by George Capaccio

Dear Mr. President,

Now that you have met your objectives in Afghanistan, I understand that you are wrestling with the question of which country to attack next. It appears that Iraq is somewhere near the top of your list of potential targets. Despite the U.S. ban on traveling to Iraq, I have gone there many times in the past five years, and have developed close and lasting friendships with families in Baghdad and Basra.

When you consider whether to bomb Iraq in your pursuit of “justice” for the events of September 11, I want you to understand something about the people who live there, ordinary individuals whose lives are not terribly different from those of their American counterparts.

Of course, there is one important difference between the people of Iraq and the American people. Since 1990, the Iraqis have been living under sanctions. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. If there is hardship and misery in Iraq, it is the fault of the regime. Sanctions, you would argue, are not to blame. They are a legitimate tool to control and contain the government of Iraq.

I do not share this view. You might say I have been to the mountain and seen for myself the way things are in Iraq. To my mind, the way things are constitute a crime against humanity for which the United States should be held accountable. An invasion of Iraq, following the “successful” assault on Afghanistan, would surely multiply the suffering of the Iraqi people, who have had to endure eleven years of sanctions along with cultural isolation and the longest continuous bombing campaign in history.

Cut to the chase, you say. Very well. The next time you and your cohorts lay out your maps and plot your strategies, bear in mind that the cluster bombs, “daisy cutters,” fuel air explosives, Cruise missiles, and other hellish weapons that you intend for Iraq will take the lives of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, some of whom may very well be people I know and love.

People like Um Hassan, mother of three children in Basra. In 1999 an errant missile fired by a U.S. war plane destroyed most of the homes on her street and killed several of her neighbors. It also killed her young son Hassan. Some of the shrapnel from the blast struck her other son, eight-year-old Maher. I have been to Um Hassan’s home. I have sat with this woman and her family, drank tea with them, played with the children of her sister Hosnia, and felt the shrapnel lodged under Maher’s skin. One piece of shrapnel is slowly and inexorably migrating toward this little boy’s spine.

An operation to remove the shrapnel is the only thing that will prevent him from becoming paralyzed. But there is no hospital in Iraq that can perform the necessary surgery. The policy of sanctions, implemented by the United Nations and enforced by the United States, has crippled Iraq’s entire health care system. Operations that once would have been considered routine must now be done outside of Iraq. Ironically, Maher’s only hope lies in coming to the very country responsible for his injury.

Then there is Sabreen.She is 11 years old but looks much younger. I met her in Baghdad’s Al Mansur Hospital a few days after Christmas (2001). She was sitting with legs crossed on the hospital bed. She didn’t smile when we were introduced. She wouldn’t take my hand or say her name. Her older sister was looking after her. They are Shia from Babylon. Sabreen was on her twenty-fourth day of treatment for leukemia. She had recently stopped eating and had begun to lose weight.

“She is very depressed,” the doctor said. “Her mother is sick and that is why her sister has come here instead. Some days the drugs she needs are not available. Her family is too poor. They cannot pay for them outside the hospital so she must wait and then her treatment is set back and her chance of recovery is less. She knows this. She knows she is dying and that is why she looks this way.”

I have heard stories like this one many times before. I had expected that the Oil-For-Food program would eliminate shortages of medicine in Iraq. This has not happened. Sabreen needs to follow a specific drug protocol in order to increase her chances of recovery. But under sanctions, hospitals cannot be sure the drugs they need will be available on time and in sufficient quantities. So children like Sabreen waste away on cancer wards with little hope of ever going home.

Did I mention that Al Mansur Hospital, before the Gulf War, had remarkable success in treating children with leukemia? Presently, the remission rate is down to around 5%. Sure, the walls have fresh coats of paint and the floors are cleaner, but the doctors and nurses are still struggling with shortages. Even in Baghdad, hardly representative of the rest of the country, children continue to die from malnutrition, respiratory illness, and water-borne diseases.

One of the doctors who is treating Sabreen told me a story that I think illustrates how “effective” sanctions are in creating unnecessary suffering. About a year ago, he said, he was checking on a young woman pregnant with her first child. The woman began to vomit and couldn’t stop. The doctor knew she needed potassium immediately. He searched in the hospital pharmacy but couldn’t find any. Determined to do all that he could to save the woman’s life, he then combed pharmacies in a nearby neighborhood. Eventually, he found a small amount and returned to the hospital. An hour had passed. The woman was dead. The potassium would have saved her life.

In Basra, a week before my visit to Al Mansur in Baghdad, I attended Christmas Eve service at a Chaldean church. Throughout the service, which lasted four hours, people periodically stepped outside to mingle with family and friends. During one such break, I met a doctor I knew from previous visits. He works at the Basra Pediatric and Gynecological Hospital. A slight, soft-spoken man, he joined me in lighting a pair of votive candles in front of a small shrine to Mary.

We stood together in prayerful silence, and then got caught up as people do. He told me of a time a few years ago when he was caring for two critically ill patients. One was a newborn child; the other a young woman in labor. Both needed oxygen. In the entire hospital, there was only one source–an old cylinder once used by welders. “I will never forget that night,” he said. “I could only give oxygen to one of my patients.” His voice trembled. He paused and then went on.

“I had to make a choice, and I did, but I cannot accept that only one patient should live because we did not have enough oxygen.”

The child died from asphyxiation. Shortages of oxygen are not uncommon in Iraq, whose health care system had once been first-rate. Sanctions have changed all that. Now, even in major hospitals, there are often not enough blood bags, clotting agents, cytotoxic drugs, and oxygen, among a host of absolute necessities.

Mr. President, you have a choice to make. You can carry your war into Iraq and cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people while making the lives of the survivors a living hell. Or you can honor the humanity of the Iraqi people and do whatever is in your power to alleviate their unjust suffering.

May the better angels of your nature prevail.

Sincerely,

George Capaccio, writer and teacher