Here
http://en.wikipedia....uring_sanctions
Sanctions or not it will not affect a dictator. Just look at North Korea Jim Jong Un the more Sanctions we put he will not budge.
EDIT: Saddam Hussein should not gassed the Kurdish people and the whole nation suffered as a result. But being fair I think the humanitarian AIDs will not help the Iraq people. I think it will go straight to the military.
Thanks for the source, this is actually credible, in that it was cited frequently. However, it was still an estimate, and not a real figure.
Since the U.S. did provide food aid and allowed it, along with many other kinds including medical aid, with the oil for food program and others, they didn't remove the Iraq's people food or other necessary resources. Furthermore, while they suggest that Iraq's condition worsened (such as literacy rates going down), I doubt people would have legitimately forget how to read. More likely, Iraq over inflated his own figures and then afterwords revealed conditions weren't as good as Saddam reported to begin with. He lied about plenty of more things.
The guy who did this study however, Richard Garfield, suggested that all sanctions must lead to restrictions to food and medical aid, even though these were not specifically targeted. He says that there must have been deaths, but since the U.S. didn't target these areas it's all speculation. We would have for instance, expected to find more records of these deaths, which don't exist. ""In many countries," he wrote, "the embargo-related lack of capital was more important than direct restrictions on importing medicine or food.""
" 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."- In essence, these figures were never truly substantiated, and Saddam claimed nearly every death was due to sanctions in the first place. [1
The most credible source would be by UNICEF, however it too does not directly implicate the sanctions. In fact, it never mentioned the sanctions at all in it's reports.
"Significantly, UNICEF found child mortality actually decreased in the autonomous north (from 80.2 per 1,000 in 1984-89 to 70.8 in 1994-98) while more than doubling in the south (from 56 per 1,000 to 130.6). This is Exhibit A for those who, like The New Republic, argue that Saddam alone is responsible for Iraq's humanitarian crisis. When the report was released, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy attributed the difference in mortality trends to "the large amount of international aid pumped into northern Iraq at the end of the [Persian Gulf] war."
More or less, while mortality rates seemed to increase according to unicef, it was predominately in the southern region, the Region Saddam had been in control. And the problems started occurring before the sanctions took place, as well. Still, compared to previous estimates of the mortality rates, the new one took the estimates without help from Iraq's government, while the old one's took just the Iraq governments estimates. At the time, Iraq was trying to cover up the fatalities, so these are estimated to be much lower than the actual figures.
[2] "Data from household surveys are plotted in the above chart, with all points from a single survey joined together with a line. The thick blue line, labeled "CURRRENT MORTALITY ESTIMATES", shows UNICEF’s current estimates of the under-five mortality rate in Iraq, and are derived from the survey \ data. Methodology for these estimates can be found at http://www.childinfo.../kh98meth.html."
In any case, while arguments have been made that large civilian casualties MUST have resulted from the sanctions, even though they didn't target things like food and water, there still isn't substantial evidence of a direct cause.
For instance, assertions were made that since Chlorine was banned, the lack of water purification must have resulted in people dying or at least created discomfort. However, the U.N. counsel resolutions never actually banned Chlorine in Iraq; in fact, they shipped over 15 million kilograms of it to Iraq, who was only using approximately 10 of those millions. [3] In fact there were allegations that this could unintentionally be arming Saddam since they were supplying too much Chlorine; so, many of the assertions that these estimates were based on have proven to be generally unfounded. Since they are estimates, it's not exactly solid evidence in the first place.
Lastly, the U.S. was not responsible for these sanctions, but the U.N. But that's a small issue.
More or less, we can sum this up in 3 primary ways.
1. The figures given were estimates, not true numbers. Their estimates tended to be higher than the actual death tolls recorded during the time, for example. It not only would be impossible but must grossly over exaggerate the figure, since not ALL deaths could possibly be a result of sanctions (some would be natural causes, accidents, murder etc.).
2. They were based on a number of asserted logical principles that were later proven wrong, such as the banning of food, medical supplies, or Chlorine in Iraq, when this wasn't the case.
3. The most credible sources do not implicate the sanctions and actually specifically illustrated that it was largely Saddam responsible for the increase of deaths, which were somewhat strangely exaggerated. Even sources that agree that the sanctions killed a lot more people than was reported believe that these estimates were largely over exaggerated. Even if we reduced this to a more realistic number it's difficult to say that the sanctions truly killed as many people as reported.
Edited by Manoka, 13 June 2014 - 02:06 PM.
