Two days ago, interim Iraqi dictator Paul Bremer testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee, large hat (capable of holding $87 billion) in hand. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) focused his questioning on health care (found at 1:44:00 of the video testimony):

Saddam Hussein's government spent virtually nothing on health care. The under-5 mortality rate has more than doubled in the last decade, with 1 in 8 children now dying before their 5th birthday. Of those deaths, 70% are due to preventable illnesses such as diarrhea or respiratory infections...What's happened to these kids is just absolutely atrocious in a country that should have been able to provide for their children.

Left I could not have said it better ourselves. Just one little thing missing from DeWine's summary, and from Bremer's response to him - the word "sanctions." Nowhere is there a hint as to why this remarkable rise in infant mortality, claiming an estimated 500,000 to one million lives, had occured "in the last decade." Like Colin Powell talking about WMD (direct link temporarily down; scroll down to Sept. 17 entry entitled "Halabja (re)visited"), DeWine and Bremer seem to have developed selective amnesia about what happened in the last decade in Iraq. Bremer's response implied this was all due to Iraq simply not spending enough money on health care (all the more remarkable because Bremer did claim elsewhere in his testimony that sanctions were partially responsible for the poor state of the oil industry in Iraq).

And there really is no debate about at all about what effect sanctions had on health care in Iraq. Back in 1996, this famous exchange occured on 60 Minutes, as cited by FAIR:

Lesley Stahl: We have heard that a half million children have died [as a result of the sanctions]. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.

Stahl was referring to a 1995 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the sanctions; as FAIR notes, Albright didn't even attempt to challenge that fact.

There is, of course, a lot of material to read explaining the effect of sanctions on Iraq. From example, here's a first-hand report from Gloria LaRiva, visiting Baghdad with Ramsey Clark and a delegation from the International Action Center in 1997. Just one fact out of many from that article: "Before sanctions, Iraq imported $500 million worth of medicines from Jordan. Last year it could only afford $7 million worth." More first-hand observations from 1998 can be found in this report by Sharon Eolis, RN, visiting Iraq with the Iraq Sanctions Challenge. She writes "Before the United States/United Nations sanctions and the Gulf war, Iraq had a developed, nationalized health-care system that provided care to everyone. The level of technological development in health care was on a par with industrialized Western nations." Some more from this very informative article:

Safe drinking water is a basic human need. Chlorine is used to disinfect water. UNSCOM, the UN Sanctions Committee, limits the amount of chlorine imported to Iraq because it is considered a dual substance that can be used to make poison gas.

Iraqis at a Baghdad water treatment center told delegate Dave Sole--a water specialist from Detroit--that there is not enough chlorine available to make the water safe to drink.

According to one of the Iraqi doctors we spoke with, 80 percent of the cases of amebic dysentery could be eradicated if there were clean water. In 1989, there were 19,615 cases; in 1997 the number rose to 543,295 cases.

In 1980, there were no cases of cholera in Iraq. In 1997, there were 10,000 cases caused by contaminated water and food.

And, we need to remind our readers that the destruction of Iraq's water supply, and the consequences which followed, was a deliberate policy of the U.S. government, as documented here (direct link temporarily down; scroll down to Aug. 28 entry entitled "Paying for war crimes - $16 billion to restore Iraq's water").

I haven't mentioned Bremer's responses to DeWine's questioning. Bremer told DeWine that, besides for (or as a result of) the lack of spending by Iraq on health care, "the infrastructure is appallingly run down," and when asked by DeWine "How do you begin to improve the infant mortality rate?", his answer was to spend "$400 million on hospital refurbishment." Not a word about restoring the water purification and electricity generating systems, nor about importing medicines. Bremer clearly understands (or was willing to acknowledge) nothing about the causes of the problems nor their solutions.

Instead of spending $400 million on hospital refurbishment (no doubt designated for some Bechtel subsidiary), Bremer should let the Cubans take over. Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate in the Americas (yes, lower than the United States), and they didn't accomplish that by concentrating on "hospital refurbishment" (though I'm sure they did that too), but by understanding public health (water, sewage, nutrition) and providing free health care (as Iraq did, of course) with clinics in every neighborhood.

Are things going badly in Iraq? No, they're much, much worse, and with folks like Bremer in charge, the future's so dark they've gotta wear night-vision goggles.

Followup: Stephen Zunes, analyzing Bush's speech to the UN, has this observation:

Bush: By the end of 2004, more than 90 percent of Iraqi children under age five will have been immunized against preventable diseases such as polio, tuberculosis, and measles thanks to the hard work and high ideals of UNICEF.

Zunes: This figure would be comparable to childhood immunization rates in Iraq prior to the U.S.-led Gulf War in 1991 and subsequent sanctions that largely destroyed the country’s public health system.

From Left I on the News