Considering costs of human suffering
Scott Appleby
As the nation prepares for war with Iraq, the suffering of the war's likely victims, including untold numbers of noncombatants, weighs heavily on our minds. During the initial forum of "Peace and War 2003: Debating the Issues," theologian Father Michael Baxter delivered a report on his recent visit to Iraq, where he celebrated Christmas with members of the Christian community and interacted with other ordinary Iraqis. Baxter spoke movingly of a people who have been denied basic human needs, including adequate nutrition and health care, by the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the international community over the last decade. Antibiotics are absent or in short supply, for example, and the economic and social infrastructure of Iraq society has virtually collapsed.
Baxter came away from the experience, he said, with an rueful awareness that Iraqi Christians, who number approximately 1 million, are no more willing to oppose the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein than U.S. Christians are willing to launch a sustained and effective protest against the destructive and pernicious policies of their own government.
The consequences of such public opposition, of course, are far more severe in Iraq, where freedom of speech, assembly and religion are a distant dream and state torture and execution of dissidents are commonplace events. Respondents Dan Philpott, professor of political science, and sophomore Teresa Hansen made this point, albeit indirectly, in different ways.
Hansen, who is strongly opposed to war, spoke of her own participation in organized protests against the U.S. military build-up. One might add that such protests are protected by U.S. law and even encouraged by some public figures as expressions of a thriving democracy.
Philpott underscored the paucity of effective options in responding to Saddam's ruthless repression of his own people and his designs on regional power. (During Saddam's rule perhaps 1 million Iraqis have been killed. Hundreds of thousands died in needless war, and others were simply murdered by the regime.) In an attempt to de-fang Saddam, the international community has tried diplomacy, sanctions, embargoes, positive inducement and even limited military strikes. None of this has worked.
Over the course of three panels thus far, no one has minimized the monstrous nature of Saddam or his regime. But some have questioned the motivations and intentions of the Bush administration.
Theologian Margaret Pfeil, invoking the John Howard Yoder's call for a just war theory "with teeth," expressed doubt that the U.S. government satisifies the "right intention" criterion for making war. If we are so concerned with liberating the Iraqi people, she asked, why did we wait decades to do so? The U.S. government showed little interest in the people of either Iraq or Iran, Pfeil noted, when it supported Iraq in the bitter and prolonged war of the 1980s. Nor was the senior President Bush particularly concerned with liberating the people of Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War. The current Bush administration, in its "realist" concerns with "regime change," whatever the cost in innocent lives, demonstrates that international law was indeed developed as a law for states rather than a law for the people.
Were the U.S. government truly concerned with the people who would become the victims of war, the following estimates would give pause. The United Nations, in a once-secret report (now available on the web) that draws upon data provided by the World Health Organization, estimates that 500,000 people would require medical treatment as a result of the military attacks upon Iraq. One hundred thousand citizens would be wounded, and an additional 400,000 would fall ill after the bombing of water and sewage facilities and the disruption of food supplies. More than 2 million children under the age of five would require therapeutic feeding.
Wit such estimates in view, Vittorio Hosle raised the question of proportionality in considering the consequences of a pre-emptive strike against Iraq. What if the proposed war would end in the deaths of far more innocent Iraqis than would die otherwise (e.g., by a policy of containment, constant harrassment and scrutiny of Saddam's regime)? How could we consider this a justifiable "humanitarian intervention"?
Christopher Rupar, a senior undergraduate in Air Force ROTC, argued that the U.S. military, far from being trigger-happy, shares a strong presumption against the use of force and seeks to limit the number of casualties on both sides. The military can play a constructive role in rebuilding war-torn societies, Rupar noted, in part by providing physical security and stability for post-war governments dedicated to democracy.
Pfeil nonetheless lamented the fact that Americans, and Christians in particular, have a long way to go in preparing themselves to pursue peace in the fullest sense of the term — the restoration of right relations with God and with one's neighbor. We are far from being converted to peace, far from exhausting every possible alternative to war.
Future panels will address the impact of a war on the Middle East and U.S. relations with Islam, the role of the media in framing perceptions of the crisis and the financial cost of the war.
Scott Appleby is a professor of history and director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. To respond to this or another other column in the "Viewpoint: Iraq" series, please contact viewpoint.1@nd.edu.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, February 10, 2003
