MAYDAY:Neo-Con Bliar on morality.
socialist
You tried to spin weapons of mass destruction and that failed. You tried
to spin terrorist links with OBL, but we all know that was bollocks. Now
you're onto morality and humanitarianism in a desperate attempt to drum
up support for an immoral, unnecessary and unprovoked war.
There is no chance of you saying "Trust me" any more because we all
realise now that you're full of shit. Now I'm going to put an and to the
humanitarian nonsese that you're spinning(lying).
Iraqi children are dying because of the sanctions imposed by the US and
UK. How dare you speak of morality and humanitarianism. You, your
administration and the US administration are directly responsible for
these deaths.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/2002/paper.htm
None deny that Iraq sanctions have caused many deaths, but a debate has
raged over how many. The larger the number, the greater the burden on
sanction advocates to justify their actions. Unfortunately, wrangling
over numbers obscures the unavoidable reality: a tragically large
humanitarian disaster.
The measurement of deaths rests on the concept of "excess" mortality
- those deaths that exceed the mortality rate in the previous,
pre-sanctions period or that exceed a projection of the earlier trend
towards further gains. The previous mortality rate is well-established,
but two arguments arise first, what is the present mortality rate
(which, some argue, may be distorted by false Iraq government
statistics) and second, what is the cause of such mortality increase.
Neither of these questions has a simple answer. Not surprisingly, the
government of Iraq claims a very large increase and blames most of its
child mortality on sanctions. UNICEF, in a widely-publicised study
carried
out jointly with the Iraq Ministry of Health, determined that 500,000
children
under five years old had died in ?excess? numbers in Iraq between 1991
and
1998, though UNICEF insisted that this number could not all be ascribed
directly to sanctions. (119) UNICEF used surveys of its own as part of
the basic research and involved respected outside experts in designing
the study and evaluating the data. UNICEF remains confident in the
accuracy
of its numbers and points out that they have never been subject to a
scientific challenge.
Prof. Richard Garfield of Columbia University carried out a separate and
well-regarded study of excess mortality in Iraq. Garfield considered
the same age group and the same time period as the UNICEF study. (120)
He minimized reliance on official Iraqi statistics by using many
different statistical sources, including independent surveys in Iraq and
inferences from comparative public health data from other countries.
Garfield concluded that there had been a minimum of 100,000 excess
deaths and that the more likely number was 227,000. He compared this
estimate to a maximum estimate of 66,663 civilian and military deaths
during the Gulf War. Garfield now thinks the most probable number of
deaths of under-five children from August 1991 to June 2002 would be
about 400,000. (121)
There are no reliable estimates of the total number of excess deaths in
Iraq beyond the under-five population. Even with conservative
assumptions, though, the total of all excess deaths must be far above
400,000.
All of these excess deaths should not be ascribed to sanctions. Some may
be due to a variety of other causes. But all major studies make it clear
that sanctions have been the primary cause, because of the sanctions'
impact on food, medical care, water, and other health-related factors.
Though oil-for-food has changed the situation studied by UNICEF and
Garfield, resulting in less malnutrition, recent field reports suggest
that infant mortality remains high, due to water-borne disease. (122)
The mortality rate for under-five children has probably not continued to
rise since the 1999 studies, but the rate apparently remains very much
higher than that reported in Iraq before 1990.
In the face of such powerful evidence, the US and UK governments have
sometimes practiced bold denial. Brian Wilson, Minister of State at the
UK Foreign Office told a BBC interviewer on February 26, 2001 "There is
no evidence that sanctions are hurting the Iraqi people." When denial
has proved impossible, officials have occasionally fallen back on
astonishingly callous affirmations. In a famous interview with Madeleine
Albright, then US representative at the United Nations, Leslie Stahl of
the television show 60 Minutes said: "We have heard that half a million
children have died . . . is the price worth it? Albright replied, "I
think this is a very hard choice, but the price we think the price is
worth it." (123)
Six years after Albright?s statement and twelve years after Security
Council Resolution 661, comprehensive economic sanctions continue to
impose on Iraq a very high number of deaths of young children, as
measured by careful and well-regarded estimates. Combined with the
deaths of older children and adults, this adds up to a great and
unjustifiable humanitarian tragedy.
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