For those who thought that the left was exaggerating when it was claimed that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were dying unnecessarily, because of the sanctions, here is some probably reliable information from the U.N.
Here is an excerpt, followed by a link so that you can read the whole copyrighted article.
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The survey is likely to inflame the ongoing debate in the U.N. Security Council over whether to ease the sanctions - regardless of whether Iraq has fully complied with U.N. demands to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction.
The UNICEF findings back a trend that U.N. officials identified in a recent report: U.N. humanitarian relief operations were more effective in areas outside the control of President Saddam Hussein.
The survey found that in government-controlled central and southern Iraq - home to 85 percent of the country's population - children under age 5 are dying at more than twice the rate they were 10 years ago.
Between 1984 and 1989, there were 56 deaths of children under 5 per 1,000 live births compared to 131 deaths per 1,000 live births from 1994 to 1999. UNICEF said this puts the child mortality rate in most of Iraq on a par with rates in Haiti and Pakistan.
By contrast, in the autonomous northern region, the mortality rate of children under 5 declined by over 20 percent - from 90 deaths per 1,000 live births during the years 1989-94 to 72 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1994 and 1999.
Bellamy also noted that Iraq's child mortality rate was on the decline in the 1980s. If that decline had continued in the 1990s, there would have been a half-million fewer deaths of children under 5 from 1991 to 1998.
UNICEF Releases Child Deaths Survey.url