Reply #43: And That Individual Was Wrong To Do So, Sir [View All]

On several grounds, the most important of which is that the numbers claimed for deaths from sanctions simply do not stand up to examination.

The noted Lancet survey used a base, pre-invasion death rate for Iraq of five per thousand, which amounts to roughly one hundred twenty-five thousand deaths a year, during the period in which sanctions were in place. Claims that a million people died as a result of sanctions over that same period, between 1992 and 2003, amount to a claim that nearly one hundred thousand persons a year died as a consequence of sanctions. Were this taken as true, it would suggest the actual expected death rate in Iraq during those years was approximately one death per thousand per year, or twenty-five to thirty thousand deaths a year. You will have a difficult time finding countries with so low a rate of deaths per thousand as that, to put it mildly. Syria, to take a regional example, has a death rate of slightly under five per thousand.

The claim of a half million children dead in consequence of sanctions does not hold up much better. The Iraqi birth-rate runs about thirty per thousand per year, or roughly three quarters of a million births, with infant mortality alone running to nearly fifty per thousand births, or roughly thirty-five thousand per year. This is suggests a pediatric death rate in toto of no more than seventy thousand dead minors, ranging from new-borns to adolscents, over the course of a year. A death rate 'from sanctions' of a little under fifty thousand per year, again, leaves very little room for deaths among minors to have occured at all in the absence of sanctions.

Since the Iraqi population has been increasing dramatically over the years, as the comparison of death and birth rates makes clear, the numbers fit even more poorly, since the population was smaller by several millions at the start of the sanctions, perhaps as low as twenty millions, which would make total deaths calculated on a per thousand basis noticeably smaller, while there is no such elasticity in the average per year of deaths claimed to result from sanctions. In most years, the comparison would indicate, if the latter group of figures were to be taken seriously, that virtually every death in Iraq in those years was a result of sanctions. There being no evidence that persons born in Iraq can expect immortal life, barring sanctions imposed by the United Nations, this proposition cannot accurately describe the case.