The Politics of Dead Children / Have sanctions against Iraq murdered millions?

Two weeks after the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I began looking in earnest for trustworthy sources of information about the effects of sanctions on Iraq. I was joined in my search by a half-dozen or so e-mail acquaintances who approached the question from a broadly similar viewpoint: If sanctions are killing Iraqi babies, then Osama Bin Laden has a legitimate propaganda tool, and the U.S. has blood on its hands that demands immediate attention. So let’s find the facts, weigh them against Saddam’s weapons capabilities, and proceed from there.

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Garfield concluded that between August 1991 and March 1998 there were at least 106,000 excess deaths of children under 5, with a “more likely” worst-case sum of 227,000. (He recently updated the latter figure to 350,000 through this year.) Of those deaths, he estimated one-quarter were “mainly associated with the Gulf war.” The chief causes, in his view, were “contaminated water, lack of high quality foods, inadequate breast feeding, poor weaning practices, and inadequate supplies in the curative health care system. This was the product of both a lack of some essential goods, and inadequate or inefficient use of existing essential goods.”

Ultimately, Garfield argued, sanctions played an undeniably important role. “Even a small number of documentable excess deaths is an expression of a humanitarian disaster, and this number is not small,” he concluded. “[And] excess deaths should…be seen as the tip of the iceberg among damages to occur among under five-year-olds in Iraq in the 1990s….The humanitarian disaster which has occurred in Iraq far exceeds what may be any reasonable level of acceptable damages according to the principles of discrimination and proportionality used in warfare….To the degree that economic sanctions complicate access to and utilization of essential goods, sanctions regulations should be modified immediately.”

(http://reason.com/archives/2002/03/01/the-politics-of-dead-children/singlepage)