Post 8: Saddam's Children

Wars, destruction, and the price we all pay

“Iraqi kids don’t count, apparently. It is a racist problem; there really is no question about that. It’s ugly.” Dennis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary-General of The United Nations, interview with David Edwards, March 2000 http://www.zmag.org/edwinthalliday.htm

In December 2002, I received a call from a gentleman I did not know; he said that he was representing a Canadian civil society organization called War Child Canada, and they were planning to fly to Iraq to write a report about the possible impacts of war on Iraqi children and asked me if I could join their team as an expert on food security. I told him that I did not know Arabic, did not have extensive knowledge of what was going on in Iraq, and could not be of any help. The language of an imminent war was escalating. US authorities were blaming the Iraqi regime for having weapons of mass destruction (after the war ended, we learned that this was a total fabrication). An embargo imposed by the UN Security Council that had started after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in August 1990 was entering its 13^th year. I was reading stories that would not make the front lines at that time about the impacts of the embargo on Iraqi civilians. Still, I was more preoccupied with the wars in former Yugoslavia, Kongo and elsewhere.

In January 2003, I received another call from Dr. Hoskins, who said they were about to leave and wanted me to join their team. All I knew was that Eric Hoskins and his wife, Samantha Nutt, were medical doctors and founders of War Child Canada. This was going to be a two-week trip; our son was about ten years of age, and my wife was teaching at a university in another town. It was the beginning of the term, and I was unsure if I could get permission from my university for a two-week leave. This would be a logistical nightmare, and I said “no” for the second time. That night, I mentioned this story to my wife for the first time. Her answer was, “When are you flying?” “Even if you could not do anything to stop the war, at least you could be an eyewitness to the situation there,” she said. I was surprised by her answer and embarrassed by my cowardice. The next day, I contacted my Department Chair and was informed that the university would not care as long as I could find a replacement for my classes and go there at my peril. My friend Elaine Power from Queen’s University volunteered for one week; my wife covered me for another. In a week, I flew to Amman with a group I did not know before to catch a night flight that turned its lights off to Baghdad, which was declared a no-fly zone by the US.

As an informed observer of world events, I was shocked to see how little I knew about the level of destruction Iraq had suffered during the Gulf War and the following 13 years of sanctions. I guess I was distracted. Like most of us, I kept looking at the direction of the TV tube: Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan. I am writing these lines: while the US and UK are bombing Yemen, the Russian army is about to enter Kursk in Ukraine, and wars of different scales are taking place in Myanmar, Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Sahel region of Africa, Kongo and a terrible humanitarian situation getting worse in Gaza and Haiti in March 2025.

These are not just wars of destruction but also distractions—distracting us from other facts that are as important as the wars themselves. Years later, we may ask ourselves what other things we might have missed while focusing on Ukraine or Gaza.

During the 1990s, I did not pay attention that 500,000 children had lost their lives in Iraq alone under the Sanctions regime. I did not notice that cancer rates increased by 700 percent, with some blaming it on depleted uranium used during the Gulf War. I did not know that under five, mortality rates increased more than 2.5 times, that only 6 percent of Iraqis had access to potable water where more than 500,000 metric tons of raw sewage was pumped into rivers, that even chlorine to treat water was banned under sanctions; that 60 percent of Iraqi families were 100 percent dependent on monthly food rations handed by their government.

Why did these numbers not create the same outrage they did during the war in the former Yugoslavia? Could it be because our political leaders and the media do not distinguish between civilians and their leaders? If they had not rebelled and overthrown Sadam Husein's regime, their suffering would not have counted. They were all Saddam’s children.

As the “looters” removed, under the watchful eyes of US marines and embedded journalists, many of the computers, hospital registries, and public archives at the UN agencies and libraries, much existing evidence might also have been lost.

Some journalists claimed that the sanctions “did not hurt too much” and “Saddam turned the children’s deaths into propaganda, notably by forcing hospitals to save babies’ corpses to have them publicly paraded” :

“The parents were ordered to wail with grief – no matter how many weeks had passed since their babies had died – and to shout to the cameras that the sanctions had killed their children, the doctors said. Afterward, the parents would be rewarded with food or money” (Matthew McCallester, 24 May 2003).

We presented our report, Our Common Responsibility: The Impact of a New War on Iraqi Children, at the Federal Parliament in Ottawa. The Iraq War started in March 2003. In 2007, with Rupen Das, one of the team members and our research assistant, we wrote a follow-up paper in Food, Culture and Society, Food Security and Food Sovereignty in Iraq: The Impact of War and Sanctions on the Civilian Population. With little evidence we could find then, we realized that our earlier report about the potential impacts of war was an underestimation.

The FAO-WFP map shows the hunger hotspots worldwide. Most of these countries have had a civil war or are occupied by other countries.

President Bush released the official estimate that the cost of the war on Iraq will be at least 70 billion. In 2002, the world's military budget was $839 billion (U.S. dollars), with the US spending $ 396.1 billion. (www.globalissues.org). The World Food Summit in Rome in 2002 estimated it would cost $24 billion to reduce world hunger by 2015. At the same time, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow announced their desire to erase Iraq's whopping debt - estimated at between 100 and 300 billion dollars after the War. Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes, both American economists, published a book in 2008 estimating the actual cost of the war in Iraq for the US; the book title was Three Trillion Dollar War.

In 2021, a report from the Costs of War project at Watson Institute at Brown University revealed that 20 years of post-9/11 wars have cost the U.S. an estimated $8 trillion. Brown University site estimated that the human toll of the 20-year war was around 905,000 - 940,000 direct deaths and 4.5-4.7 million indirect deaths, and in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines, approximately 38 million people have been displaced. These numbers do not include figures from Africa, Latin America or South Asia.

In Afghanistan, after 20 years of war, the Taliban came back to power. In those 20 years, Afghanistan has become the biggest supplier of heroin (80 percent) in the world. Thousands of people died in a war estimated to cost the US over 2 trillion dollars. By 2050, the cost of interest alone on the Afghan war debt is estimated to reach $6.5 trillion. That amounts to $20,000 for every U.S. citizen.

Wars are horrible events. Wars destroy life; they destroy the economy, environment, and hope for peace and development.

A paper by Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Oct. 2024) estimated that between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 1, 2024, 53,887 direct and 67,413 indirect deaths could be attributed to the conflict in Gaza. These were slightly more conservative estimations than the 186,000 direct and indirect deaths published in an article in the Lancet in July 2024. Shockingly, an estimated 62,413 of these were due to starvation. The report summarized the factors that could have contributed to these excess deaths.

Another FAO-WFP reports that $53.2 billion is needed over the next decade to fund and finance the recovery and reconstruction in Gaza and the West Bank.

In her paper, The Credit Card Wars: Post-9/11 War Funding Policy in Historical Perspective, Linda Bilmes (2017) states that most of these expenses were made with borrowed money, and she argues that America's method of paying for the post-9/11 wars has profound implications for the conduct of public policy. These include:

• Reduced transparency over the spending process

• Lowered accountability for war expenditures

• Weakened fiscal discipline over the defence budget

• Less meaningful public debate over the wars

• Transfer of the financial cost to future generations

• Failure to provide resources for accrued promises to veterans

• Making it easier to engage in wars and to prolong war.

Cindy McCain, WFP’s Executive Director, stated in November 2024, “Global humanitarian needs are rising, fuelled by devastating conflicts, more frequent climate disasters, and extensive economic turmoil. Yet funding is failing to keep pace.”

While the impacts of these wars are worse in locations where they take place, the economic and human toll spreads like waves in the water around the world in the form of refugees, new regional conflicts, higher inflation and unemployment. Next time you look at the prices of groceries or the number of people experiencing food insecurity globally, consider what we are paying for.