The politics of war

The editorial on the war in Iraq1 is far below CMAJ's usual standards and would be more suitable for the pages of a university student publication or a free weekly community newspaper. Surely a medical journal can be expected to limit its editorials to subjects at least nominally connected to the practice of medicine. Instead, your condemnation of the coalition's war against Iraq amounts to little more than sophomoric political partisanship. More disappointing, the commentary neglects one of the basic principles of medical and scientific analysis: any criticism of an intervention, whether pharmaceutical or surgical or political, must at least acknowledge the consequences of not intervening.

Even if one accepts the utterly unverifiable, not to say baseless, claims of the Iraq Body Count Project,2 a reputable medical journal must contrast these allegations with the “body count” associated with not removing Saddam Hussein from power. Failing to make this comparison invites the conclusion that the liberation of more than 100 Iraqi children from a children's prison3 does not matter, or that the information coming to light about Iraqi torture chambers4 is not relevant to the writers of the editorial.

There is no question that, tragically, civilians have been accidentally killed by coalition forces. But accepting the null hypothesis — that no intervention is preferable to this intervention — would entail believing that Hussein would have killed fewer civilians than the coalition has. The evidence that is now mounting challenges this hypothesis most strenuously. Of course, this editorial is not about evidence; it is about politics.

Jason Ford Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School Boston, Mass.