When I first went to Iraq before the 1991 war, Baghdad was a fairly modern city with modern facilities, people going about their business threatened by the building tension in the country at the time. I next went back in 2001 after having meetings in New York with the people running Committee 661, the Sanctions Committee.

There had been many complaints about the way in which the Oil For Food programme was working, the programme where Iraq is allowed to pump a certain amount of oil, a large proportion of it for humanitarian aid. 25% of what is pumped goes to the reparation fund, 3% goes to the UN and the rest has to go through a vetting committee. I’ve talked to some people about the illegal oil income that is in breach of the sanctions – I think the figure put on it by conservatives is about 1.3 billion per year – and while I don’t doubt that there are things Iraq hasn’t declared, I don’t think there is enough to finance what would be regarded as the production of the weapons of mass destruction.

So when I went to Iraq in 2001, things on the ground were very bad, but when I was there last week everything had deteriorated. Infant mortality is three times what it was in 1980; one child in four is malnourished; the conditions in the hospitals are appalling, particularly in relation to the treatment of the child leukaemias where a child needs three or four drugs to form a cocktail and there’s always one missing.

Children are dying from things associated with contaminated water – gastroenteritis conditions for example – but there’s a second big killer, which is black fever, transmitted by the sand fly. There’s a 20-day treatment for that, and the chances of recovery are 80-90%, but if one interrupts the 20-day programme you have to have a 40-day programme, and once again all the drugs aren’t there to handle that, so dreadful invidious choices between children have to be made by those responsible.

I am heavily critical of both sides; if I was apportioning blame I’d put about 20% on the Iraqi side and 80% on the sanctions. The thinking behind the sanctions was to drive the people to achieve a change of government but the opposite has happened, it has driven them into a total dependency on the state for food, it has demoralised them. The average civil servant has an average income of between five and six dollars a month, the head of a hospital has 25 dollars a month, a specialist would have 20 dollars a month, a retired professor I interviewed has four dollars a month for his pension after 30 years in the university.

The people go about affecting a kind of normality, but the middle class has disappeared. In 1990 you had a highly educated middle class with a great commitment to reading – ten years later all the books have been sold. People even sell the internal doors of their houses that are heavily ornamented, keeping only the outer door. Unemployment is 50% and the rest are dependent on the state in some way. 18 out of 26 million depend on food rations that are distributed through a ration card that you present at the local shop – there’s a charge of 250 denar, about 12 cent. Some people sell the milk in order to activate the rest of the food ration, and then this of course gets described in the tabloids as an abuse, as aid being sold abroad and so forth.

The threatened war will not impact on Saddam’s elite, about whom I would’ve been one of the very earliest critics from the 1980s on, but it will impact on the civilian population. If you have 18 million people depending on the state food system, and you get bombing of the crucial bridges over the two great rivers that trisect the country, the Tigris and the Euphrates, it creates immense problems moving the food, as with the first few weeks of the 1991 war.

There are reports internationally that a military strike, the ‘short sharp war’ as it’s described in some of the Pentagon papers, would involve 200 to 300 missiles hitting Baghdad early on. These mean you would also have damaged roads and rail, and generators to run water purification systems gone.

Different UN agencies have a contingency plan for food distribution, but the difficulty about that is diplomats are already leaving, and what the UN usually does is relocate its staff first and then probably withdraw them altogether, so the people in charge of the contingency plans are gone. Each household has already been allocated two months’ rations in addition to the usual, but people in desperation often won’t budget for the full nine weeks. What’s required for people immediately at risk would be 500,000 tons of food, five times the size of what has ever been transported in human history.

To give you a scale of what would happen in terms of casualties, the assessment is that you would have 100,000 direct, 400,000 indirect, about 3.3 million people at risk, including a million pregnant women and lactating mothers. The unofficial UNICEF document that has been leaked says that the number of children acutely malnourished would go from 4% to 30%.

There’s a moral choice facing the west not only about this threatened war but also about others: the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war, is one of the most important principles of international war. It is not an academic one, it is one of those from which, once it has signed, no country can denigrate or remove itself. And that has effectively been torn up.

You’re supposed to draw a distinction between children, civilians and combatants; you’re supposed to give children special protection. You’re not supposed to destroy facilities that affect children. I can’t understand how the European Union is staying so silent in relation to the Geneva Convention. That’s where the moral authority of small countries comes in – you don’t have to be a military power; you simply have to believe in international law.

The announcement by Brian Cowan that our neutrality was always military neutrality is both wrong and appalling. If you want to speak of positive neutrality, you would be developing the diplomatic options. I believe that instead of allowing a vacuum in which people just hurl insults at each other until February 14, we should fill it with activity of a diplomatic kind. And if the European Union won’t take the initiative as a collective, Ireland should do it, conscious that it is such an activity that helped us in the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

The massive peace demonstrations around the world are helping that process, and it is so very important that around the 15th of February, which will be a very dangerous few days, there be massive indications against the war.

It’s a very sad day when we have our defence forces, which have such a distinguished record of working for peacemaking operations in every continent in the world, deployed defending military aircraft. Silence becomes complicity in this regard.

If I were the Minister for Foreign Affairs myself, whether I liked it or not, I couldn’t afford to be silent. If there is a pre-emptive strike against Iraq by Britain and the United States without a United Nations sanction, there isn’t a single recognised international lawyer that I know who says that such would be legal, and through the build-up facilitated through Shannon you would have made yourself complicit in it. That is so wrong, and thankfully it is something that so many Irish people are opposed to.

There’s something interesting in the French response to Colin Powell’s statement to the UN, where they spoke of not just extending the inspection period but also increasing the number of inspectors and resources available to the inspectors. But they also had another one – I think the Iraqis might be willing to concede a more permanent UN presence that would achieve disarmament. But I also think that the UN should on moral and practical grounds end the sanctions, which are appalling and hold the civilian and child population of Iraq hostage, and the United Nations lessens and demeans itself by putting its stamp on their continuing operation.

It is an extraordinary indictment that, decade after decade, the features of famine repeat themselves and we still haven’t solved the logistics of the quick removal of emergency food response, but we are able to prepare for war and move hundreds of thousands of troops across the world within 96 hours.”

Michael D Higgins was speaking in conversation with Peter Murphy