources for military and security purposes) since then. The provenance of this figure is worth emphasising because its appearance in anti-war campaign propaganda may raise doubts about its legitimacy. Yet it is not the product of some rhetorical conjuring trick, a number plucked from thin air and exaggerated over and again for maximum effect.

Rather, it emerges from the considered best estimates of official UN agencies charged with the task of assessing the need for and administering humanitarian relief in the region. The actual figure may be rather lower (or, indeed, higher); what is certain is that the dead are numbered in hundreds of thousands. And the number of deaths relates, above all, to what UNICEF has called a "lethal synergy between malnutrition and infection" among children, who comprise the majority of those who have died.

The incidence of chronic malnutrition illnesses such as kwashiorkor and marasmus tells its own story. Kwashiorkor notifications increased from 41 per month in 1990 to 2,237 in 1995; marasmus cases averaged 20,549 a month in 1995 compared with 433 in 1990. The mortality rate among children under five has risen from 29 to 140 deaths per 1,000 live births since 1991. UNICEF estimates that: "A child with diarrhoea in 1990 had a one in 600 chance of dying; in 1996 this became one in 50. A child with pneumonia in 1990 had a one in 60 chance of dying; in 1996, one in eight children with pneumonia died."

Even more depressing is UNICEF's current bald assessment that: "There is no sign of any improvement since Security Council Resolution 986/1111 [allowing Iraq to sell oil for food] came into force." This puts into cold perspective Robin Cook's defence of sanctions in the Guardian last month. "The sanctions regime does not prevent medicines or food from getting to the Iraqi people," he wrote. "Ever since sanctions were imposed, Britain has led efforts to ensure that the impact on the Iraqi people was minimised, and that the impact on the regime was maximised."

I do not intend it as a cheap debating point to ask: So how can it be that the Iraqi people are still dying and Saddam's regime is still in power?