The Day After the Eve of Destruction

[McCamy Taylor]

“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 War

There 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) First

Modern 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=1326


III. 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.international

In 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-1.272986

If 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 Science

The 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.html

However, 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.html

V. Doctors Without Borders

We 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/4

Their 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.html

or

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=213439

If 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.html

Shame 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.htm

Which 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 Disease

The 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=1

For 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_1989

Just 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.html

You 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 Grief

If 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"

[wolfgangmo]

1. YOu are one of the few reliably great poster on here.

Here is a pat on your back for a job well done.

Thanks.

[Francisco]

2. As long as war=revenue

It will never end, the Weapons and Defense Contracts will keep moving and we will nuke ourselves into oblivion.

[planetc]

6. As long as we all think it will never end...

it never will. We will go on killing each other until we achieve oblivion. It's the way we think: the self-imposed line we draw between the thinkable and the unthinkable. For a lot of people right now, it is unthinkable that we could run a country or a world without war. As long as we think that, war will dominate our thinking, our foreign policy, our political actions, and it will keep on maiming and killing both our soldiers and their civilians.

In the 1950's, when I was a teen ager, all the chairmen were called chairmen, and they were almost all men. After 1968, the latest wave of the women's movement insisted we call the office "chairperson." Many people thought this was unnecessary, a disfiguring of the language, a silly PC requirement. But eventually people started talking about searching for a chairperson. And as of this writing, more committees have chairwomen than in the 1950's. We have to change the language we think in before we can change the world we live in.

It used to be not just socially acceptable, but theologically supported, to own slaves in this country. The Bible justified chattel slavery, or so many Southerners were convinced. It's no longer socially or politically acceptable to keep slaves. There still are slaves, but our thinking has changed enough to react negatively to anything that can fairly be called slavery. It does make a difference what we think and what we say.

Just now, a high proportion of citizens, both men and women, think war is inevitable. There's nothing inevitable about it. To conduct a war, you need to have some weapons, which someone has to pay for, and some soldiers, who have to be willing to use those weapons on complete strangers, not to mention risking their lives. Conducting war is one of the most highly organized and expensive of human activities. It's also one of the stupidest and most destructive. War is no more inevitable than buying an iPhone. Many people have resisted the urge to buy one. And we can change human thinking so as to make war not just the last alternative, but an unthinkable alternative.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Modern Warfare: Women and Children (Die) First

I am certainly glad this was not the case in the Middle Ages. Oh wait, this is why Renaissance experts developed the just war theory... why? Because women and children, as well as the elderly were put to the sword many a times, an image from the Crusades makes the point very well, Crusader horses walking up to the knees in blood in Jerusalem.

I am glad that Civilians were allowed to live during the Napoleonic wars...

I could go on. In fact, modern warfare actually has a better record of respecting civilians, if better can be called not bombing cities during total war... oh wait, that happened during WW II... my bad.

That said, we actually do better these days in general... in actual wars. When you get civil insurgencies, not just in the middle east, yes that is a sad reality of modern warfare. Alas that's been the reality since oh at least the mythical times of ... Joshua who came in and destroyed the Caananites by putting all to the sword, men, women, children, dogs, cattle... and salting the land.

[McCamy Taylor]

4. WWII is first major (non civil) war in which civilian casualties outnumber military casualties.

That is because the Germans and Japanese committed so many atrocities against civilians.

The First World War had about 40% civilian deaths.

The Napoleonic War had about 28% civilian deaths.

So yeah, war increasingly kills civilians in the modern era. 90% civilian casualties just sort of boggles the mind. No army can be that incompetent. They must be targetting civilians. Last I heard, targetting civilians is a war crime.

[BobbyBoring]

7. Lets not forget

us and the Brits bombing the bejesus out of nearly every city in Germany. Hamburg was leveled as were many other major population centers. We also killed quite a few in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mostly civilians. These were "Justified" as an attempt to end the war and they nearly failed. Many of Japans leaders wanted to keep fighting after the nukes were dropped. Had Hitler not been a complete lunatic, the war in the ETO could have gone on for many more years.

Yes, the Germans and Japanese did commit many atrocities against civilians. The only thing that "Justifies" our part of the loss of 58,000,000 people is we didn't start the war, we just finished it. We can't say that about Nam or Iraqistan. Iraq is getting ready to blow apart again and it's our fault. I just hope that China never adopts our philosophy on preemptive war or we'll be in deep do do~

[glitch]

8. Thank you, and welcome to DU! nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Alas for me this is not theory

as one of my jobs was to actually take testimony for ahem war crimes... in that war we officially never fought in... alas the Salvadorans did a bang up job, as well as the Contras...

But as a student of warfare I know civilians are always casualties. One of the arguments we had after a bad afternoon of taking testimony, was how much of that was US actually taking testimony and how much it was actual higher numbers.

Just the kind of thing people actually on the front lines did as part of that damn gallows humor. I remember years later asking that exact same question from an International Law Instructor... i mean even for WW I, if we took into account a certain genocide campaign (Armenian) that mostly the Turks wished we all forgot, the numbers jump. If we did the same for the Napoleonic Wars... or for that matter the American Civil war...

But it is also a fact of history that nobody kept tract of these things in such detail until relatively recent in Human History.

And yes, targeting civilians is a crime... alas proving that you are doing it on purpose, no matter what army, is a little more tricky... and yes there are reams upon reams, upon reams of Central America... of testimony. Wake me up when any of those people ever goes to the docket.

[Overseas]

9. K&R. //nt