Who Will Rescue Iraqi Civilians?
The images projected relentlessly around the world are becoming numbingly familiar — the smoke and flames over Baghdad, the terrified faces of prisoners of war, the broken and sometimes lifeless bodies of the American, British and Iraqi military, and the mounting civilian casualties, including children.

What remains invisible to most of the world is the dreadful day-to-day reality behind those searing televised images — the daily lives of the Iraqi noncombatants. While a full-scale humanitarian crisis has not yet developed, conditions on the ground are extremely dangerous and reports are emerging of children in southern Iraq falling ill because of a lack of potable water, sanitation facilities and medical supplies.

With the initial phase of the war taking longer than expected, frustrated humanitarian workers have for the most part been unable to enter the country. They are anxious to provide aid to a population that was already in a perilous state before the first missile of the war was ever launched.

As the relief organization Save the Children has noted, about 45 percent of Iraq's population is under the age of 15, and those youngsters "are particularly vulnerable to death, starvation, disease, displacement and trauma as a consequence of war."

"Thirty percent of the children were malnourished before the war," said Charles MacCormack, president of Save the Children, "and obviously their situation is not improving."

As they wait for the opportunity to assess the conditions inside Iraq, several humanitarian aid organizations, including Save the Children, are expressing concern over the Bush administration's increasing tendency to blur the distinctions between the activities of humanitarian aid organizations and those of the military.

Even as it is waging war against Iraq, the U.S. government has tried to put a kinder, gentler face on the military, with the president and top Pentagon officials insisting that civilian casualties will be held to a minimum and that the military will be directly involved in the effort to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people.

This is a confusing message to say the least. And the confusion is compounded by what appears to be insufficient planning by the U.S. to meet the humanitarian challenge in Iraq. Leaders of humanitarian organizations in the U.S. have been complaining for some time that the government has kept them out of the loop as far as its plans for relief and reconstruction in Iraq are concerned. At the same time the government has made it clear that it wants substantial control over the operations of these independent groups once they are in the field.

This sounds very much like the no-need-to-consult, we-know-it-all policy that has become such a hallmark of this administration. The problem is that excessive control of humanitarian efforts by the government of a combatant is very dangerous. And it's especially dangerous in an area as volatile as the Middle East.

Such humanitarian efforts have traditionally been coordinated by the United Nations and largely carried out by nongovernmental organizations that have decades of experience and go to great lengths to express their neutrality.

Relief workers from groups like the Red Cross and Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders provide help to those in need, no matter which side of a conflict they're on. "By definition we need to remain neutral and independent," one official told me last week. "If you're seen as siding with one combatant or the other, you can end up getting killed."

While it's appropriate for military personnel to provide relief in certain situations, that effort should be handed off as quickly as possible.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/31/opinion/31HERB.html