Yanking the Tube in Iraq

(no pun intended)

Iraq war is blamed for starvation

Rory Carroll in Baghdad
Thursday March 31, 2005
The Guardian

Acute malnutrition among Iraqi children aged under five nearly doubled last year because of chaos caused by the US-led occupation, a United Nations expert said yesterday.
Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food, said more than a quarter of Iraqi children do not have enough to eat and 7.7% are acutely malnourished - a jump from 4% recorded in the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion (emphais added) .......

Prof Ziegler based some of his analysis on a US study in October 2004 which estimated that up to 100,000 extra Iraqis, mostly women and children, had died since the invasion than would have been expected to before the war.

"Most died as a result of the violence, but many others died as a result of the increasingly difficult living conditions, reflected in increasing child mortality levels," he said.

Population:
24,001,816 (July 2002 est.)
Age structure:
0-14 years: 41.1% (male 5,003,755; female 4,849,238)
15-64 years: 55.9% (male 6,794,265; female 6,624,662)
65 years and over: 3% (male 341,520; female 388,376) (2002 est.)

Let me get out my calculator again (hope numbers don't stun you):
Total population 0-14 years: 9,852,000; under five say 3,200,000

7.7% of this is: 250,000 children who are experiencing severe malnutrition.

Severe malnutrition can lead to death. Severe malnutrition frequently does lead to death (or permanent neurologic damage). Severe malnutrition is a painful way to die for a sentinent being.

To paraphrase Stalin, one death in Florida is a comedy; 250,000 children dying in Iraq is a statistic.