War = Humanitarian Disaster

"The human consequences," writes Paul Rogers, "of large-scale war [on Iraq] could be massive, with three recent assessments being relevant."

First, a detailed analysis of conflict with Iraq has been written by three analysts at the Brookings Institute and is published in the current issue of Survival, the journal of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. In a war that does not involve use of CBW, it considers it likely that there would be perhaps 10,000 Iraqi military killed and a similar number of Iraqi civilians also killed. Any use of CBW could increase this substantially.

A second report, by the London-based MEDACT medical charity looks at the health-orientated consequences of a war. The MEDACT assessment covers a much wider range of up to 50,000 casualties but its real contribution is to point to the longer-term effects of a war on the provision of health services to the population as a whole, as well as for the more immediate and frequently forgotten issue of refugees.

The last point is crucial, in that there are indications that the deaths among refugees in Afghanistan have been very much higher than those due to the direct effects of the bombing.

The other point that comes from MEDACT is that the existing health status of ordinary Iraqis is so much lower than before the 1991 war, as a direct result of that war and of the subsequent sanctions regime.

This line of argument is supported by the third recent assessment, produced by one of the foreign charities that has operated in Iraq for many years, the European organisation Caritas with its UK affiliate, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD). There are about 800,000 Christians in Iraq and Caritas has worked for years with many of them, sending a team there recently to assess the health and humanitarian consequences of a war.

The report, available on the CAFOD website, points out that there are currently 14 million Iraqis dependent on food aid, about two-thirds of the total population. Any breakdown of this distribution system, itself highly likely in the event of war, would lead to immediate major problems of malnutrition as well as many long-term effects. In a remarkably blunt conclusion, CAFOD states that: ‘from a humanitarian perspective, a war against Iraq would be a catastrophe that would bring shame on the world community.’

Proponents of the war argue that what is most likely to happen is that the regime itself will collapse at the onset of an invasion, and that none of these casualties or health impacts will happen. Perhaps the most reliable indicator that this is hardly certain comes from a number of reports that the United States may be planning to use less than 100,000 troops in the actual invasion, but plans to have at least another 100,000 in the immediate region as reinforcements for a longer war.

It is still possible that war might be avoided, but it is frankly unlikely. What is becoming apparent is that there is a very high risk of a humanitarian disaster as a consequence of military action, an aspect that does not seem to be factored into any of the current political discussions in Washington.