NP - Fighting the Forces of Invisibility

[Michael Baum]

Terrance (on Wednesday, October 03, 2001, 12:56:37 PM):

T> Otto wrote:

>> This is no statement exclusively on the WTC-attack, this is a general
>> statement by Rushdie. So he logically says the accepted death of those
>> 500.000 Iraqui kids (worth the price, just an inevitable collateral damage
>> according to Dave Morris) was terrorism too.

T> Where did you get these figures. ? This number, half a million Iraqi
T> children (why only children? ) has been floating around for a while.
T> People seem to accept this number. I'm not disputing it, but what does
T> it mean exactly? 

The number basically comes from statistics, but I imagine it's
reasonably good. An international team of physicians, public health
experts and so on did a survey/study comparing childhood mortality
and morbidity in Iraq now with the figures before the Gulf War and the
imposition of UN sanctions. They arrived at a five-fold increase in
the mortality rate post-sanctions, extrapolated that to approximately
500,000 deaths, and argued, _post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc_, that the
sanctions caused the increase.

Now of course that's one of the classic fallacies of formal logic, but
this isn't logic, it's epidemiology. You can point to substantiating
data -- the dramatic fall-off in food and medicine imports into Iraq
that of course correlates with the sanctions, the loss of oil revenue,
the fact that malnutrition and lack of appropriate medication is one
of the major causes of the childhood mortalities, usw. -- and decide
that there's at least a pretty strong connection between the
sanctions and the deaths.

Using the phrase "collateral damage" is kind of a rhetorical trick, of
course, but one can understand the underlying metaphor -- the children
dying as the unintended consequence of the action. Of course the
government of Iraq could solve the problem for its children like a shot
by giving up its mass-destruction weapons and such, as demanded by the
UN, but no one expects _that_ to happen. The far easier attack is to
get the West to drop the sanctions and give up trying to pressure the
Iraqi government by that route.

maab