Cost of the War in Iraq
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Dr. Bernard Lown

Medical Concerns of Iraq and the likely effect of the "collateral damage"

It is with a heavy heart that I write to you as we begin a new year with the fear that another attack on the beleaguered people of Iraq is imminent, and, like you, I'm outraged.

Prior to the first Gulf War, IPPNW informed all within ear shot that war would be an unthinkable calamity. We warned that coating the sands of Arabia with blood, creating millions of refugees, and crippling a nation was no way to secure peace and justice in the Middle East. "Victory," we forecast, would destabilize an already volatile region, stimulate proliferation, foment the growth of religious fundamentalism and terrorism, and make Americans persona non grata throughout the Muslim world. An even more sinister aspect of the Gulf War would be the legitimization of the use of violence to settle international disputes in the post-Cold War world. Our predictions, if anything, were understated.

Twelve years ago, American military power reduced to rubble a country with a gross domestic product equal to that of the state of Kentucky. While allied casualties were miraculously low, hundreds of thousands of civilians perished. Untold numbers of survivors overwhelmed Iraq's limited medical resources leaving many of the wounded and traumatized without adequate health care. With sanitation and water purification facilities deliberately destroyed, outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera, typhoid, malaria, polio, and hepatitis ravaged the population. In short, the Gulf War was an unmitigated health catastrophe.

Yet the Gulf War was not just another carnage. It was intended to rehabilitate war as the proper means for enforcing global order. A new era was opened of high-intensity warfare using modern conventional weapons with devastating results. The military strategy was vastly different from Vietnam. No more body counts or napalmed children. Avoided were the acres of rubble of WWII. No images of Dresden, Tokyo, or Leningrad to wrench emotion, mobilize moral outrage, or evoke sympathy. It was a "techno war." During 43 days of war, the US and its allies dropped 88,500 tons of bombs, the equivalent of nearly seven Hiroshimas. While 70% of the new "smart bombs" were off target, sanitized media coverage focused on the high-tech wizardry of the aerial blitzkrieg. Televised images defined the war as a game, fostering the illusion of safe, bloodless playing fields while a Third World country was being dragged back to the last century.

Appallingly, the delusory belief that overwhelming military force can solve the world's problems is now official US policy. Worse still, the Bush Administration has sanctioned mere threat perception as sufficient justification for waging unilateral "preventive" war, propagandized as an essential element to defeating terrorism and to ensuring peace. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman historian Publius Tacitus saw through the rhetoric, "They make a wilderness and call it peace."

IPPNW is once more sounding a global medical warning of a humanitarian catastrophe in the making. Should America wage war on Iraq, again the cost will be borne primarily by the innocent. An assault on Saddam Hussein will be, in real terms, an assault on the people of Iraq. Still suffering from the first Gulf War and more than a decade of economic sanctions, ordinary Iraqis - especially the very young, the infirm, and the elderly - will be far more vulnerable to this new assault than they were in 1991. As documented by our British affiliate, Medact, in the newly released IPPNW report, Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq, the death toll could mount to more than 200,000 deaths.

A new Gulf War will shatter what remains of Iraq's economic and civilian infrastructure, demolishing simultaneously the interlinked health services. It will leave behind unspeakable environmental degradation with profoundly adverse health effects. IPPNW projects an additional 200,000 victims dying in the post-war aftermath.

Hordes of displaced persons and floods of refugees will subsist in unavoidable squalor. Dumbfounding psychological trauma, like a distorting genetic mutation, will wreak havoc in human behavior into future generations. Such conditions serve as incubators of disease, pestilence, and hatred. Rather than stopping terrorism, a new Gulf War will incite new acts of desperate revenge.

The ever-threatening possibility of a so-called conventional war escalating to the use of nuclear weapons is real. If US forces encounter determined resistance which claim substantial American casualties, the Pentagon is ready to resort to nuclear weapons. The Orwelian language justifying such a dreadful eventuality comes in the nuke-speak of "bunker-busters." For its part, the Bush Administration has just declared that it "reserves the right to use all of our options," including genocidal nuclear weapons. If nuclear weapons are used - by the US or by Israel or by Britain - the help that medicine can render to the countless victims will be utterly trivial in mitigating human suffering.

Thus IPPNW's mission is the practice of preventive medicine of the highest order. We cannot be merely appendages to military machines left to cope with maimed bodies and broken spirits. We cannot sit on the sidelines as helpless spectators to an unfolding tragedy of untold misery and death. Compelled by our sworn duty to protect life we are demanding alternatives to war. Simply stated, when a disease cannot be cured, it must be prevented.

American policy is not preordained. It can be contested and changed - in the coffee shops, the living rooms, and the papers of towns small and large across this great country. Politicians do not respond to moral imperatives, but to the clamor of their constituency. You and I - we are the decision-makers. Together we can meet the challenge and speak out against this injustice, and change the wayward immoral course.

I urge you to order a copy of IPPNW's Collateral Damage report for yourself - and to send copies to your representatives in Congress. Demand that they publicly renounce war on Iraq and support UN weapons inspections. Help us spread the word still further. Talk to your friends, your congregation, your editorial board about the impending humanitarian catastrophe and the portentous direction of US war-making. Visit IPPNW's website at www.ippnw.org to see what others around the world are doing to prevent this senseless war.

Bernard Lown, M.D.
IPPNW Co-Founder
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985 Nobel Peace Prize)
727 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel (617) 868-5050

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