War Victims are Mostly Innocent Civilians

If there is one statistic to remember today, it’s this: 90% of the people dying in wars today are civilians.

Whether you’re a peace promoter or war supporter, don’t you think that this single, startling fact should make people think twice before declaring war in the name of anything? Is oil, money, property, food, anything worth spilling the blood of so many women and children in any country?

It’s so easy to ignore this fact when it’s not taking place on our own home soil, but just to put it in perspective, imagine that instead of Afghanistan or Iraq, there was a war being fought here in America—and that for every 10 soldiers dying, another 90 women and children die.

A single death alone makes war a travesty, and like the first woman in Congress, Jeanette Rankin, said, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” Devastation is devastation.

Think, too, on this: today, we are devastated—and sometimes rightly so, of course—because our unemployment rate keeps hovering at the 10% level. That is truly disheartening for anyone, and many people who have jobs fear of losing them.

However, 8% of the population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is actually gone—gone!—having died in the ongoing genocide in the country. These people died from hunger, disease and sheer violence caused by this conflict. Put on a scale similar to our country, that would mean a loss of the population of Texas—or 25 million people. That’s quite a sobering number, and it reminds us that while we have problems, we do still have much to be grateful for.

According to Oxfam America, with our country’s understaffed Foreign Service and frequently cloudy mission, our country has been ineffective at protecting the most vulnerable people during wartime. By increasing “the size of our country’s diplomatic corps” and giving “our diplomats a clear new mission: to prevent, mitigate and resolve armed conflict,” Oxfam maintains that we can use our Department of State to help more people and stop so much devastation from occurring in the first place.

U.S. goals, Oxfam says, should include improving conflict response training, increasing the size of the diplomatic corps, and repositioning diplomats already skilled in conflict resolution into needier areas like Central and East Africa.

To take a stand and ask the Senate to support these efforts in the State Department Authorization Bill, click here to send Oxfam’s letter—or to write your own.