Five-year-old Attared Ziad lay dying of leukaemia in the Saddam children’s hospital in Baghdad. His mother blamed Tony Blair. “May your youngest son suffer as much as mine — maybe then you will understand,” she said bitterly.

The drug he needs, Cytosar, is not available in Iraq. And the very poor, such as Attared’s family, cannot afford to have it smuggled from neighbouring countries.

In the next bed lay Koogine Farhat, a four-year-old Kurdish boy whose father lives in London. The child moaned and twisted in pain, telling his mother he ached in the stomach and head.

Dr Haidar Amin Aziz, a medical intern, said the child needed blood plasma but there were few machines available to purify the blood and make the plasma.

The plight of such children has been highlighted by the anti-war demonstrators in the West. The children’s distraught parents and doctors blame United Nations sanctions — and Blair and George Bush — for the lack of medical supplies.

Western officials and the UN itself point out that the sanctions are in place because Saddam Hussein has still not convinced the security council that he has complied with his agreement to disarm after being thrown out of Kuwait in 1991. This argument, however, has no effect in the emotive atmosphere of the children’s hospital.

“You think it is easy for a mother to watch her child suffer like this?” said a doctor. “What is the West talking about? The sanctions have increased the cancer in children and that is a fact. We are seeing abnormal numbers unfamiliar in our history before the war and this is most certainly related to the sanctions and its effects, the poverty and malnutrition, and the effects of war.”

Under a UN oil-for-food programme, Baghdad is allowed to export oil and to use the proceeds to acquire food and humanitarian goods. Iraq is estimated to have earned $62 billion since the beginning of this set of sanctions in 1996. Of this, 72% has gone on “humanitarian expenses”, 25% to compensate victims of the 1991 Gulf war, 2.2% for operational expenses and 0.8% to finance UN weapons inspections, according to official figures.

During this time, severe malnutrition was down from 11% to 4% of Iraqi children, but chronic malnutrition is still 23%, having fallen from 32%, says Ramiro Lopes Da Silva, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq.

Experts say malnutrition could increase rapidly again if food distribution is disrupted. An estimated 60% of Iraqis are totally dependent on UN food allocations.

The poverty that has befallen what was once the most advanced country in the Middle East is shocking. The middle class, all but wiped out, is now part of the dispossessed lower class that makes up the majority of Iraqi society.