War Never Did Anything Good Except Save 40,000 Babies In Afghanistan And 15,000 Babies In Iraq
Except save the lives of 40,000 babies in Afghanistan.
And that’s a conservative estimate.
INFANT mortality in Afghanistan has fallen dramatically since the demise of the Taleban, according to a new study, with 40,000 fewer babies dying every year.
Improvements in women’s access to medical care since the Taleban were ousted from power five years ago was cited as the main reason for the death rate becoming significantly lower.
Grim infant and maternal mortality rates have been regularly cited as evidence of Afghanistan’s backwardness after decades of war.
They were also seen as a sign of the slow progress of the internationally funded reconstruction effort.
According to the preliminary results of a Johns Hopkins University study, the infant mortality rate has declined to about 135 per 1,000 live births in 2006, down from an estimated 165 per 1,000 in 2001. . . .
Benjamin Loevinsohn, a World Bank health specialist, said the survey results probably underestimated the improvement in infant mortality.
“It’s a conservative estimate. This is the situation two and a half to three years ago ... It should be better than that now,” Mr Loevinsohn said.
Stupid war of American imperial aggression saving all those babies lives.
/leftard
After reading this, I got curious as to how Iraq was doing in this same area post invasion. According to figures from the CIA World Factbook there are roughly 864,588 live births in Iraq every year (about 31.44 for every 1,000 citizens). In 2003 there was an infant mortality rate in Iraq of 55.16 per 1,000 births, or about 47,690 infant deaths.
In 2006 that infant mortality rate has dropped to 48.64 deaths per 1,000 births. Or about 42,503 infant deaths/year. Or about 5,187 fewer dead infants every year than in 2003.
So is it safe to say that we’ve saved roughly (and these numbers are, admittedly, very rough) 15,000 infant lives since invading Iraq? I think that would be in the ballpark.
And just think of that. 15,000 lives saved.
The anti-war folks may be quick to respond to that number with talk about the approximate 62,570 Iraqi civilians who have died in Iraq since the invasion over four years ago, a number that works out to about 15,323 dead civilians a year, but I’d point out that fewer Iraqis are dying now in the violence in Iraq than were dying under Saddam’s cruel regime.
According to this article the Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled information on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime. That’s probably low as its just the executions we know about and it doesn’t include those who died because Saddam diverted money from the UN’s humanitarian oil-for-food program into his own coffers, but we’ll use it anyway. If we consider that Saddam Hussein was in power for 24 years, those 600,000 executions puts his yearly death toll at about 25,000/year.
So even with a conservative estimate as to the number of civilian deaths under Saddam there are still 10,000 fewer civilian deaths in that country per year now.
We’re saving lives in Iraq. But don’t expect anyone in the media to tell you this stuff.
Update: Bob Owens has some problems with my math, and points out that the yearly civilian death toll under Saddam was probably more in the ballpark of 35,000 per year. He’s probably right. Civilian death numbers in pre-invasion Iraq are notoriously hard to pin down, mostly because all these murders weren’t exactly something Saddam was advertising.
We know hundreds of thousands of civilians were dying from starvation, poor social conditions, political unrest, Saddam’s wars of aggression and just plain outright murder at the hands of Saddam’s regime before we invaded. As I noted in the post, my numbers are a conservative estimate. We’ll probably never know the full scope of Saddam’s murderous tyranny, so it is with little hesitation that I embrace Bob’s numbers.
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