Iraq’s health crisis, brain drain

Last week, Workers World and most of the world’s press reported on a study in the highly respected medical journal The Lancet, arguing that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, estimated at about 655,000, have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation.

Iraqi doctors now charge that as many as half of these deaths might have been avoided “if proper medical care had been provided to the victims.” Writing in the British Medical Journal this month, a group of Iraqi medical professionals appeal for international support in the face of staggering problems. “Many emergency departments,” they state, “are no more than halls with beds, fluid suckers, and oxygen bottles.  . . .  Our experience has taught us that poor emergency medical services are more disastrous than the disaster itself.”

Of the 34,000 physicians in Iraq before 2003, some 12,000 have left the country and 2,000 have been killed, according to the conservative Brookings Institution’s just-released Iraq Index. The global health group Medact puts the number who have left closer to 18,000. Medact says that the most basic treatments are lacking. “Approximately 50 percent of Iraqi children suffer from some form of malnourishment,” their report says. “Easily treatable conditions such as diarrhea and respiratory illness caused 70 percent of all child deaths.”

On top of this medical emergency sits a water, sanitation and electricity crisis. The U.S.’s own Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction [sic!] in a recent audit states that only 32 percent of Iraqis have access to potable water and a mere 19 percent have “sewerage access.”

Electricity levels in Baghdad are at the lowest levels since 2003. Electricity is only turned on about 2.4 hours per day, compared to an average of 16-24 hours per day before the invasion, according to the Brookings study cited above.

Baghdad is home to almost six million people. The temperature there this week is in the 90s (Fahrenheit)—with virtually no electricity for refrigeration, fans, lights, or power.

“Imagine yourself trying to operate on a patient in a two-hour surgery and the power goes out.  . . . You pray to God, and you sweat,” Dr. Waleed George of Baghdad told Medact.

Record numbers of teachers and intellectuals are also fleeing the country in the face of systematic violence. The Iraqi university system, once considered among the best in the Arab world, has been ravaged. Isam Kadhem al-Rawi, president of the Association of University Teachers, estimates that 2,000 professors have left Iraq since the invasion, on top of the 10,000 who left in the 12 years since the first Gulf war. Iraqis report that academics who have been killed are often victims of professional assassinations, not the car bombs or sectarian killings that get the focus of media attention.

“We don’t know who is threatening us,” said Rawi, “but we do know that when we report killings and kidnappings those responsible are never found.” These statements were given to the Christian Science Monitor over two years ago. And the violence has gotten much worse. The Monitor reported that a “widely accepted theory” of who is behind the killings “is that the U.S. and Israel are encouraging Iraq’s instability and brain drain because, as Rawi says, ‘they want a weak Iraq.’”

The British Independent’s veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk has written, “University staff suspect there is a campaign to strip Iraq of its academics to complete the destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage, which began when America entered Baghdad.”

The BRussell’s Tribunal in Belgium, the Spanish Campaign against Occupation and for the Sovereignty of Iraq, the International Action Center in the U.S. and many others have joined forces to demand an investigation into and to stop the assassination of Iraqi academics and medical personnel (www.brusselstribunal.org).

Lest anyone think this is just “conspiracy-mongering,” recall the then-secret, but now well-documented Operation Phoenix program the U.S. organized in Vietnam in the 1960s. The Phoenix program was a CIA-led campaign of assassination and terror. Among those targeted were Vietnamese intellectuals who sympathized with the resistance.

Forty years later, the following exchange with Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Lt. General William Boykin lies buried at the end of a New York Times (Feb. 4, 2005) report on Iraq:

“Boykin was asked whether the government should re-establish a program of identifying and assassinating specific adversaries, like Operation Phoenix, conducted in Vietnam by the CIA. Emphasizing that he was giving his personal opinion, General Boykin said that America’s conventional military forces and its Special Operations teams in Iraq and Afghanistan were ‘doing a pretty good job of that right now. ... I think we’re doing what the Phoenix program was designed to do, without all of the secrecy.’”