Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Demographics from nearly 20 years of war in Iraq

Here's what the American media should have been saying about Iraq before the US began its second invasion:
  • A near majority of the population of Iraq were children under the age of 14 - 45% of the country were kids
  • Half a million children died in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 (that's 1 in 20)
  • Per capita income in Iraq went from $3510 in 1989 to $450 in 1996
  • Between 1990 and 1998, twenty-five percent of the children of Iraq stopped going to school
  • The parents trying to support their children lost nearly 88% of their income. How, as a parent do you raise a family when you lose 88% of your income? We know that the Iraqi government was giving out rations of food to 60% of the country. These rations, by the way, covered less than half the calories we recommend for a person to live.
  • The population of Iraq in 2000 was about 22 million (CIA World Factbook, 2000), that means just over 9 million were children - at least 1 in 20 children died as a result of these sanctions
Today Iraq has 11 million people (nearly 40% of the population) under 16 years of age, 1.6 million Iraqis live as refugees within their own country.

So we can infer the following about the effects of the American wars against Iraq:
  • Since 1987, America has fought a war against a country where the population for the most part has remained below the age of 16 - that's 20 years, at least two generations of children raised with America waging war against them.
  • Almost as many children died during the Economic Warfare of the 1990s as the total number of Iraqi civilians during Gulf War II (150,000 in the report given to the WHO)
  • more than twice as many children died from economic sanctions during the 1990's than all casualties of the first Gulf War (Gulf War casualties estimated at just under 30,000) and all casualties from Gulf War II (all deaths in Iraq seem to be about 180,000) combined.
 
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