Epidemiology of Mad War

[Clara T]

About 85% of the people killed in WORLD WAR I were uniformed combatants.  Military strategists have since devised ways to protect their own forces from the deadly effects of ever more powerful modern weapons.  Those who fire the most destructive weapons are now well protected from their effects, including the psychological effects of seeing what they do to other human beings.  Thus Hellfire missiles are fired from Predator drones over IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN by people sitting at computer terminals at Nellis Air Force base a few miles from the casinos of Las Vegas. 
 
Likewise, enemy combatants, the nominal targets, make use of evolving defensive technologies and strategies, from high-tech armor to asymmetric warfare, to protect themselves from all this destructive power.  This leaves tragically unlucky and defenseless civilians as the principal victims of modern warfare.  The inevitable consequence is that about 90% of the casualties in modern wars are CIVILIANS, not combatants.
The public perception of war in developed countries has not quite caught up with this reality.  When Americans complain about censorship of the news from IRAQ, they are generally asking to see more flag-draped coffins, not more reports of children dismembered by American aerial weaponry.  The reality that children dismembered by “precision” weapons are a far more common feature of this war than flag-draped coffins is still too disconcerting for most Americans to accept, and neither politicians nor media executives are prepared to face the consequences of breaking the spell.
 
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After leaving the CDC, Roberts became the Director of Health Policy for the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based NGO that provides relief to victims of war in many parts of the world.  In this capacity, he has conducted epidemiological studies in about twenty war-zones around the world.  In 2000, this brought him back to eastern Congo.  Troops from eight different countries allied with politically well-connected Western mining interests had turned the region into a living hell for the civilian population.  Humanitarian intervention was an extremely dangerous proposition, but it was feared that hundreds of thousands of people were dying in a “complex emergency” that was difficult to accurately assess.
 
Roberts’ team conducted a “cluster sample survey”, which balanced the very real danger to their own safety with the need to survey statistically meaningful samples from randomly selected clusters throughout the region.  He concluded that, while 200,000 civilians had been killed in the war, another 1.5 million excess deaths had occurred as a result of diarrhea, measles, malnutrition, malaria, anemia and meningitis, all preventable diseases under other circumstances.
 
http://www.kavkaz.org.uk/eng/content/2006/01/16/4370.shtml