After September 11, the anecdote received new life, as in this typically imaginative interpretation by Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham in the magazine's November issue: "When Madeleine Albright, then the American secretary of state [sic], was asked in an interview on 60 Minutes whether she had considered the resulting death of 500,000 Iraqi children (of malnutrition and disease), she said, 'We think the price is worth it.'"
Albright has been dogged by protesters at nearly all her campus appearances the past several years, and rightly so: It was a beastly thing to say, and she should have refuted the figures. Quietly, a month after the World Trade Center attack, she finally apologized for her infamous performance. "I shouldn't have said it," she said during a speech at the University of Southern California. "You can believe this or not, but my comments were taken out of context."
The other, far more credible source of the 500,000 number is a pair of 1999 UNICEF studies that estimated the under-5 mortality rates of both Iraqi regions based on interviews with a total of 40,000 households. "If the substantial reduction in the under-five mortality rate during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s," the report concluded, "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." If the expected mortality rate had stayed level rather than continuing its downward slope, the excess death number would be more like 420,000.
Significantly, UNICEF found child mortality actually decreased in the autonomous north (from 80.2 per 1,000 in 1984-89 to 70.8 in 1994-98) while more than doubling in the south (from 56 per 1,000 to 130.6). This is Exhibit A for those who, like The New Republic, argue that Saddam alone is responsible for Iraq's humanitarian crisis. When the report was released, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy attributed the difference in mortality trends to "the large amount of international aid pumped into northern Iraq at the end of the [Persian Gulf] war."
The UNICEF report took pains to spread the blame for increased mortality in the south, mentioning factors such as a dramatic increase in the bottle-only feeding of infants in place of more nutritious (and less likely to be tainted) breast milk. "It's very important not to just say that everything rests on sanctions," Bellamy said in a subsequent interview. "It is also the result of wars and the reduction in investment in resources for primary health care."
But in the hands of sanctions opponents and some news organizations, these findings were translated into a U.N. admission that sanctions were "directly responsible" for killing half a million children (or even "infants"). In September 2001 alone, the UNICEF report was mischaracterized in The Boston Globe, The Buffalo News, The Akron Beacon Journal, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Charleston Gazette, the Wilmington Sunday Star-News, and The Chicago Tribune (by a Northwestern University journalism professor, no less).
By November, UNICEF was annoyed enough with the frequent misinterpretations to send out regular corrective press releases, saying things like: "The surveys were never intended to provide an absolute figure of how many children have died in Iraq as a result of sanctions." Rather, they "show that if the substantial reductions in child mortality in Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s -- in other words 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."
Sanctions critics almost always leave out one other salient fact: The vast majority of the horror stats they quote apply to the period before March 1997, when the oil-for-food program delivered its first boatload of supplies (nearly six years after the U.N. first proposed the idea to a reluctant Iraqi government). In the past four years of oil-for-food, Iraq has exported around 3 billion barrels of oil, generating $40 billion in revenue, which has resulted in the delivery of $18 billion of humanitarian and oil-equipment supplies, with another $16 billion in the pipeline. (The rest is used to cover administrative costs and reparations to Kuwait.)
As the U.N. Office for the Iraqi Program stated in a September 28, 2001 report, "With the improved funding level for the program, the Government of Iraq is indeed in a position to address the nutritional and health concerns of the Iraqi people, particularly the nutritional status of the children." Even two years earlier, Richard Garfield noted in his survey that "the most severe embargo-related damages [have] already ended."
Anyone who tells you more children will perish in Iraq this month than Americans died on September 11 is cutting and pasting inflated mid-1990s statistics onto a country that has changed significantly since then. Knowingly or not, these critics are mangling the facts to prove a debatable point and in the process damaging their own cause.
The Truth is Bad Enough
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.
It immediately became obvious that sanctions opponents, especially in the U.S., would be a hindrance, not a help. "I'm a little disgusted at the way the Naderite left has used the issue, especially when they have no backup for the claims they are making," one of my co-conspirators, Eric Mauro, wrote me. "They may be right, but they are so inept at arguing that it's dangerous to take their word for it."
The man who launched the American anti-sanctions movement as we know it is a University of Texas journalism professor named Robert Jensen. His Web site's "factsheet" on Iraq contains two lies right off the bat. Citing WHO, he claims that "each month 5,000 to 6,000 children die as a result of the sanctions." And citing UNICEF, he asserts that "approximately 250 people die every day in Iraq due to the sanctions."
Jensen, who teaches "critical thinking," drifted onto the national radar screen days after the terrorist attacks, when he wrote a column published in ZNet, CommonDreams.org, and The Houston Chronicle titled "U.S. Just As Guilty of Committing Own Violent Acts." He has opposed the war against Afghanistan (not to mention Serbia), teaches the journalism of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and once wrote a column about how the "U.S. middle class, particularly the white middle class, is probably the single biggest impediment to justice the world has ever known."
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