In my childhood atlas, they were two small diamond-shaped wedges of territory to the west and south of Kuwait, each marked "N.T." or "Neutral Territory". Sand on top, and below the surface, vast reservoirs of priceless oil. They weren't destined to stay neutral for long.

Ten years ago this week, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army rolled into Kuwait and the surrounding NT land, giving him control of 20 per cent of the world's oil reserves. Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the imposition of sanctions on Iraq; the Gulf War, a 42-day pummelling of Iraq led by the US airforce and topped off with a 100-hour ground war, followed in January 1991.

But that did not solve the problem. Today, Saddam remains firmly in power; in the eyes of most observers, he is stronger than ever.

Sanctions linger on like an appendix - something that once had a function, no longer does, but which nobody can be bothered getting rid of unless the pain grows too great. Unwilling to go to war to get rid of Saddam, the West takes the easy option and leaves the status quo in place.

But this status quo has contributed to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children since the UN put the sanctions in place, according to a UNICEF report last year. Child mortality has doubled and one-third of children are malnourished.

A succession of visitors have come back from Iraq with tales of enormous suffering. Maura Quinn of UNICEF Ireland visited schools with "no running water, no windows, no benches, holes in the roof, no clean water, no toilets, no books, the playground under rubbish with stagnant water".

Half of the babies in a hospital she visited would die within two days because of the lack of medical supplies, she was told.

Iraq's infrastructure is crumbling. Electricity blackouts are common. The tap-water causes diarrhoea. The sewers are broken and their content seeps to the surface. This pollution has killed the fish in the main rivers. Mosquitoes and other insects are proliferating because the government can no longer spray them.

The conclusion drawn by many is that the sanctions should be lifted. Irish MEP Niall Andrews, for instance, wants the vast majority of sanctions abolished so that Iraq's economic decline can be halted and its infrastructure upgraded.

But whose fault is it that ordinary Iraqis are suffering? The sanctions whipped away Iraq's main source of foreign revenue from oil sales.

In theory, food and medicines were always excluded from the sanctions, but bereft of its foreign revenue, Iraq had no means to pay for them.

Since December 1996, however, the UN has permitted an "oil-for-food" regime, under which Iraq is allowed export limited amounts of oil. The revenues involved are impressive; since its inception, Iraq has sold $25.3 billion-worth of oil.

Thirty per cent of this goes to pay war reparations, and there are other costs, but that still leaves $16 billion available for the humanitarian programme, according to the UN. Half of this was spent on food.

As ever when international organisations are involved, though, there have been problems: delays, mistakes, excessive bureaucracy.

The UN Security Council has at times delayed or denied urgently needed supplies (for example, ambulances), usually on the basis they could be used for military purposes.

But the Iraqi authorities have been accused of hoarding medical supplies and equipment and of making contracts with unreliable suppliers for defective products.

While ordinary Iraqis suffer, the ruling clique looks after itself. When the vice-chairman of Iraq's revolutionary command council needed medical treatment last year, he looked for it in Austria. But when a Viennese city councillor, inspired by the moves made in Britain to bring Pinochet to book, filed a court complaint against him for war crimes, Ezzat Ibrahim al-Durri hightailed it out of town before completing his treatment.

And the air war continues. British and US warplanes, flying from bases in Turkey, regularly bomb targets in northern and southern Iraq. Dozens of Iraqi civilians were killed in such attacks in two air-exclusion zones last year.

On at least two occasions in the past decade, the US has threatened a renewal of full-scale war over the behaviour of Saddam.

Layer by layer, the legitimacy of the UN sanctions is being peeled away. France, Russia, China and the 22 members of the Arab League all now support the lifting of sanctions, leaving Britain and the US as their main supporters.

A succession of UN officials in Iraq have resigned in protest at the humanitarian effects of their employer's actions. Irishman Dennis Halliday headed the UN humanitarian mission until he resigned in 1998; now he tours the world crusading against sanctions.

Littering his arguments with words such as "famine" and "genocide", Mr Halliday claims that oil-for-food is sustaining the humanitarian crisis. "It does make a huge difference in keeping the Iraqi people alive - but only barely alive," he said last month.

In the war of words between the US and Iraq, Washington consistently overstates the danger posed by Iraq, while Iraq gives misleading impressions of its military strength. Although Iraq's weapons sites have not been checked since UN arms inspectors were thrown out in 1998, most observers feel that Saddam poses little threat militarily.

Even Scott Ritter, who resigned as an arms inspector two years ago because he felt the UN was being too soft on Iraq, now believes that it has essentially disarmed and no longer poses a threat to its neighbours.

However, according to resolution 687, adopted after the Gulf War in 1991, sanctions will remain in place until the UN certifies that Iraq does not possess weapons of mass destruction.

Ten years on, it's striking how little has changed in this part of the Middle East. Saddam - like Gadafy, Bin Laden, Milosevic, Castro and so many others demonised by the US - remains at the helm.

Hundreds of people were executed last year and the use of torture and ill-treatment was systematic, according to Amnesty International.

According to Mr Ofra Bengio, a Middle East expert at Tel Aviv university and the author of a book on the dictator, the West has allowed Saddam to divert responsibility for the misery of sanctions away from himself and on to the US.

"The prolongation of the embargo has thus strengthened Saddam rather than weakening him, not least because it has made Iraqis depend on him more than ever for their livelihood," he said.

It's unlikely that there will be much movement on sanctions until after the US presidential elections in November. Even then, for the West, Saddam remains "the problem" - as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mrs Mary Robinson said in Dublin last month.