Even if the sweeping trade sanctions were lifted tomorrow, ``it would take years for the country to return to the same standards
as before the Gulf War,'' because of the utter devastation, said the report, which was obtained Tuesday by The Associated
Press.

``Iraq: A decade of sanctions,'' outlines ICRC work in Iraq following the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Persian Gulf
War, and was intended to justify to donors why the relief organization has had to increase its budget and operations in the
country, ICRC officials said.

But it also has added some fuel to the increasingly volatile debate over the sanctions and their impact on Iraq's 22 million
people, offering details of the desperate state of the nation's hospitals and the population as a whole.

``Deteriorating living conditions, inflation and low salaries make people's everyday lives a continuing struggle, while food
shortages and lack of medicines and clean drinking water threaten their very survival,'' the report said.

Iraq's collapsed health system and badly damaged water sanitation system pose the ``gravest threat,'' it said.

U.N. Security Council resolutions say Iraq must be declared free of its weapons of mass destruction before sweeping trade
sanctions, imposed after Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, can be lifted.

The United States has blamed Iraq for the suffering of its people, saying President Saddam Hussein has prolonged sanctions by
refusing to cooperate with arms inspectors and has failed to implement a U.N. aid program that allows Iraq to buy humanitarian
goods through U.N.-supervised oil sales.

Washington, however, also has come under fire internationally and at home for its hard line on sanctions and for blocking
Baghdad from receiving badly needed equipment through the U.N. program. The United States says it wants to make sure the
goods, which include equipment to repair Iraq's bombed-out power grid, oil industry and water sanitation system, aren't used
for military purposes.

The Security Council has pledged to try to improve the efficiency of the U.N. humanitarian program in Iraq, but the ICRC
report said that neither the oil-for-food program nor any other aid program can meet all of Iraq's basic needs.

The report paints a bleak profile of the effect that the dilapidated infrastructure has had on Iraq's health system, profiling four
hospitals and a health center that ICRC members visited as part of an in-depth survey last year.

Basic rules of hygiene are not followed at the Al Karama Teaching Hospital in Baghdad because of a lack of disinfectants and
water, the report says. Syringes, intravenous lines and fluids are in short supply. The sewage treatment plant has not worked for
years and electricity is erratic.

At the Basra Teaching Hospital, waste water seeps through the piping — and in one case, dripped from the ceiling into the
abdomen of a patient, the ICRC report quoted the hospital director as saying. The patient survived. But the entire basement is
inundated under water, making it home to rats and stray dogs.

Doctors at the Al-Rashad Psychiatric Hospital, meanwhile, have no access to anti-psychotic drugs and must administer electric
shock treatment to patients when they are awake because there is no anesthesia.

The report notes that the problems are compounded by the fact that most of the equipment and technology that made Iraq's
health system among the best in the Middle East before the Gulf War was imported — meaning its upkeep was particularly
vulnerable to sanctions.

``The population, in particular doctors, technicians and teachers, are now exposed to Third World problems which they had
never been prepared to deal with,'' the report said.