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I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to fdr We know al-qaeda zawahiri is supporting the opposition in syria are we supporting al-qaeda in syria It's a proud day for america And by god, we've kicked vietnam syndrome once and for all thank you very very much These witnesses Are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact He came he saw Died we ain't killing their army, but we killing them We be on cd like say our name been saying say it three times The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world then there's going to be an invasion All right, you guys introducing richard greenfield professor emeritus at columbia university and also at the u.s centers for disease control and uh back in 1999 almost 20 years ago He wrote this thing for the campaign against sanctions in iraq.
It's at cassie.org dot uk morbidity and mortality among iraqi children from 1990 through 1998 assessing the impact of the gulf war and economic sanctions And so if I can set this up a little bit Especially for the young people here after the first iraq war in 1991 the sanctions That had been levied before the war began stayed And throughout the bill clinton administration as well under the argument at least I won't characterize it Uh that saddam was hiding his weapons of mass destruction and therefore had not given in to all the demands of the ceasefire From the war and so the thing continued and it was a huge controversy Over the number of people who had died because of the economic effect of the sanctions in the country And bill clinton's secretary of state madeline albright famously said on 60 minutes We think the price is worth it to the accusation from or well a statement from a unicef study That said that five hundred thousand excess deaths among children had taken place in iraq um Because of that and this was cited by osama bin laden among others uh as reason to attack the united states, in fact, so um Just last year.
There's a article that was written um by a guy named tim dyson um for bmj global health Uh called changing views on child mortality in iraq a history of lies damn lies and statistics And i've emailed back and forth a little bit with this guy um, and the point basically as he says it is that Not just the first but the second unicef study uh, we're both wrong the first one admittedly, so And uh the second one also he says and that that's proven by later studies Uh that went back and and did the same kind of survey questions Uh later on when the hussein regime was not there to influence the results at all And it turned out that the whole thing was completely overblown in the middle is my guest here our guest And uh this study that he wrote is You can look at it yourself.
I've read the whole thing and it's based on Wide and varied sources not including that first debunked unicef study um uh, and comes up with I I think and it's uh 227 000 excess deaths among children is the estimate uh based on a lot of statistics and number crunching and question asking and And analysis of all the different regions of iraq and everything else.
So um I've really asked you on the show today richard to help to settle this Uh for us so to to help us to understand what's the truth and and how can we know what's the truth about what?
Was really the effect of america's economic war iraq war one and a half.
I guess you could call it the bill clinton years there Uh, well, that's a tall order I can help you to understand it i'm not positive that I will share the one and only truth about all of these events because It's difficult to know these things well and clearly and correctly But but I can say for sure that um, the information generated by unicef was not lies and damn lies All right, well, um, so now part of it was in I think at least officially partially retracted from that first study from 1995 that um One researcher had been under the influence of the hussein regime had had pumped up some numbers in in some place this or that um But I don't know.
That's right.
I'm, sorry.
Go ahead.
So that's right.
Um, we get data To estimate mortality rates from countries from three places One is from routine health system sources.
So when somebody dies in a hospital Usually that gets collected in vital statistics But a lot of people who die don't die in hospitals So that's not a good enough source for a lot of countries, especially low-income countries The second way to get information quickly is to do a survey going door to door Of a sample that should be random of the whole population And ask who lived here before at a certain date and where are they now and then you will collect information On people who had been members of their household and since died And from that you can generate some rates of mortality And the third source is from a national census, which essentially is going door to door And instead of trying to take a sample it's trying to reach everybody and get information on the whole population And each of these sources is imperfect So you've got to know how to understand the stuff and you have to understand the limitations Of the methods and the way they're carried out so on that first unicef study you're right They had I think six may have been eight field interviewers might have even been 12.
I don't remember up hand And one of them clearly was generating data.
That was very different from the others which led to an inflated rate of mortality And when that was recognized the whole study was thrown out Um The thing is that was a very small study that was designed just to explore the subject But what it did was it started to set up the he said she said if you're Against the u.s.
Then mortality is high if you're against saddam, then it's all lies kind of polarized polarized dynamic If you want to understand what's really going on, you have to look at these three sources and Interpret the data from each study knowing something about how they chose the people to be included Who didn't make it into the database?
And how that might have influenced it So that's what I tried to do With um, I think it was 28 sources all together by the year 1999 And it really is an impressive piece of work and I have to admit that When it comes to mathematics and that kind of thing I got to leave it to you to tell me what i'm looking at on a lot of this stuff Um, but I will say, you know, i'm trying i'm actually paging through trying to find the emails, but I did email back and forth uh with um With dyson the the critic who was widely cited last year Uh turns out is saying.
Oh, it never was true at all It was all a saddam hussein hoax and this kind of thing and um, and he didn't have anything bad to say about you He said that no In fact, you had been really careful and I said well, you know I mean garfield had still come to the conclusion that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of excess deaths of children here So do you have your favorite ballpark estimate then or you know, what is it that you're saying?
And then at that point he begged off and said he didn't have a favorite answer.
So In other words, he wasn't saying Oh, it kind of sounded like he was trying to have it both ways that that the all the big studies That said it was somewhere near half a million were completely fake and that in fact There hadn't really been much of a change at all through the 1990s But then at the same time When I showed him your work, he said well, yeah, you know, i'm not saying that And so I don't know.
I hope i'm characterizing right?
Maybe I should have tried to arrange a debate instead um, but he certainly he certainly, uh begged off, uh saying anything negative about your work and and that you were wrong, so Um, you know, it certainly seemed like a careful study to me and I know it was 20 years ago But can you kind of take it through take us through it and help us understand what was going on?um First let me say I don't think i've ever met.
Mr. Dyson.
Um but I I didn't like the tone of his article which was I have discovered the truth that nobody else has bothered to say now it is really Very possible that unicef or other aid agencies It is possible in many situations that they take Information that they just got from a recent period from a small group of people Which shows something really terrible?
And make it popularize that information in the way of fundraising and consciousness raising, uh, unicef is not An organization designed to do demographic studies, which are difficult to do But it happens that in iraq where people were looking the other way unicef was one of the very few agencies un or otherwise That was engaged on the ground Providing a great deal of assistance and put in the position of being advocates for children So they needed to generate these data um, and they did a heroic job of Not just talking about was it a hundred thousand two hundred thousand half a million or a million They talked about access to food and medicine Things that used to be available that were no longer available and the deterioration of conditions of life for children That's their job and I think they did it Heroically like nobody else did in iraq Now they might have gotten something wrong in that second study there might be some truth to what mr.
Dyson is saying Um looking deeply into the data in that study, which was a very large population-based study So they did a lot of things right in that survey There are i'm told some funny things in the data That data had been held by government of iraq um, which was Together with unicef carrying out the study in what what year was it done?um, uh I think it was 1998 Um, I could be wrong on that day at that time the government of iraq under saddam didn't let anybody do anything big in iraq Unless they were part of it and the central statistical bureau worked with unicef They hired iraqi interviewers and they did a large sample survey and they held on to the data And it wasn't until the fall of that government that the data was available for others to look at and others found Funny things in the data, you know If you have a large data set from a survey in a country where access is limited and there are very few surveys There will always be some limitations and um Imperfections things to be clean in a large data set um Mr. Dyson is going further to say that there was falsification in that data And that it was knowable and that nobody did anything about it and essentially that not just essentially he accused them of lying All of that I know goes much farther than it's possible.
There may be errors in the data I knew the unicef people involved and I knew that they were seeking the truth and They talked to me about limitations and issues and methods To try to get it right they were seeking accurate information if you're going to do just one study in the middle of a situation where there is a a very autocratic regime breathing down everybody's necks and there's Spies everywhere Your ability to get at the truth is going to be limited So we can debate the data in detail.
Unfortunately, Mr. Dyson doesn't he doesn't present the data to show That there were significant errors or that those errors were noble at that time.
So Let me now take a step back from that criticism Because there are in fact two possible patterns of changes in mortality in iraq between the first gulf war of 1991 And the second gulf war where the us and the coalition the willing invaded and overthrew the government of saddam hussein in those two time periods With all the data that we have you can identify two different patterns One pattern showed a rapid rise in mortality soon after sanctions came in and that would be reasonable Knowing how comprehensive sanctions work in many countries where that's been the case.
There has been a rapid rise in uh death rates So it's a plausible pattern and that that pattern of high mortality was in place through the period of sanctions it actually Um started to come down according to the hospital data that we have Under the last two years of the government of saddam before the uh, second gulf war We know that it was starting to come down because people were finally getting Reasonable levels of food and medicine and the water systems were being slowly repaired at a better rate um So that's one possible Pattern the other pattern is that as as you stated in your conversations with mr.
Dyson That mortality was sort of plateauing that it didn't go down much or up much and If you compare iraq to every one of the seven countries that it borders That is a very strong and important statement.
It sounds like you're not saying anything like it just didn't go anywhere.
No In all of the middle east I should know I should say in iraq and in the seven countries that border it Mortality was dropping rapidly in the 1970s and 80s and this was even more pronounced in iraq It was dropping faster in iraq because iraq was investing very heavily In electricity roads hospitals and in education all the conditions of life which tend to reduce mortality During the period of sanctions from 1991 Till the second gulf war Every one of the seven neighboring countries of iraq continued to decline in child mortality rates the decline on average Was remarkably the same in other words they started at different levels But the rate of decline over that 12-year period was three percent a year a decline in the rate of mortality in every country around iraq So even if there was not a rapid rise after sanctions suddenly came in Plausible as that is even if there was only a Stabilization of the rate which had been dropping rapidly Compared to neighboring countries there were still hundreds of thousands of excess deaths Among children in iraq in the period of sanctions and mr.
Dyson actually refers to that in his last page so to me The data are complicated the In in the evidence for one pattern or the other would be Problematic in court because I don't think you can finally say one is right and one is wrong But either way either pattern of mortality even if Dyson's lies and damn lies were the case There were still hundreds of thousands of more deaths among iraqi children Than there would have been If conditions had been improving as they were before sanctions were put on iraq All right now just for clarity for the audience that lies and damn lies again is in quotes the title of dyson's article Uh, just make sure no one's confused by that and now and I understand what you're saying that you're saying you know assuming that that's right that all the later data shows that all of the um Conclusions in the 90s had all been overwrought that that still um at the baseline would amount to a horrible tragedy when you Take into account the improvement going on Uh everywhere else and I guess even during the iran iraq war Uh, which was devastating for both sides They weren't under a blockade america backed them And so they still had access to world trade and all of that at that time it wasn't really until the first iraq war that and then you know joy gordon in her book explains especially how This was unlike the blockade and the embargo against cuba Which was really only the us versus cuba that this was an entire united nations global un security council blockade By, you know mandating every state suspend all trade with iraq basically and completely cut them off And this is a country that had gotten rich on Uh oil revenue and had been spreading that money around and now we're then completely cut off Iraq was much more vulnerable to sanctions than cuba ever was because cuba Basically has always grown most of its own food, even when it was importing a lot from the soviet bloc iraq for a long time Had imported almost all of its foods more than 90 percent of the economy of iraq Was in the export of oil completely dependent on oil you cut off the oil or the revenue from oil and you've cut off the country So this other point that you made is quite right Prior to the sanctions in the decade before there was a very bitter Massive war between iraq and iran And in that even in during those years iraq was exporting a lot of oil Um sanitation water systems education were improving hospitals were being built And mortality was declining in those years because the conditions of life were improving even in the midst of that war That war killed About a million iraqis, but those are adults child health was improving through those years um I want to make one other point on what you've said comparing cuba And iraq, um, I Have spent a lot of time in cuba studying their sanctions the sanctions on cuba were actually quite Uh potent because the u.s.
Was cuba's biggest trading partner historically for all of its years.
Well all of the 20th century anyhow um But it's not just a question of money That a country has it's also how a country uses its monies cuba took the Threats to its society of sanctions as a challenge And did more than any other country that I know to minimize the impact of sanctions on health and well-being of um the whole population as the result cuba still under sanctions has more extensive medical care and a more developed education system Than almost any other country in latin america at a much lower GDP They did many many different things.
In fact, lots of countries have learned from cuba how to minimize the impact of sanctions um studying the things that cuba learned over 50 years of sanctions on on how to get key goods or how to Minimize their impact or replace them.
This was not the attitude of the government of iraq under saddam hussein That government saw sanctions as its main enemy and uh took um Uh the harm that occurred to the general population as a political weapon in many ways the government of iraq under saddam um Rather than trying to minimize the impact of sanctions were at least satisfied with it and in some ways and sometimes Made it even worse on the population So that sanctions would show suffering to the population and that there would be international efforts to reduce or eliminate sanctions on them Um, so they took sanctions in in quite a different way than the government of cuba took it And the result was tremendous suffering for the general population Well, I guess in cuba castro was settling in for the long haul whereas saddam thought maybe he could get them lifted In some reasonable period of time.
It sounds like you're saying Which makes sense.
Um, that that certainly is is uh a potential political calculation But the americans had said explicitly really in the bush administration and in the clinton bush senior administration and clinton administration That the sanction would stay would stay on until saddam was gone And I think in the clinton years they even explicitly explained that They were trying to even Make the population the civilian population so desperate that they would risk everything to rise up and overthrow saddam Even though when they had their chance when george bush senior encouraged them to rise up and overthrow him After the iraq war the first iraq war in in 1991 He then changed his mind and left them high and dry as saddam slaughtered them all that was when they had their one chance and then This was it seemed like a pretty hollow excuse to just maintain the status quo, but the price was worth it.
I don't know In many countries sanctions are designed To change policies of government In other countries that's used as a fig leaf to seek to overthrow governments The government of the united states also had at many times the explicit goal and sanctions on cuba To create an uprising and overthrow that government the way the government of cuba responded By trying to make up for it and meet the population's needs Was diametrically opposed to the way that the government of iraq did Hey, let me tell you about the sponsors of this show.
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I don't know Um and tom was liberty classroom if uh, you like learning things i'll get a commission if you sign up by way of the link on my website And listen, if you want a new and the reason my website is down is my own broken servers Uh, but if you want a new good looking website, like the one I do have when it's up and running at scotthorton.org Uh, then check out expanddesigns.com Slash scott expanddesigns.com slash scott and you will save 500 bucks on your new website All right, well so now That's a bit more of the historical context for people who were too young or not paying attention back then what have you but so um Back to the statistics here Uh, what do you think about that?
Kind of best case scenario that there was really no change.
Do you think uh, Did did you did you think that dyson had a point that later data seemed to dispel the earlier data overall?
The best sources for most countries of the three kinds of data that I discussed on mortality that being um uh data from the vital statistics systems and hospitals That's one kind a second kind is special surveys and the third kind of censuses The data from censuses is almost always far superior to those two other sources of data Other sources of data So when we got a another census in iraq um in 19, uh, uh No, yeah in 1997 98.
It was not the best census they'd ever done in that country but still it was reasonably good and A reasonably good census kind of beats any other kind of study For mortality and for a lot of other things Because it is a survey seeking to reach the whole population.
Well if you compare the data from the 1997 census the data from the 1978 79 census It just in this two data points then what you can see is that there was from these two sources a There was less of a drop in mortality Before sanctions were there and there was less of a rise in mortality After sanctions were there Than the data that mr.
Dyson is criticizing So it's it is somewhat supportive of his argument.
That is to say of the two patterns It looks like there is more support for the pattern of a rise It's not that there wasn't a rise in mortality, but that the rise was not sharp.
It was gradual But over a 12-year period where you're expecting Declines of three percent a year to have no decline And a gradual increase over time Um, that is a pattern that's only happened It's since world war ii in 12 countries and those countries um All of them had a that's this gradual rise in child mortality because of hiv infections in africa Uh, iraq is the only country where we have data to suggest a sustained um rise when you're expecting decline, so Um, i'm saying that mr.
Dyson might be right He doesn't have enough data to be know that he's right on the particular details of the pattern But one way or the other there was a trim There was a shocking pattern that we don't find in other countries things really were terrible for iraqis and it was manifest In a high mortality rate among children under five years of age um and now You know one thing i'm sorry because I meant to mention this when we were talking a little bit about the historical context where?
The americans they recorded in the washington post it's in my book um Where they said yeah, we deliberately bombed the waterworks and the electricity and the civilian infrastructure Because we're trying to make life painful for these people so they'll do what we want, you know and they're very clear about that and then of course the sanctions meant it was Reportedly at least it was very difficult to get all those basic services back online and that's something that you talk a lot about in your study is the poor drinking water and the The formula for the infants and this kind of thing um, and and so well If you don't have much food and the quality of food goes down And if you don't have electricity to keep refrigerators running And if your water is contaminated There's really only one thing that you can expect to happen among young children Yeah, well, it certainly makes sense so, how do you reconcile he might be right because he the the later censuses seem to show that maybe he is with All the other and you do have wide and varied sources as you said at the beginning here You have many sources that you attempted to synthesize here in in this article um You know, how do you make sense of it all now or do you think that?
Your best guess from 1999 that you're talking about a possibly a quarter of a million Children somewhere around there is is right or maybe not now Um if If mr Dyson was right that that pattern of sudden rise in child deaths after sanctions began if he's right And that's not the case We still are talking about several hundred More deaths among children than were expected over the 12 and a half year period of sanctions So there are two patterns there's data that is consistent with the pattern that he's saying There's data that's consistent with a pattern of rapid rise after sanctions.
So it's just a question of Whether you got a gradual rise or a rapid rise instead of the expected decline And either way if you have a population of 20 million people like iraq was at the time And if you're going 12 years, that's going to add up to a lot of excess deaths Yeah, you know I talked with dennis halliday who was at the united nations and resigned over this He was in charge of implementing the sanctions, of course and famously resigned And he said he thought all these numbers must be low that he thought that the deprivation That the iraqi people were going through uh was so uh You know understated and unknown and unreported but one example was he talked about going to the hospitals and seeing all the kids with uh leukemia from the depleted geranium and this kind of thing these massive increases that You know, maybe didn't get counted by anybody else, but he knew Uh this kind of thing.
What do you make of that?
Uh, whoever is commanded herring coordinator of the un in a country is there to uh Meet the un's goals for social development and protection of the population at the same time the un was administering the oil for food program Which was a way that members of the security council could continue the war against the government of iraq So they put in a possible situation Mr. Halliday Was supposed to lessen the burden on the population, but he was also involved in um Carrying out rules.
That's that worsened the burden and it's not unreasonable that he would resign because of that um his his uh The person who subsequently was in that position found himself in the same moral conundrum a really terrible situation um And i'm not sure what the right answer is on that.
Um But eventually I think anybody who's reasonable would resign from such a situation now Uh that mr.
Halliday said that it was probably even worse because he saw terrible conditions That's what epidemiologists like me don't trust.
Um I'm sure conditions were terrible.
I was there a lot of the time Uh, but that doesn't tell us how terrible we we want to know Uh what's going up and what's going down and by how much?
Um, and so you need to get these kind of data Uh, there's there's a problem that we had all through those years of people trying to do studies That would be quantitative to assess these things and in fact, even after the american And coalition invasion and takeover iraq in 2003 um, the problem continued as people debated how many civilians were dying And no there weren't and that was just propaganda And uh, oh, but there were a hundred thousand.
Oh, but the hundred thousand is not precise and we don't like your methods um People will always fight over those things when the conditions are not very good for doing such studies and the real danger of people who will throw holes into data Rather than say here is how good the data is.
Here's how much of a conclusion we can come to Is that they throw up their hands and say you just can't know there's no way to know Whether there are excess deaths or not and we should just walk away and not look That would be a terrible response when the international community is engaged in hostile behavior.
We need to know Whether non-combatants are being affected and how much they're being affected We will not know this perfectly, but we are able to know it more or less whether things are getting better or worse and what's affecting them um, so, um so the the real danger of the dyson position is that All data is just politicized and it doesn't matter and you can't know so just don't look Well um, so now what about the oil for food program because um, I mean, I mean this is the whole thing right is on from my point of view, which is Never going to be you know, the actual algebra Uh, like when you're sitting here going through doing your statistics here is hey look they had a war against the infrastructure They had a blockade.
They took a country that imported Some huge percentage of their food and prevented them from doing so And all of these things and the water was filthy They wouldn't let them import chlorine because they said it could be used as a chemical weapon and all of this kind of thing I read joy gordon's book.
So i'm thinking You know, it must be something I don't know even though that doesn't amount to uh real statistics, but statistics has said that um, you know, uh Well, for example that the oil for food program even if you have a problem before with the The policy before that they changed it and they said okay, you can sell your food You just can't buy any you can sell your oil You just can't buy anything except food for your civilian population with it, which was a brilliant stroke of genius You say that enabled the policy really to continue I guess as sort of just a pr Thing but how much difference did that make and how can you know?
Well things would have been a whole lot worse without the oil for food program And over time that program changed at a certain point when it was established that um Chlorine was not being permitted to import unicef made a campaign and said that they personally would keep an eye on Chlorine imports and make sure they're being used for water purification and then chlorine was imported so little by little Sanctions were actually getting weaker and the funds from sanctions were being Were accumulating so that water pumps were being fixed And people ended up Um in the last couple years of sanctions before the coalition invasion having an adequate calorie Level there were more medicines in the hospitals More and more of these goods were being permitted through the oil food program As well as sales of oil and imports of goods that were technically illegal outside of the oil food program As a result in the last year and a half at least of the oil food program Mortality was dropping survivability was improving The this created sort of a problem for the saddam government that they had these data They occasionally reported them, but they sort of kept it quiet.
They didn't want people to know we're not suffering that much as before um, but uh that tells me that the goods through the oil for food program when they were used well, and when they Accumulated enough to reach the population did have an impact on improving survival and then Uh, I know it this makes a big difference in the studies and in your research here, too the difference between whether we're talking about iraqi kurdistan or the rest of the country and I mean because at that point kurdistan was basically an autonomous zone under american protection virtually that whole time I don't know.
I don't know what that meant exactly for their ability to trade with the rest of the world But they weren't under saddam's thumb anyway Um in the north in iraqi kurdistan, they did their own oil extraction and sales partly through baghdad, but partly through the north on their own and they had their own funds they were Some some parts of the oil for food program Um provided goods to them and so they had some limit the same limitations as the south through the oil for food program But they had their own sales permitted on the outside by the u.s And so from the time of the 1990s until today iraqi kurdistan has been a boom economy their economy has grown their quality of life has Increased it was an ironic situation in iraq because the centers of learning and culture Were in the center in the south and iraqi kurdistan was the backwoods It's as if in the united states, um quality of life and survival and education levels and income All went up in appalachia and then down in san francisco instead So iraqi kurdistan today is in a pretty good situation.
They have ridden out these storms favorably and so we can see the contrast that Availability of goods and connection with the world community makes for them Yeah.
All right.
Well, so I must be overlooking something.
Uh, any major points or bottom lines you want to talk about?
Um, yeah, there's one point this thing That I call the most important issue that gee you can't know so let's not bother to look This always comes up when coalition attacks Uh, they say there were only terrorists killed and then it turns out that there were There was a wedding and there were a lot of civilians on the ground.
Oh, well, who knows you can't know um this this agnosticism toward the impact of actions actually This was a big debate in the 90s and in the first decade of the 20th century but this debate is declining because New technologies, especially through cell phones make so much more information available That we actually know much better who was affected where?
Such that now with the war in syria We don't have the controversy we had during sanctions and then the wars in iraq after the coalition invasion 2003 We know how many people have died.
We never know perfectly, but we know within three or four percent Um who has died where whether they were civilian or combatant and so there's an optimistic end to this story that Uh that the what I would call Evil and convenient view of since you can't know perfectly don't bother to know at all Because because it's not convenient for us politically This is receding because there's an awful lot of things that we can know When we pay attention and make systematic approaches When there are violations of uh life and human rights around the world So we are that doesn't mean we're more able to do something about it But at least we can know and then we have tools that we didn't have before I think that's the most important part of the story.
Yeah, and it certainly creates the potential For us to be able to do something about it or somebody to All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time.
It's really been great My pleasure All right, you guys that's richard garfield He's professor emeritus at columbia and is now at the u.s centers for disease control And he wrote this study back in 1999.
You can find it at cassie Casi.org.uk It's called morbidity and mortality among iraqi children from 1990 through 1998 assessing the impact of the gulf war and economic sanctions All right, so you guys know the deal, uh fool's erin.us for the book scott horton.org and youtube.com Scott horton show for all the interviews 4500 of them now going back to 2003 for you there Read what I want you to read at Anti-war.com and at libertarian institute.org and follow me on twitter at scott horton show.
Thanks
