Report on the Iraq War CASUALTIES: NARRATIVE AND IMAGES OF THE WAR ON IRAQ

The Iraqi people have endured an excess burden of morbidity and mortality during the past 15 years due to war and sanctions, with the March 2003 Anglo-American assault on and subsequent occupation of Iraq representing the most recent chapter. Children have been disproportionately affected; many have died from infectious disease, malnutrition, and lack of access to health care. There have been significant differences in the availability of narrative accounts and images of this suffering, reflective of the need of those who wage wars and impose sanctions to keep the public uninformed. This article suggests that public health and medical practitioners have a respon-sibility to seek out such accounts and images. The authors explore possible responses to narrative and images of this suffering, and outline the sorts of responses engendered by three perspectives—charity, development, and social justice. The suffering of the people of Iraq should spur a response from the health community to alleviate the situation and prevent unneces-sary suffering. Individual experiences of pain and suffering are made irrevocably public when they are portrayed in the mass media. Arthur and Joan Kleinman call this phenomenon the cultural appropriation of suffering (1). Much of this suffering is inflicted on humans by other humans, war being a prime example. Public health and medical practitioners should approach such suffering from a health per-spective. If public health and medicine are dedicated to the alleviation of pain and suffering then war should be considered a public health problem (2, 3) and practitioners of public health and medicine need to respond accordingly. The ongoing war in Iraq has produced reportage and images that convey the suffering of its victims. Some of these images are already iconic: those of th