The wars we should be fighting

The arguments have been heard, the speeches made, the resignations proffered (or not, as the case may be) and the mass protests duly ignored. Public opinion has apparently been squared, probably by the shameless pretence - in which the media, including the BBC, colluded - that US and British leaders had tried diplomacy in search of a peaceful solution, but failed. (In fact, the only diplomatic effort was to get other countries to abandon peace and support war.) By the time you read this, the bombs will have started to fall. On the merits of this war, there is very little more to be said.

So let us turn to the wars that ought to be fought, to the human tragedies and injustices that receive only a fraction of the public money, high-level government planning and media attention, and none of the political grandstanding that will be devoted to an invasion of Iraq. Let us consider, in the words Tony Blair used to the House of Commons on Tuesday, "what we know to be right".

We know it to be right, for example, that everybody on the planet should have clean drinking water and hygienic sanitation. Yet more than a billion people have no access to safe water and, as a result, two million children die each year - a toll that dwarfs anything in Saddam's Iraq or any likely casualties in war. As David Mepham, a former government adviser, writes in a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research: "For billions, going to the toilet means a stinking hole in the ground infested with flies and bacteria." Water is currently the subject of an international meeting in Kyoto, for details of which you will search most of the British and American press in vain. We also know it to be right that everybody on the planet should get the drugs needed to combat disease, particularly Aids and TB. Yet a third of the world's population have no access to essential medicines and, in Africa alone, two million people have died of Aids in the past year. We know it to be right that everybody on the planet should have enough to eat. Yet in Eritrea, for example, 70 per cent face imminent famine.

Some things are being done to end these injustices, and we know that Mr Blair cares because he keeps telling us he does. But where are the strict deadlines, the inspectors, the urgent meetings in the Azores, the announcements of exhausted patience? A deadline of 2002 was set for agreement on how poor countries could import cheaper copies of patented medicines. Pharmaceutical companies have lobbied hard to limit both the drugs and the countries covered by the agreement. The US government has largely backed them - because, many suspect, the Republicans received heavy campaign funding from big drugs companies. A World Trade Organisation meeting in Geneva last month failed once more to reach an agreement on drugs. And, at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg last year, deadlines were set for clean water and sanitation. But the prospects already look grim, with private companies increasingly unwilling to invest in very poor countries where they can see few profits, and western governments reluctant to trust a public sector that they see as inefficient, wasteful and corrupt. As for famine, the UN has received $4m from rich countries to help Eritrea. But it asked for $163m; it got even smaller fractions of what is needed to help other stricken countries such as Liberia and Guinea.