The fate of children during a war, any war, is tragic. Thousands die from violence, neglect, and starvation; the rest struggle along with their parents and their communities to survive; when the war is over, a lifetime of coping with trauma awaits.
The governmental, military and corporate decision-makers who wage these wars barely take the impact on children into consideration. Iraq provides an infamous example. Following the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the US and Western powers imposed economic sanctions. In a 1999 UNICEF study (published in Lancet) attributed the sanctions regime for the deaths of 500,000 children due to starvation, disease, and malnutrition. This number was conventional wisdom at the time I drew this cartoon.
But in the past few years, the UNICEF study has come under criticism. In 2017 a study published in BMJ Global Health by researchers from the London School of Economics accused UNICEF of relying on data manipulated by the Saddam Hussein regime and perpetuating a “masterful fraud” and “remarkable fiction”. The researchers argued that the child mortality rate in Iraq during the period of 1991-2003 was indeed high when compared to neighboring countries; but this time period is not unusual compared to periods of child mortality before the Persian Gulf War and after the 2003 US Invasion of Iraq unto the present day.
The Geneva International Centre for Justice dismisses the LSE study as propaganda attempting to dismiss the damage caused by the sanctions regime. And the UNICEF study was not the only critic of sanctions on Iraq. Denis J. Haliday, who oversaw the Oil-for-Food Program, resigned from his position as assistant secretary general of the United Nations in 1998 in disgust. Not long afterwards he would say:
What are some of these appalling costs, direct and indirect, of the ongoing sanctions regime? They run the gamut from malnutrition and infant death, rising illiteracy rates, and disruption of the family structure to the plunder of the archaeological patrimony. The sanctions are leaving in their wake a harvest of bitterness that could bedevil the future of the country and the region for years to come.
The Impact of the UN Sanctions on the People of Iraq (Firewall warning)
Haliday wasn’t a Hussein regime dupe. And neither was UNICEF.
As it happens, in 2017 UNICEF published another study on Iraq, finding that children are caught in an “endless cycle of violence and increasing poverty.” Saddam Hussein was not on hand to “massage the numbers” this time.
