Love Your Enemies - "Malnutrition Rising Among Iraq's Children"

[rjbny62]

http://nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Malnutrition-Rising.html

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Malnutrition Rising Among Iraq's Children
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 22, 2004


Filed at 12:45 p.m. ET

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Malnutrition among Iraq's youngest children has nearly doubled since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq despite U.N. efforts to deliver food to the war-ravaged country, a Norwegian research group said Monday.

Since the March 2003 invasion, malnutrition among children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years has grown from 4 percent to 7.7 percent, said Jon Pedersen, deputy managing director of the Oslo, Norway-based Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science, which conducted the survey.

The U.N. Development Program and Iraq's Central office for Statistics and Information Technology also took part in the survey.

``It's in the level of some African countries,'' Pedersen told The Associated Press. ``Of course, no child should be malnourished, but when we're getting to levels of 7 to 8 percent, it's a clear sign of concern.''

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[Nicholas_J]

1. This is something Iraqi's have not known in decades.

No matter how brutal Saddams regime is made to appear, an Iraqi could expect to have all of the basic needs of life met under the Baathist Regime. Housing was subsidized, health care was free and universal, food prices were subsidized and kept extremely cheap, education through college was free and universally available to all children, both male and female, explaining why the proportion of males to females in professions like law, medicine, enginerring and so on was equally divided by gender. Much moreso than in the U.S.

The Iraqi people, like many other people in the world, have a very misguided idea of what Democracy is. They simply beleived that they would be able to retain all of the benefits provided by Saddam, get rich, and be able oto do and say whatever they wanted. They beleived that converting to a U.S. style free market system would allow them to retain all of the benefits that they had before. This was a common idea in the Soviet Union and the Ex Soviet Bloc. Everyone beleived that they would have all of the social benefits they had before, but somehow immediately, the free market system and democracy would suddenly cause everyones lifestyle to greatly improve and that they would live just like the people on American TV shows like Dallas.

When reality rears is ugly head, many of the citizens in these states start to feel they have been betrayed amdnd lied to by the west.

As usual, they dont blame themselves for their greedy little thought, and will not accept the fact that these televisionversions of America are both fiction and propaganda. THey bear a good deal of the blame themselves for biting into the nice fat worm, and not seeing the hook.

Iraq is a differnt case. They didn ask us to overthrow Saddam. THey did complain about him, but they didnt ask to bbe invaded or occupied. They may have wanted help in the means of deposing Saddam, so they could establish their own government, but they didnt ask us to come in and establish one for them.

THe reason that we did is that in the last case that we assisted a group overthow a government, Afghanistan, the resulting goverment was not what we wanted, a pro-western democracy, but an anti western theocracy. WE were not about to let that happen in the country with the second largest oil reserves in the world.

[Zhade]

2. Wow. Vilsack must be SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than Iraqi kids.

Kick.