Humanitarian Crisis Brews

While the Pentagon trumpets its victorious race toward Baghdad, the death, starvation, disease and homelessness that war will inflict on Iraqi civilians goes unmentioned. In the rush to war, the Bush administration’s plans for the impending humanitarian crisis are too little, too late.

A recent confidential U.N. planning report for humanitarian relief in a war-ravaged Iraq predicts that “the collapse of essential services in Iraq ... could lead to a humanitarian emergency of proportions well beyond the capacity of U.N. agencies and other aid organizations.” Some 30% of Iraqi children under age 5 -- 1.25 million -- could face death from malnutrition, the report said.

International aid groups from Oxfam to Refugees International to the International Rescue Committee echo the U.N. report’s alarm. “This won’t be 1991 in the Gulf, not a war in the empty desert; it’ll be a war for the cities and will engulf a people already vulnerable from 12 years of sanctions,” said Erik Gustafson, a Desert Storm veteran who is executive director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center. “Food would be the most urgent need,” said Kenneth H. Bacon, president of Refugees International. “Iraqis could starve.”

The United Nations predicts that military operations would jeopardize the food sources of 10 million Iraqis, nearly half the country’s population, that only 39% of them would have water even on a rationed basis, that shortages of fuel and power in cities would shut down water and sewage systems, that up to 1.45 million refugees could try to escape Iraq during the war and that some 900,000 could flee their homes inside the country.

Yet, “All U.N. agencies have been facing severe funding constraints that are preventing them from reaching even minimum levels of preparedness,” the report concludes.

And this scenario is only a “medium” -- not a “worst” -- case.

To compare, in the eight months after the Gulf War, according to a U.S. Census Bureau study, the deaths of 110,000 Iraqi civilians were linked to the paralysis of the country’s urban infrastructure and lack of food, water and electricity. The study estimated that more than 10,000 refugees died from disease and starvation.

The first Iraqi civilians to die in the latest conflict were in Iraqi cities, especially Baghdad, victims of the “shock and awe” of thousands of precision-guided bombs and missiles.Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently said: “As hard as we try to limit civilian casualties, they will occur.... People get the idea that this could be antiseptic. Well, it’s not going to be.”

About 5,000 Iraqi civilians died in the bombing raids that began the 1991 war, according to the Census Bureau study. This time, the Pentagon aims to limit civilian casualties by varying bomb size, using different fuses and angles of attack to control blast and taking into account the timing of the assaults. The Pentagon has good reason to minimize civilian casualties. The Bush administration’s planned democratic rehabilitation of Iraq cannot take place in a land of hostile civilians.

Still, some military critics remain skeptical about the Pentagon’s faith in high-tech weaponry to limit civilian casualties. Retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, an Army artillery officer for 31 years and now advisor to the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, said: “The U.S. military is known for its indiscriminate use of firepower.... I don’t care how accurate the weapons; if you unleash the kind of barrage they’re talking about, a lot of people will be killed.... We ripped up the infrastructure in Kosovo with ‘smart’ bombs [but] remember the Chinese embassy [in Belgrade and] the refugee column that was hit.”

And Myers has admitted that just 60% to 70% of the bombs to be used in Iraq are “smart” and that 10% of them can be expected to go awry.

Last week, the Bush administration, after months of entreaties by the international aid community and Congress, disclosed a few details about its plans for humanitarian aid in Iraq. Three-million daily military rations have been sent to Iraq, enough, the administration claims, to feed Iraqi war refugees. Problem is, this is only enough food to feed the U.N.-estimated 2 million refugees, which the administration accepts, for a day and a half. Ramiro Lopes da Silva, the U.N.’s top official in Iraq, said these supplies, in addition to the World Food Program’s stockpile of food for 250,000 for 10 weeks and extra rations distributed by the Iraqi government -- aren’t enough. After six weeks, he said, “We will have to feed 10 million people. Eventually, we’ll have to feed the entire population.”

The administration has committed about $25 million to a task the U.N. estimates will cost $200 million for its operations alone. Other countries have pledged a total of only $30 million. “The perception that the U.S. government acted unilaterally against Iraq has greatly chilled humanitarian donations,” Sandra Mitchell of the International Rescue Committee said at a recent Senate hearing. Even some Republicans, among them Sen. Richard G. Lugar, have blasted the administration for inadequate aid planning.

The administration said it would work through international aid groups, but it, along with the U.N., has refused to lift sanctions against Iraq to allow these groups to prepare for a humanitarian crisis. The sanctions have forced the U.N. to reject Kurdish pleas for gas masks. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has thrown up roadblocks in the Kurdish areas of the north. As a result, unlike in Kosovo and Afghanistan, only the ill-financed, understaffed U.N. has been able to stockpile food, medicine and shelter. International aid groups have been forced to set up operations in Jordan, Iran and Kuwait.

Despite pleas to the contrary, the White House has put a Pentagon-run civilian agency in charge of relief efforts and the reconstruction of Iraq. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance wasn’t even created until Jan. 20. Aid groups charge that U.S. humanitarian aid is so interwoven with the Pentagon’s war plans that many planning documents have been classified, making coordination with U.S. operations impossible. The EU has, so far, given nothing because it too doesn’t want to appear to support the U.S.-led war. And the French are already challenging U.S. and British control over postwar reconstruction, complicating U.N. participation.

The Pentagon’s track record on restoring social order after a war doesn’t inspire confidence. “The biggest civilian casualties of the 1991 Gulf War were after the war,” said Gustafson. “Thirty-five [thousand] to 50,000 Iraqis died.”

Though some aid groups, like the International Rescue Committee, disagree that Iraq’s ethnic groups are waiting to carve up Iraq after the war, most agree that a postwar lawless state would offer a rich opportunity for score-settling. They doubt U.S. military forces have the sophistication, skills and training to control a breakdown in social order.

The unarmed people of Iraq will be the victims.