Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos (and other news from the debacle in Iraq)

/ iraq / humanitarian / intervention / continued /

The Washington Post, on other unmentioned casualties:

"Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from 'wasting,' a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein."

(link via Lenin's Tomb)

Meanwhile Scott Thomas talks about the aftermath of Fallujah and makes an interesting point:

..As American troops pounded Falluja into rubble, the Iraqi resistance overran police stations in a number of urban centres throughout Iraq - not the least of which was the city of Mosul. While the Americans acknowledged these setbacks, they did their best to downplay their significance.

In reporting that six police stations in Mosul had been overrun, no explanation was given as to how 5000 American-paid Iraqi police could have been "overwhelmed" without a single casualty on either side. The six heavily barricaded police facilities were occupied, looted of weaponry, munitions and flak jackets and then destroyed without interference...

Finally, from the mouth of the beast himself, Paul Wolfowitz makes one wonder if, at the end, he does believe in the ideoleptic garbage he expounds... The interview is filled with "is he serious" - type moments, but I'll just mention one; says Wolfowitz:

What Saddam did in Iraq was certainly genocide - not as systematic as Hitler's, not as fundamentally racist as Hitler's, but absolutely horrible. And for various reasons, the world looked the other way.

Heh! this from a man who actually served in both the Reagan and WH Bush state departments, meaning some of the parties heavily involved in supplying weapons (conventional and biological) o Iraq, fanning the flames of a most irrational war (Iraq-Iran) with the obvious and cynical purpose of hurting Iran and actively campaigned against UN action against Saddam after Halabjah...

...Read the whole thing, its infuriating but educational...