NEWS: Malnutrition in Iraq May Have DoubledÂ…or Not

POLITICS: Malnutrition in Iraq May Have Doubled…or Not

The Associated Press reports that a study from the Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences indicates that malnutrition may have doubled in Iraq since the invasion:

This could be an important finding, if the reporter could come up with a source for the pre-war 4 percent claim. There is no good reason to believe any figures provided by the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein provided that affected Oil for Food disbursement. The Fafo Institute, publisher of "LabourStart: Where trade unionists start their day on the net" and other publications, has not posted the study on their own site for independent analysis of their methodology.

It may very well be that the Coalition and the Iraqi Interim Government are doing worse than Chad in supplying Iraqi children with food. Based on reporting like this from the AP, we cannot honestly say we know, and that's a shame because this matters. The risk here is that inaccurate information may cause aid to be taken from more desperately needy locations and sent to rot in warehouses in Iraq. The brutal reality of aid distribution is that until security is established, the poor go hungry, the sick go untreated, and the efforts of concerned people are wasted.

Perhaps the Fafo Institute could apply some social science towards getting the terrorists to stop blowing up food convoys.

Editor's note: This is being published side by side with this article as a point/counterpoint on this issue.

The 4 percent figuire is from a UNICEF survey, independent of Iraq and the U.S. in 2003, with results that about 4 percent were.

Um, Patrick, the source for that figure is UNICEF, as Luis pointed out. Did you not catch that? Did you not expect people would read the article? What's wrong with you?

But UNICEF is one of those 'liberal' organizations. How can you trust them when they, you know, help people and stuff?

But Rush didn't tell him to read the article. He only told Pat what to think.

[Edited on Nov 23, 2004 11:28PM]

walks into the room...

"hey wait, there's no naked girls in here!"

leaves room without letting the door hit me in the ass.

Ahhhhhh yes... the old "food rotting in Iraqi warehouses" gambit. I remember that one well from my anti-sanctions activism days. I swear, do you guys ever learn any new tunes? I guess when people are so willing to dance to a musty old standard, why bother?

UNICEF had a vested interest in showing that Oil for Food was working, the officers in charge of that organization were involved in the largest financial fraud in history. I question the UN's numbers on Iraq regardless of which agency of the UN it comes from.

Since when did skepticism become anathema to liberal thought?

If anyone can publish an independant analysis of conditions in Iraq prior to the war that support UNICEF's numbers, I will apologize. I doubt that any such analysis exists because it would have had to recieve cooperation from the Ba'athist government to be generated. I do not believe that there are ANY accurate reports on pre-war Iraq. Accurate reporting was illegal in pre-war Iraq, and punished vigorously.

Of course, if you really believe that people were willing and able to report to UNICEF that they were starving, knowing that the punishment for doing so was getting fed feet first into a plastic shredder...

Meanwhile in "post-war" Iraq, news agencies have been shut down.


whoops

[Edited on Nov 26, 2004 by fenris23]

s5,

I believe UNICEF lied about Iraq because the directors of the UN were deeply complicit in perpetrating a fraud. I believe that unquestioning acceptance of UNICEF claims happens because doubting those claims means admitting that UNICEF is party to something despicable.

For your further edification:
Here are several indications that the leadership of the United Nations were complicit in fraudulent activities in Iraq.

Nice back-peddling.

If this was what you meant why didn't you say it in the first place? Probably because that isn't what you meant at all. You said this:

You claimed there was no source at all. You did not suggest that the source used is biased or present any evidence to prove it. You denied the existence of any source at all. This, I guess, is attributable to either shoddy analysis or shoddy writing. Either is equally likely.

If only you could come up with a scource for that claim.

I wonder where they got all that, um, "blowing shit up" gear...

*sigh*

Patrick's rules of engagement:

Rule number one--Like a bird feigning a broken wing to draw a predator away from its young, divert attention to an outside topic to draw attention away from the discussion at hand. Common diversionary topics include "what does it mean to be liberal" and "what does it mean to counter-culture" another corallary is "why are you attacking my assertion"

(emphasis in the quote is mine)




[Edited on Nov 24, 2004 3:33PM]

no one is dieing in Iraq except the Bad people!

no one is dieing in Iraq except the Bad people!

Can you provide a source for that statement please? Preferably the actual Iraqi law stating such. I will also accept edicts, mandates, fatwahs, or ,hell, a polite reminder post-it note would suffice.

You also lose points for illegal comma usage.

i would certainly be skeptic about statistics from pre-war iraq, too. i can't post any sources, but i've met Iraqis who were jailed for not doing what Saddam wanted them to. in amny cases, that was actually the way they described it. a lot of the contracters i met over there had similar stories about not accepting government jobs for various reasons and being thrown in jail for it. i also talked to a lot of Iraqi National Guard soldiers who considered the $300 they make each month to be good money. many of them told us that many Iraqis had to turn to crime to make enough money to support their families under Saddam.

i don't know if there's a specific law on the Iraqi books backing up patrick's claim about accurate reporting. hell, i doubt that there is. but given the things i've been told about Saddam's methods, i don't doubt for a second that anyone who publicly said anything bad about conitions in iraq would have been punished fo it.

You're complaining about the Oil-for-Food programme, but why? You make it sound like it was your money.

Lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous to all this. I seem to remember during the 1990's a lot of outcry about the harmful effects of UN sanctions on Iraq's civilian population, especially the children. And when we'd fly in there and bomb them from time to time, Saddam would claim things like we bombed a baby formula plant. It was commonly stated that since the1991 war and the imposition of sanctions, 500,000 Iraqi children had died from malnourishment, lack of medicine, ect. Bin Laden cited these deaths as one of America's crimes against the Muslim world, and it was the impetus to instate the oil-for-palaces scheme by the UN, ostensibly to alleviate Iraqi civilian hardship but in fact did next to nothing for them.

So I wonder how it could be with the sanctions lifted, the oil-for-food scam gone, and Iraqi incomes and standards of living rising, how malnutrition could be worse than it was under the sanctions program. Doesn't make much sense,

[Edited on Nov 26, 2004 by stockula]

For the first time, I don't take issue with the overall theme of one of your posts Stockula.

Except of course the "Iraqi incomes and standards of living rising." miss statement, but hey thats a technicallity.

I think it's safe to say that since the Iran Iraq war, the civilian population of Iraq has been in bad shape. And I doubt it is going to change anytime soon.

Where is your evidence for that happening?