The Wounded

The truck bomb that killed 130 today in Iraq is said to have wounded over 300. As is the case with American casualties, we focus on the dead. We should think more, though, about the wounded. If we assume that Lancet was accurate, we’re probably closing in on 700000 or so excess dead since the war began. I don’t know of any estimates of the wounded, but two injured for every one killed seems plausible enough, which gets us close to a million and a half Iraqis wounded in the war and ensuing strife. That’s about one in every twenty Iraqis.

Can you imagine what that does to a country? People in the US are already worrying about the long term expense of the Iraq War in terms of medical costs for veterans. Iraq likely now has 30 times the number of wounded as the US in absolute terms, and roughly 300 times as many corrected for population. Add to this the surviving injured from the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War, and you have a health care disaster of almost unimaginable proportions. How is it possible to build or manage a national health care system under such conditions? This isn’t a problem that’ll be gone in ten years, even if some sort of stability is achieved. The Iraqi state and its successor(s) is/are going to be caring for the wounded for the next forty years, an obligation which is going to prove onerous even for a state with oil revenue.

I don’t think we’ve begun to grasp the extent of the disaster.