Me Three

A Humanitarian Effort, or a Humanitarian Catastrophe?

By Sarah Stodola

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It’s human nature to be selfish, to be more concerned with the things you can see than the things you can’t, to protect the ones you love even if it means hurting the ones you don’t. It’s also human nature to get caught up in debates, to lose sight of reality in the face of argument.

But the coming days might be the time to try and extend the reaches of our humanity.

Now that an invasion of Iraq has come to appear imminent, many people who were before speaking of and debating the issue in abstract and hypothetical terms are now sitting up and realizing that this is actually going to happen. There’s a sense of doom, no matter which side you’re on. And there are a lot of issues to work out, and there will be a lot of guilt to deal with, especially if things go badly.

And even if things don’t go badly, there is a serious and inevitable repercussion that, up to now, has been largely ignored by many of those involved in the debate: Iraqi civilian casualties.

There’s no denying that if we invade Iraq, people there will die. And maybe in the grand scheme of things this will have been a necessary and tragic byproduct of a positive outcome. I’m nowhere near convinced of this, and regardless, I am in no place to play God, deciding who deserves to live and who doesn’t in any sort of scheme, much less the grand one. But either way, the issue of civilian casualties needs to be something that we are acutely aware of as this conflict progresses. These are people, after all, with friends, fears, livelihoods, and neighbors.

So far, this issue has been unabashedly pushed under the rug.

There doesn’t seem to be any concrete estimate out there of projected civilian deaths once the war actually gets going. I conducted a Google search in hopes of obtaining some numbers from credible sources. I didn’t come up with any. I saw estimates ranging from a few thousand all the way up to 500,000. Nothing has been verified, to say the least.

There may be logical reasons for this. Predicting the future is always an imprecise science. There are really smart people out there who spend there entire lives studying the economy, for example, and yet it seems no one is ever able to do anything better than make an educated guess about what will happen next, economically speaking. One factor which makes projections of casualties so difficult is the fact that casualties won’t stop increasing once the war is officially over. Resources such as water supply and health care will be cut off and/or contaminated, which will have a lasting effect on the country's population. In addition, there’s no telling how many deaths Saddam Hussein will cause among his own people during and following an invasion, and it’s tough to say whether or not those casualties should be tallied as victims of our invasion.

But the statistics may also appear so unreliable because no one has really made an issue out of figuring them out. The press has not placed the issue at the forefront of the debate, so there has been no pressure on the government to come up with accurate numbers.

One would think that we could look to the past to get a decent idea of what the numbers might look like this time around. However, statistics regarding the 1991 Persian Gulf War are no clearer than predictions for the coming war. There is no consensus of info, even among reputable sources. All of the major news sources seem to site different statistics. The Pentagon says it was 3,500. It has been estimated elsewhere that 205,000 Iraqis died either during the Gulf War, or as a direct result of it (although this is a controversial figure, it is not without merit, and it’s an interesting story in and of itself). The vast majority of these people were civilians, many of them children. Statistics like this make the World Trade Center disaster look like a minor inconvenience. If this estimate were correct, it would mean that roughly 68 times more Iraqis died in the Persian Gulf War than the total number of people who died in the September 11th attacks. It would also amount to over one percent of the entire population of Iraq. One percent of the population of the United States, just to put things in perspective, would be 2.9 million people.

Figures concerning the Gulf War are also difficult to calculate for several reasons. Because of UN sanctions following the war, Iraqis did not have adequate access to food or medicine (and as a result, the United Nations implemented the “Oil for Food” program, which allowed Iraq to sell enough oil to feed and supply necessary services to its citizens. According to the State Department, 60% of Iraq’s population relies on the program for daily necessities). In addition, it’s important to remember that in 1990 Iraq had been involved in a longstanding conflict with Iran for years, which severely destabilized resources for civilians.

I was unable to find any statistics, either from the Gulf war or for the impending one, on the U.S. government’s website, although it does acknowledge that “there remains a concern that U.S. and other military leaders have underestimated the potential humanitarian crisis in Iraq.” I spent about an hour searching the government sites. Maybe another couple of hours would have turned something up. But even if it did, suffice it to say that the information is not readily available. On the other hand, there exist several government documents that lead me to believe it’s at least possible that the United States will make a sincere effort to minimize the somewhat inevitable humanitarian catastrophe.

The United Nations is estimating 100,000 “immediate casualties.” In addition, it claims that there are currently 400,000 malnourished children in Iraq, and their lives will be placed in serious jeopardy if a war starts. And there will be refugees and displaced civilians numbering in the millions. So we are talking about literally millions of people whose lives will be ruined by the war. We should all try to imagine how we would feel if the tables were turned, and international organizations were predicting that hundreds of thousands of us - our own friends and neighbors - were likely to die because of an invasion that by most counts is not completely necessary.

I’m not trying to make an argument against the war - that has its time and place, and this isn’t it. What I am doing is trying to put into perspective the catastrophic and very real potential consequences of an invasion. Many of those promoting the war are doing so with the argument that it will be a humanitarian effort, liberating the Iraqi people. But common sense tells us that you can’t liberate dead people.

And even if we do get some accurate statistics before too long, we need to start thinking of the Iraqis as people, not simply as a bunch of numbers.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted at [email protected].