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=> The Iraqi babies scam is still alive

The Iraqi babies scam is still alive
Posted by Jeff (Guest) jeff@attoz.com - Wednesday, February 25 2004, 13:21:41 (EST)
from 69.14.56.182 - d14-69-182-56.try.wideopenwest.com Commercial - Windows XP - Netscape
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Found this at his WEB SITE:

http://mattwelch.com/FreelanceSave/StarBabies.htm
Beruit Daily Star - September 3, 2003


The Iraqi babies scam is still alive

On Aug. 26, the widely published America-critic Tariq Ali repeated one of the most persistent myths of recent Middle Eastern history. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Ali asserted that United Nations sanctions against Iraq from 1990-2003 were, “according to UNICEF figures… directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children.”
This has never been true, no matter how many thousands of times it’s been cited by partisans on either side of the international debate over sanctions policy toward Iraq. Now that the end of the second Gulf war has brought forth a torrent of new and better information about humanitarian cause and effect under the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, sifting through it accurately is the best method for evaluating whether sanctions should remain in the diplomatic toolbox.
First, the myth. In 1999, UNICEF published a study, based on interviews with 40,000 Iraqi households, which concluded: “If the substantial reduction in the under-five mortality rate during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998.”
Doesn’t that prove that Ali and others are right? No. First, the assumption is based on mortality rates continuing their same historic decline as during the 1980s; if the expectation benchmark was fixed to 1989 levels, the “excess death” number would be closer to 400,000. Second, UNICEF found that under-five mortality actually decreased in the autonomous north, while doubling in Saddam-controlled regions, giving pro-sanctions (and pro-war) advocates evidence that the Iraqi dictator was largely to blame. (It is also true that the north received far more international aid.)
Thirdly, and most importantly, the UNICEF study never once assigned anything like 100 percent of the blame to UN resolutions. “It’s very important not to just say that everything rests on sanctions,” UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said in an interview at the time. “It is also the result of wars and the reduction in investment in resources for primary healthcare.”
The study was so often cited after the Sept. 11, 2001 massacres as evidence for the “blowback” interpretation of the air attacks, that UNICEF had to rush out another clarifying press release.
“The surveys were never intended to provide an absolute figure of how many children have died in Iraq as a result of sanctions,” the statement read. Rather, they show that “if there hadn’t been two wars, if sanctions hadn’t been introduced and if investment in social services had been maintained ­ there would have been 500,000 fewer deaths of children under five.”
Others who have studied the numbers in detail shoot lower. Richard Garfield, a Columbia University nursing professor whose sanctions work has earned high praise, came up with a range of between 106,000 and 227,000 excess deaths from August 1991 to March 1998. Recently he cited the figures 345,000-530,000 for the entire 1990-2002 period. This would mean that the rate actually accelerated during the “oil-for-food” program, which brought a whopping $28 billion worth of humanitarian supplies into Iraq between March 1997 and March 2003.
Since the US military defeat of the Baathist regime, anecdotal evidence has piled up suggesting that Saddam milked the humanitarian tragedy for all it was worth. In May, doctors at Baghdad hospitals told reporters from the BBC, Newsday and other media that they were forced to save each and every dead baby’s corpse ­ regardless of cause of death ­ to display in made-for-Al-Jazeera protests against the murderous sanctions.
The doctors also explained how medical supplies delivered by the oil-for-food program would be deliberately diverted or damaged. “We would get a shipment from the Ministry of Health of vaccines provided by the World Health Organization,” one doctor told journalist David Rieff, who wrote a long and critical article on sanctions for the July 27 issue of the New York Times Magazine. “But then we would be instructed not to use them until they had reached or even exceeded their sell-by date. Then the television cameras would come, and we would be told to lie and tell the public how the UN made ordinary Iraqis suffer.”
The US Defense Department claimed in July that the Baath regime spent a microscopic $13 million on healthcare for the Iraqi people in 2002. “That’s less than $1 per person per year,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder told reporters on July 25: “Yet, Saddam and his sons continued to spend the money of Iraq and its resources in their palaces, and in their security apparatus and in their effort to pursue weapons of mass destruction. It is almost unbelievable. One has to be there to believe it and to see it.”
Ultimately, it is still too early to assign precise blame for Iraq’s humanitarian catastrophe between the two Gulf wars. Certainly, the effects of sanctions could have easily been avoided had Saddam complied with UN resolutions by more readily paying reparations to Kuwait, as well as disarming and discontinuing weapons programs (he even rejected the oil-for-food offer for nearly two years), and allowing UN inspectors to verify this. What’s clear is that the Iraqi dictator recognized sanctions as one of his only effective propaganda tools, which gave him material incentive to exaggerate and worsen their impact.
Which is an excellent reason to question their continued infliction upon countries such as Cuba, Libya and Myanmar. With the very notable exception of South Africa, the sanction tool’s track record in changing dictatorial behavior (or triggering regime change, which is often the real motivation) has been poor. Surely there must be some option between all-out war and a slap on the wrist, preferably one that doesn’t contribute to thousands of needless deaths.

Matt Welch debunked the figures for dead Iraqi babies in the March 2002 issue of Reason magazine, where he is an associate editor. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR




parhad wrote:
>it's easy to say all of this...we have said numerous things about the missing WMDs and no one has even bothered to explain them away...except to say Saddam would have "liked to" have made them...though how we know that is beyond proof.
>
>I'll bet you that if any number of challenges to this guy came in with several offers for an open and public debate...he would say..."I haven't the time to waste...read my lips".



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