5000 children a month?

[King Coal]

A right-winger I know is making the following claim:

"you have given a figure of about 10,000 iraqi’s killed since the start of the war. 5000 kids a month were dying because of the sanctions. clinton was in office for 8 years. there are 12 months to the year. i hope you can do the math from there."

Where in the world can he possibly be getting that number from? Have any of you ever heard a number of children dead from the sanctions?

[Massacure]

1. There wouldn't be sanctions if Bush Sr. had just overthrown Saddam

[Zynx]

2. That number seems obscenely high.

[teach1st]

3. Some links

http://reason.com/0203/fe.mw.the.shtml

Are "a million innocent children...dying at this time...in Iraq" because of U.S. sanctions, as Osama bin Laden claimed in his October 7 videotaped message to the world? Has the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) discovered that "at least 200 children are dying every day...as a direct result of sanctions," as advocacy journalist John Pilger maintains on his Web site? Is it official U.N. belief that 5,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5 are dying each month due to its own policy, as writers of letters to virtually every U.S. newspaper have stated repeatedly during the past three years?

The short answer to all of these questions is no. The sanctions, first imposed in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, are administered by the U.N., not the U.S. They were first imposed on all exports from Iraq and occupied Kuwait, and all non-humanitarian imports, in an effort to persuade Saddam Hussein to retreat within his own borders. After the Gulf War, they were broadened to include a dismantling of Iraq’s biological, chemical, nuclear, and missile-based weapons systems, out of fear that Hussein would otherwise lash out again. Estimates of sanctions-era "excess" child deaths -- the number above the normal mortality rate -- vary widely due to politics and inadequate data, especially concerning children older than 5. The dictatorial Iraqi government, which has blamed nearly every civilian funeral since 1991 on sanctions, claims there have been more than 600,000 deaths of under-5-year-olds these past 11 years (4,500 per month) and 1.5 million deaths overall.

While firefighters were still pulling out warm body parts from Ground Zero, foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky and his followers on college campuses and alternative-weekly staffs nationwide were insisting that it was vital to understand the "context" of the September 11 massacre: that U.S.-led sanctions were killing "5,000 children a month" in Iraq. Meanwhile, on the Iraqi government’s own Web site, the number of under-5 deaths from all causes for the month of September was listed as 2,932.

Arriving at a reliable raw number of dead people is hard enough; assigning responsibility for the ongoing tragedy borders on the purely speculative. Competing factors include sanctions, drought, hospital policy, breast-feeding education, Saddam Hussein’s government, depressed oil prices, the Iraqi economy’s almost total dependence on oil exports and food imports, destruction from the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars, differences in conditions between the autonomous north and the Saddam-controlled south, and a dozen other variables difficult to measure without direct independent access to the country.

Confusing the issue still further are basic questions about the sanctions themselves. Should the U.N. impose multilateral economic sanctions to keep a proven tyrant from developing weapons to launch more wars against his neighbors? If sanctions are inherently immoral, what other tools short of war can the international community use? Is this particular sanctions regime more unreasonable than others that haven’t triggered humanitarian crises? How much should we blame Saddam Hussein for rejecting the U.N.’s "oil-for-food" humanitarian offer for six years, and expelling weapons inspectors in 1998? Most important, has Iraq made headway since then in pursuing nuclear and biological weapons?

Yet all this murkiness has not deterred advocates of sanctions from claiming absolute certainty on the issue. The warmongering New Republic, for example, announced in October that the notion that "sanctions have caused widespread suffering" was simply "false." Writing in National Review in December, former army intelligence analyst Robert Stewart asserted that "resources are available in Iraq. Even under the sanctions, Iraq’s people need not starve."

Other views:
http://www.casi.org.uk/
http://www.scn.org/ccpi/

The Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI) provides information about the humanitarian situation in Iraq and its context. It aims to raise awareness of the effects on Iraq of the sanctions which were in place until May 2003, and previously campaigned on humanitarian grounds for the lifting of non-military sanctions. CASI does not support or have ties to the government of Iraq.

"if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq 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" Unicef, 12 August 1999.

"We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral." Denis Halliday, after resigning as first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, The Independent, 15 October 1998

[rooboy]

4. I don't know if that's all children..

but it was estimated at least half a million Iraqis died from disease and malnutrition as a result of the UN sanctions. Divide that by 96 months and you get roughly 5000 a month.

These sanctions were diabolical because they prevented things like chlorination equipment being used to repair water treatment plants; such stuff was deemed capable of being used to produce WMD.

Of course, this freeper's argument is based on the principle that two wrongs make a right. Ask them if they teach their children that.