This blog was going to be completely different. It was going to be about the horrors visited upon the children of Iraq by the present disastrous situation there - and maybe some of it still will be, as there is no doubt that the children of Iraq are suffering; children always get the raw end of things in war.
The trigger was the report which I read in the Independent, but which was no doubt also to be seen in other papers, on the publication of a new report from Save the Children called "The State of the World's Mothers, 2007" which, despite the title, seems to concentrate on children. Maybe they couldn't use the title they wanted because Unicef have been producing a "State of the World's Children" report every year for at least 20 years. The account in the Independent picked up on one factoid in the new report: that the Under-5 Mortality rate in Iraq had risen by 150% between 1990 and 2005 (in fact the Independent got its arithmetic wrong, quoting only 125%, but gave figures of 50 per 1000 live births in 1990 rising to 125 in 2005).
I downloaded the report and there indeed were those figures (with the correct rise of 150%), and an attribution of the data to Unicef's State of the World's Children Report 2007, which I have also downloaded and that is indeed what it says. However it happens that I possess a printed copy of the 1992 State of the World's Children report, which contains the 1990 figures (these things take a little while to collate, particularly in the less developed parts of the world) - and that gives an Under-5 Mortality Rate for Iraq of 86. One might imagine minor corrections being made as better data became available too late for inclusion, but the difference between 50 and 86 is surely beyond the bounds of possibility. A random check of a few other countries showed other discrepancies between what the 1992 report said the 1990 figures were and what the 2007 report said the 1990 figues were.
I am flummoxed. If you can't believe Unicef, who can you believe? Was it just a monumental cock-up on the way to the printers? If so, it is clearly the 2007 version that is wrong as the 1988-1991 State of the World's Children Reports show a steady progression: 98, 96, 94, 89 - they can't all be wrong.
But I can't write a tirade against the iniquities of the invasion and subsequent occupation on the basis of figures as suspect as these. More children are undoubtedly dying than were before, and that's a disgrace - I'll just have to leave it at that.
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