Going to war always hurts

I was disappointed and saddened by the carelessness of the title ‘Going to war does not have to hurt’ in the June issue of the Journal (Hacker Hughes et al, 2005). One does not even have to mention the considerable number of British casualties in Iraq to realise that this headline is completely ill thought out and a particularly misplaced euphemism that fails to appreciate that war in modern times always kills civilians rather than military personnel. As the historian Norman Davies points out, almost 100% of casualties in modern warfare are civilians and this is no different in Iraq today. To minimise the considerable and well-documented consequences of going to war for Army personnel and to ignore the plight of civilians is, in my opinion, shameful. Health professionals should be very careful not to collude with politicians in minimising the impact of war and armed conflict, because they can easily become a vehicle of such policies.