War Would Be 'Catastrophic' for Iraqi Children

"Should we go to war against these children?" That's the question John Pilger proposed we all ask ourselves before signing off on the Bush/Blair excursion into Iraq.

To help clarify the ramifications of that question, perhaps it'd be worth consulting a new study, "Our Common Responsibility: The Impact of a New War on Iraq Children", released today by the Canadian International Study Team. Marty Logan of IPS reports that the study indicates that a war on Iraq "would have devastating effects on the country's 13 million children, many of whom are already malnourished and living in 'great fear' of another conflict."

''While it is impossible to predict both the nature of any war and the number of expected deaths and injuries, casualties among children will be in the thousands, probably in the tens of thousands and possibly in the hundreds of thousands,'' Canadian team leader and medical doctor Eric Hoskins said in a statement.

The report says that Iraq currently has only one month's supply of food and three months of medicine remaining.

...Weakened by the effects of war and more than a decade of economic sanctions, 500,000 Iraqi children are malnourished, it says. For example, the death rate of children under five years of age is already 2.5 times greater than it was in 1990, before the Gulf War.

Because most of the country's 13 million children are dependent on food distributed by the Government of Iraq, ''the disruption of this system by war would have a devastating impact on children who already have a high rate of malnutrition'', says the report.