Iraq's agriculture and food-processing storage and distribution system was attacked directly and systematically. Half of Iraq's agricultural production came from irrigated lands, and all of the irrigation systems serving them-including storage dams, barrages, pumping stations, and drainage projects-were attacked. Farmers lost the ability to flood or drain land, cutting food production in half. Widespread saltwater intrusion occurred in Basra province. At least three food warehouses in the Baghdad province were hit, seven were struck in Asra province, and all of Iraq's General Company of Foodstuffs warehouses in Al-Qadissiya province were destroyed. Important pesticide storage was destroyed. Three separate facilities of the Iraqi Dates Company were damaged.

Iraq's factory in Abu Ghraib to produce baby milk powder, unique to the region, was attacked on January 20, 21, and 22. Although the Pentagon claimed it was a chemical plant, the attacks were simply part of the deliberate targeting of Iraq's food production. The Al-Ma'mun vegetable oils factory and the sugar factory in Meisan Province were hit. In Al-Taji, a small town near Baghdad, the country's biggest frozen-meat storage and distribution center was destroyed. It was bombed three times in one day-at 8 a.m., 3 p.m., and 8 p.m.

Farm herds were decimated-three and a half million sheep from a total of ten million and two million cattle were lost by summer, primarily from feed shortages. Ninety percent of the country's poultry production was destroyed.

Grain silos across the entire country were hit methodically, and hundreds of farms and farm buildings were attacked. The nation's tractor assembly plant and major fertilizer plant were destroyed in bombing raids that took sixteen lives.

In June 1992, more than a year after Iraq was driven from Kuwait and with sanctions still in place, the United States burned grain and wheat fields with incendiary bombs near Mosul in northern Iraq.

U.S. bombing hit twenty-eight civilian hospitals and fifty-two community health centers. Zubair Hospital in Basra province totally collapsed from bombing. At the Ibn Rashid Mental Hospital, southeast of Baghdad, ceilings collapsed onto patients' beds. At Ulwiyya Maternity Hospital, shrapnel and broken glass hit babies and mothers. The student health clinic and school in Hilla was bombed. Five of Iraq's military medical facilities were also damaged....

As the infrastructure and life-support systems were being bombed, Iraqi civilians were killed by the thousands. Attacks on life-support systems assured that many more thousands would perish, even though they might be far from the line of fire.

The bombing of Iraq took more than 150,000 lives outright and left a broken and bleeding nation....

...Total U.S. war casualties, including thirty-seven acknowledged to have died from "friendly fire," were 148, according to the Pentagon....

The overall death rate from monitored causes due to the sanctions has increased each year since 1989. For children under age five the increase in deaths exceeds a multiple of eight, from 7,100 in 1989 to 57,000 in 1996. For persons over age five the death rate has increased more than four times, from 20,200 to 83,200. Diseases related to malnutrition continue to increase. Kwashiorkor, virtually unknown in 1989, has increased nearly sixty times to reach 21,000 cases last year, marasmus fifty times to 192,000 cases last year. Other malnutrition-related illnesses have increased eighteen-fold to 1,354,000 cases in 1996.

Sicknesses related to poor sanitation continue a steady increase. Last year amebic dysentery was up twenty-seven-fold to 243,000 cases. Malaria increased more than seven-fold to 32,000 cases. Typhoid fever increased eight times to 15,000 cases. Scabies has increased from no cases in 1989 to 37,000 in 1996. Cholera is up from no cases to more than 3,000 in 1997 through September.....

The total cost in lives directly resulting from UN sanctions is now 1,500,000 deaths over the normal death rate...

These tragic statistics do not convey the human horror of the sanctions....

Ramsey Clark

More (PDF)

THE DEVASTATED HEALTH OF IRAQI CHILDREN: The combination of sanctions, war and occupation has resulted in Iraq showing the world's worst evolution in child mortality: from an under-five mortality rate of 50 per 1000 live births in 1990, to 125 in 2005. That means an annual deterioration of 6.1 per cent -- a world record, well behind very poor and AIDS- affected Botswana. At the outset of the 2003 war, the US administration pledged to cut Iraq's child mortality rate in half by 2005. But the rate has continued to worsen, to 130 in 2006, according to Iraqi Health Ministry figures.

Nutrition is, of course, vital to health. According to the United Nations Children's Agency (UNICEF), about one in 10 Iraqi children under five are underweight (acutely malnourished) and one in five are short for their age (chronically malnourished). But this is only the tip of the iceberg, according to Claire Hajaj, communications officer at the UNICEF Iraq Support Centre in Amman. "Many Iraqi children may also be suffering from 'hidden hunger' -- deficiencies in critical vitamins and minerals that are the building blocks for children's physical and intellectual development," Hajaj says. "These deficiencies are hard to measure, but they make children much more vulnerable to illness and less likely to thrive at school." Hayder Hussainy, a senior official at the Iraqi Ministry of Health, states that approximately 50 per cent of Iraqi children suffer from some form of malnourishment.

Also important is the psychological impact of war and occupation. In a study entitled "The Psychological Effects of War on Iraqis", the Association of Iraqi Psychologists (AIP) reports that out of 2,000 people interviewed in all 18 Iraqi provinces, 92 per cent said they feared being killed in an explosion. Some 60 per cent of those interviewed said the level of violence had caused them to have panic attacks, which prevented them from going out because they feared they would be the next victims. The AIP also surveyed over 1,000 children across Iraq and found that 92 per cent of children examined had learning impediments, largely attributable to the current climate of fear and insecurity. "The only thing they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the US occupation," says the AIP's Marwan Abdullah.

from the al-ahram weekly april 5-11, 2007 via jerome a paris who broke it down to "1 Iraqi child in 8 won't live to be 5 years old."

and in case anyone is wondering what the u.s. is doing to help alleviate malnutrition:  

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

It ain't no coincidence that children start dying in larger numbers whenever the conservative Republicans are in power, their prosperity is always at the expense of those who are most vulnerable and least able to defend themselves.  This is their modus operandi

 George Bush and the members of the Bush White House are traitors to the United States of America, criminals who must be indicted and tried for their crimes against our nation, Iraq and humanity.

Read this article again.  Isn't it odd the way the statistics are quoted from 1990 to the present?  The specific way that a the results of a 1999 report from before the war is cited but almost nothing more recent?  Doesn't the way the stats are put in this article cause your BS detector to tingle just a bit?

If infant mortality rates are still high, I'll agree that something needs to be done.  To convince me of that, you're going to have to show me the trends leading up to and after the war, not quote numbers that are clearly unrelated to the war however tragic.  Let me say that more clearly.  Everything article says but one was true before the war.  The war may not have helped the situation, but it didn't cause it.

No offense, it's easy to be fooled by people who abuse statistics.  This article seems designed to manipulate the numbers and create just the kind of reaction you had without really telling you the whole story. Please look again.

On the other hand, there is some important information missing.  In their 1999 report, UNICEF estimated that infant mortality in Iraq in 1995 was 129 per 1000.  Since the 2005 estimate is 125 per 1000, it's not fair to say that mortality rate "is" soaring.  Most of the soaring occurred in the four years after Saddam invaded Kuwait, was pushed back to his own borders, and incurred UN sanctions, not in recent years as it's probably easy to assume.

And the US helped fund and arm iraq's war against iran.

The reason for social chaos since Saddam's fall was anarchists of various sorts who don't want a stable Iraqi government for their own reasons.