In Iraq war, women and children may suffer most
by Summer Wood
I was having dinner with my 92-year-old grandmother recently, when our conversation turned unexpectedly towards war. I"m always eager to listen to Gran"s tales of life in Manchester, England, during World War II, but I"m reluctant to compel her to talk about the war if she"s not in the mood. As we sat at the dinner table eating apple pie, Gran recalled the start of the German bombing raids on Manchester in 1940; she was a young woman when the war began, not much older than I am now. Manchester was a major industrial center, and had attracted steady fire beginning in August of that year. Gran described the two types of air-raid shelters available: "If you had a back garden like we did, you had an Anderson shelter; if not, you had a Morrison shelter that went up right in your front room." Each night when the sirens sounded, she and her family dropped everything and rushed into their cold, damp Anderson shelter. The bombing continued through the fall, culminating in the Christmas Blitz of Dec. 22-23. I tried to imagine how Gran must have felt as she walked several miles to work on the morning after the first night of the Blitz, past burning buildings and ambulances carrying away the wounded and the dead. "We all went in to work as usual," she said matter-of-factly. "What else could we have done?" Determined to retain some normalcy in their lives, Gran"s family celebrated Christmas a few days later - eating rationed food under the dining room table. When the smoke from the Manchester Blitz cleared, 596 people were dead, and 2,320 were injured. Bombing raids had killed 51,509 British civilians by the war"s end. Gran told me she remembered being angry at the time that it took so long for the U.S. to come to Europe"s aid. "I don"t want to see this war on Iraq, though," she said wearily. I asked her why not, if it would mean liberation for the people of Iraq. Gran"s answer mirrored my own conflicted feelings about the war: "It"s always the women and children who suffer, isn"t it? No matter which side wins." In the case of war with Iraq, the question is not whether innocent civilians will suffer - more than half of Iraqis are children - but for how long their suffering will be prolonged. According to the United Nations, more than 100 million people died in the wars of the 20th century, over 60 million of them civilians, and the ratio of civilian deaths has only grown larger with the advent of new technologies of war: civilians were just 5 percent of casualties at the turn of the century, rising to 75 percent of those killed in the conflicts of the 1990s. The U.N. estimates that as many as nine civilian deaths (many of them children) occur as an indirect result of each military casualty. Women and children have always suffered "collateral damage" in wars waged primarily by men - more acutely than ever during the last century, from the Korean "comfort women" forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army in WWII, to the estimated 250,000-500,000 girls and women raped in Rwanda from 1994-1995 as part of a campaign of "ethnic cleansing," to the half a million Iraqi children who have died as a direct result of sanctions implemented following the Gulf War. Infant mortality rates have more than doubled in the past decade, and the health of women and children in Iraq is now among the worst in the world. President Bush has frequently declared that this war is with Saddam Hussein, not with the people of Iraq, but they will inevitably be harmed by the conflict, regardless of its outcome. Less than a week into "Operation Iraqi Freedom," U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan warned of the onset of a humanitarian crisis in southern Iraq, where heavy fighting resulted in cuts to crucial power and water supplies. Sixty percent of Iraqis survive solely on food aid, the distribution of which will continue to be disrupted by the ongoing conflict. The violence inflicted by Saddam Hussein on his own people has been well-documented; less certain is whether or not this war will achieve its stated objectives of ousting Saddam and improving the dismal situation of most Iraqis. The cost of military conflict is likely to be high, both in civilian lives and in dollars spent to rebuild after the war. Though the Bush Administration has promised a Marshall Plan-like approach to reconstruction, it has yet to fulfill its last promise of such comprehensive aid to Afghanistan. To date, Afghanistan has received less than half the $4.5 billion in aid pledged by the U.S. and other nations, and President Hamid Karzai recently announced that the situation in his country remains dire, and may require as much as $20 billion in aid to achieve stability. Though there was a great deal of talk about liberating the women of Afghanistan, only two female ministers have been appointed to the interim government, and the majority of women and children continue to face violence and poverty throughout the country. Although women make up 65 percent of Iraq"s population, little has been said about what role the U.S. envisions for women in a post-Saddam Iraq. Until the Gulf War, Iraqi women were among the most educated and equal in the Middle East, but sanctions and repression have prevented more than 30 percent of girls from attending school, resulting in a sharp drop in female literacy. The U.S. has yet to make good on its promises to Afghan women, and has failed to address the concerns of Iraqi women at all, proving yet again that President Bush pays lip service to the needs of women and children only when it is politically expedient to do so. More American women than ever are involved in waging war, from National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, to the one in seven female military personnel stationed in the Gulf; the U.S. will not win this war without women, let alone the peace.
