Irony, Thy Name is America

While we've been changing 200 year-old laws to get one person hooked up to life support, we've been systematically starving a generation of Iraqi children:

GENEVA (AP) — Almost twice as many Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, a U.N. monitor said Monday.

Four% of Iraqis under age 5 went hungry in the months after Saddam's ouster in April 2003, and the rate nearly doubled to 7.7% last year, said Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food.

The situation is "a result of the war led by coalition forces," he said.

I know, the kids are browner than Americans, but still, this qualifies as ironic. Billmon (who's back, by the way) mentioned in a recent post that Stalin once said "one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic." And if anyone would know about a million deaths, it would be him. But these recent events have certainly seemed to illustrate that quote.

This quote needs to be put out as a disclaimer:

The authors of the report in the British-based medical journal The Lancet — researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad — conceded their data were of "limited precision," because they depended on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.

But I think it'll be hard to argue that conditions in Iraq haven't contributed to malnutrition. And what households would be motivated to lie to their fellow Iraqis about the deaths of their children? I don't know. But I'm sure this paragraph will be used by the right to discount the whole thing.