US-led sanctions caused at least 500,000 preventable Iraqi child deaths

Evidence

But ice cream was a crime. The dairy infraction stemmed not from the caprice of a mad dictator but from the necessities brought about by living under sanctions. After Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the international community, led by the United States and administered by the United Nations, erected the strictest and most draconian sanctions program the world has known, drastically limiting the importation of foods, medicines, and equipment into the country. Saddam’s regime quickly realized that to maintain both the population and its terrifying grip on power, it would need to institute food rationing. Most families were sold monthly supplies of 180 pounds in total of flour, rice, sugar, cooking oil, beans, and tea along with sixteen bars of soap for about sixty cents. Under sanctions, however, medicines became scarce and child mortality and malnutrition skyrocketed, totaling at least half a million preventable childhood deaths, according to UNICEF. The country’s entire physical infrastructure, maintained without any new equipment, sagged to the point of near collapse. Denis Halliday, the UN assistant secretary general who administered the program, stepped down in 1999 in protest. “I am resigning,” he wrote in his departure letter, “because the policy of economic sanctions is … destroying an entire society. Five thousand children are dying every month. I don’t want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Under sanctions, blackouts became frequent, since electricity was in short supply. Sugar imports also dropped. Considering the energy required to run freezers and the high sugar and milk content in the confection, ice cream became simply unsustainable. To ensure compliance, the regime banned the sweet dessert and criminalized its sale. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 584 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

If such simplistic rhetoric had not achieved such a dominant position, then more Americans would discuss the ramifications of U.S. support for Israel against the Palestinians, or the polarizing role of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, or the devastations caused by U.S. sanctions on Iraq between 1990 and 2003 (during which time between 170,000 and 1.5 million Iraqis, mostly children, died). Similarly absent from public debate is the U.S. role in the creation of Afghanistan’s mujahedeen during the Cold War who were funded to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union and whether mujahedeen (with American training and funding) fueled the rise of Al Qaeda. Such complexity, instead, seems distasteful to mainstream journalism. Such complexity requires too much explanation, especially for an audience raised on sound bites. Rather the debate is over whether these stated grievances should be considered at all; the foundational premise, however, is more often than not just taken for granted: terrorism results from Muslim fundamentalism. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 897 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: US sanctions on 1990s Iraq killed over a million Iraqis — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 197; U.S. sanctions on Iraq killed up to 1.5 million people, mostly children — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 897; Western sanctions killed thousands of Iraqi children who remain uncounted. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 396 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• UN sanctions killed at least half a million Iraqi children #corroborates (0.95) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 584
• U.S. sanctions on Iraq killed up to 1.5 million people, mostly children #corroborates (0.92) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 897