“Through violence, you may 'solve' one problem, but you sow the seeds for another.” Dalai Lama
If war is hell, what do we call the aftermath of war? Most of the time, we try not to call it anything at all.
I. No Black and White in WarThere is no black and white in war. If I had to pick a color, I would probably choose red, for all the blood that is spilled and all the fires. Red for the anger that comes before, during and---yes, even after the fighting has stopped. Nowadays, we do not declare “peace” and then live happily ever after. Because, long after the bombs stop falling, people continue to suffer from the effects----starvation, disease, pollution, homelessness--- of war.
War is not a political choice. It is a disease.
II. Modern Warfare: Women and Children (Die) FirstModern warfare has become increasingly brutal. In the old days, most war casualties were soldiers. Now, most of the victims are civilian bystanders---including women and children. And by most, I mean 90%. We no longer wage wars against armies. We battle civilian populations.
(D)espite the best efforts of politicians and humanitarian groups, war and public health remain inherently at odds.
Snip
The business of war is taking lives and destroying societies, not saving them.
http://hir.harvard.edu/index.php?page=article&id=1326III. How Much is a Life Worth?The good news for the Israeli and Palestinian victims of war: they get a lot of political attention from the rest of the world. Compare the number of Google hits you get for “Gaza War Dead” (3,600,000) and “Congo War Dead” (270,000). These numbers are even more striking if you consider that the Congo War has been going on for decades and has killed millions and is supported by western countries like the U.S. According to one report, from 2008, 45,000 people die monthly in the Congo.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/23/congo.internationalIn contrast, the 2009 war in Gaza killed somewhere between 1100 and 1400 Palestinians.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29778337/http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel-challenges-palestinian-claim-on-gaza-war-dead-1.272986If you do a little (nonscientific) math, you will see that each Palestinian death generated about 25,000 Google hits, while 15 people in the Congo have to die each month before Google will take any notice at all. (Note that the death of one attractive blonde American woman, Natalee Holloway is worth 1,000,000 Googles).
The bad news for Israeli and Palestinian victims of war: they get a lot of
political attention. Politics does not heal your war wounds. Politics can not relieve your PTSD symptoms. Politics does not clean up your water or replace lost jobs or parents. Medical science can help with all these problems----as long as politics does not get in the way.
IV.A Few Words about Politics and ScienceThe Bush administration was criticized for “politicizing science”. Global warming theory was bad for Exxon’s bottom line so it was “incorrect science.” Evolution offended the fundamentalist base. Certain birth control methods violated Catholic Church dogma, so the federal government could not approve them as medical therapy. Embryonic stem cell research was severely hampered for political reasons.
A couple of decades before Bush, Reagan politicized health care, by denying funding for AIDS research, on the grounds that it was a disease which afflicted a portion of the population---gays---who were considered enemies by the GOP base. His actions set back HIV research and contributed to many deaths.
President Obama has vowed to separate science from politics.
"By doing this, we will ensure America's continued global leadership in scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs," he said. "And that is essential, not only for our economic prosperity, but for the progress of all humanity."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/09/obama.science/index.htmlHowever, politics is always a factor in scientific research. Politics determines who gets the research dollars. Even after a study is complete, political and economic considerations play a big part in getting it published. Publish the wrong story at the wrong time, and you can get into trouble. Remember when the Journal of the American Medical Association got into hot water for reporting that the majority of college students surveyed did not think that oral sex was sex during the Clinton impeachment hearings, where it appeared to validate the president’s assertion that he had not had “sex” with that woman?
In 2005, Roger A. Pielke Jr. wrote
The current debate over these panels reinforces the old myth that we can somehow cleanly separate science from politics and then ensure that the science is somehow untainted by the "impurities" of the rest of society. Yet paradoxically, we also want science to be relevant to policy. A better approach would be to focus our attention on developing transparent, accountable and effective processes to manage politics in science -- not to pretend that it doesn't exist.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61928-2005Jan9.htmlV. Doctors Without BordersWe are not monsters. The sight of all those women and children dying does not leave us unmoved. We donate money. We send in the Red Cross. And, we expect our health care workers and medical scientists to collect data to help us understand the effects of war, so that we can avoid civilian casualties the next time around.
Or do we?
Here is the mission statement of one group studying the causes of civilian death in war, the Genova based “New Weapons Committee”:
Within a week from the beginning of the war between Israel and Lebanon on July 12, 2006 doctors in Lebanon and in Gaza denounced weapons previously unseen by medical personnel which in both cases had long experience of emergency medicine in warfare situation.
Snip
Our work is mostly concerned with researching and analyzing reports and data to understand the agents utilized in the war and to promote risk assessment surveys for the effects on individuals and population of the weapons utilized. In order to know how to cure and protect survivors by medical and predictive studies.
http://www.newweapons.org/?q=node/4Their findings include the presence of heavy metals of the type associated with weapons in the soil in Gaza and similar heavy metals in hair sample taken from children in Gaza.
At this point, a longitudinal study would usually be funded. Researchers would compare the health status of war zone residents with some control population in a similar geographic area.
You would not expect the response to be:
"This so-called research is eerily reminiscent of ancient blood libels against the Jewish people, when rumors were spread about Jews poisoning wells," said Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress. "Today we are seeing a recurrence of all the worst excesses of anti-Semitism and diatribes that we perhaps naively thought had remained in the Dark Ages."
http://rickscafamerican.blogspot.com/2010/01/israel-matzav-in-italy-another-old.htmlor
The "New Weapons Committee" has already shown its bias from its previous press releases that convicted Israel without any evidence, their statements of Israel using DU in Lebanon with no evidence, and the very nature of the study itself. This is not research and this is not science: it is an attempt to smear Israel by hiding behind the fig-leaf of pseudo-science that the vast majority of readers will never bother to check.
http://www.jewishblogging.com/blog.php?bid=213439If Gaza was the only place in the world where medical researchers are studying the toxic effects of bombs, then these critics might have a case. However, the use (and effects) of depleted uranium by the United States in a number of war zones as has been much studied and reported.
http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/a/299.htmlShame on them for stereotyping the United States as the kind of people who would expose civilians to toxins! It is has been years since we have traded small pox infected blankets to our enemies! And Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred in a completely different century!
Jokes aside, it appears that to err is human….and to insist that there is no way in hell you ever could have done what you are accused of doing is also human. Here are some quotes from National Review in 2003.
Help—Depleted Uranium
I'd like to try to write a column about the controversy over depleted uraniam weapons. I assume the criticism of them is hysterical and wrong-headed, but would love to hear from anyone with expert knowledge about them at this e-mail.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjNlMjExZDU0Y2MyOTY2Njc0NjcxYjg3MDA2ZDgzMzA= Re Depleted Uranium
I once heard a general explain the mythology about depleted uranium shells, saying the radioactive period is very brief and the fallout very limited and even if it causes health problems, if you're on the receiving end of a depleted uranium shell, the last of your worries is whether you'll die of cancer in 20 years
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmRiNWI2NGNiZjgyNGViMDRhNTI3OGRjY2U5YzY0MjQ=If reports about the environmental impact of war are, by their very nature, politically charged, what are we to make of this site:
http://www.lenntech.com/environmental-effects-war.htmWhich discusses Iraq, Russia, the U.S., Nazi Germany, Japan, Vietnam, Kosovo, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan and Israel? The folks at Water Treatment Solutions must hate everyone! Without doubt, there are partisans in each of the conflicts described above who have declared war impact studies biased. It is human nature to want to defend our conduct in war. We all want to believe that our war was a good war.
VI. The Myth of the “Good” War God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Reports about environmental contamination or disease or starvation caused by war are unpopular, because they contradict the notion that a war can be “good” a word closely associated with “god”.
People just love a good war---as long as it is fought in a country far-far way, against a faceless enemy that can not put up any meaningful resistance. They do not like seeing their own soldiers killed. Nor do they want to be reminded of the civilian toll of war. They do not like a long war either. They want to be told that right is on their side and that anyone who dies on the other side had it coming.
War serves all kinds of purposes. It enables us to steal other countries’ resources. It serves as a distraction when things are not going well at home. Political enemies can be silenced during war by calling them unpatriotic. Military spending is a great way to (further) enrich your political allies.
Since war is so good for so many political and economic reasons, a lot of time and effort are spent selling wars. Remember the run up to the invasion of Iraq? How we were going to liberate the people of that country? Rah, rah, go U.S.A! Ignore the limbless babies in Fallujah. They will only interfere with your enjoyment of the fighting.
VII. War as DiseaseThe effects of war—especially civilian deaths---are often underestimated. In part, these totals can be difficult to calculate. But politics also plays a role.
Wars around the world have killed three times more people over the past half-century than previously estimated, a new study suggests.
The finding supports the notion of armed conflict as a "public health problem" whose instability leads not only to violent deaths, but to indirect deaths from infectious disease and other causes, experts add.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=5207645&page=1For example, at a time when the White House claimed Iraqi civilian deaths to be 30,000, the British medical journal
Lancet estimated the deaths at over half a million. That is a big difference. If the (s)elected representatives of a democracy think that they can get away with fudging a number like that, imagine how much other unpleasant news they will try to bury.
The United States is not the only country that likes to downplays its atrocities. China claims that only 241 people died in Tianamen Square on June 4, 1989. Others, including the Soviets, estimated the deaths to be closer to 3000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989Just three years ago, the Japanese prime minister claimed that there was no proof his country forced women to become sex slaves during WWII. Compare his political posturing to an eyewitness account:
Yasuji Kaneko, 87, still remembers the screams of the countless women he raped in China as a soldier in the Japanese imperial army in World War II. Some were teenagers from Korea serving as sex slaves in military-run brothels. Others were women in villages he and his comrades pillaged in eastern China.
"They cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died," Kaneko said in an interview with The Associated Press at his Tokyo home. "We were the emperor's soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/01/AR2007030100578.htmlYou can not cure diseases like HIV, lunger cancer and depression by pretending that they do not exist (though that does not keep some people from trying). The same thing goes for the disease known as violence. We all know that cigarette smoking is a major preventable cause of death, especially in industrialized countries like the United States. How many of us stop to think that the wars we export (through our weapons sales to other countries) are also a preventable cause of death? We see the monetary waste from our bloated military budget, but how many folks appreciate the waste of human lives that goes along with it?
VII. The Stages of GriefIf we remain in denial, we can never accept and move on. Most of us accept this as true when it comes to suffering on an individual scale. However, when it comes to war, we often remain in denial for years---and even congratulate ourselves that our denial is patriotic, evidence of good citizenship. So much time and effort and ink is spent reassuring ourselves that the war we just fought was the best and most perfect war ever in the history of mankind---
Imagine what we could do to help the victims of war, if we were to redirect our energy to accepting their suffering and looking for ways to alleviate it? The U.S. military appropriations for 2010 were the largest ever. We will spend less than one tenth that amount on medical research.
“The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace
Hate your next-door neighbor, but don't forget to say grace”
Barrie McGuire “Eve of Destruction"