Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes twenty years of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him —- Baudoin I of Belgium, address to joint session of U.S. Congress, May 12, 1959.
There has been a tremendous amount of light, including by this writer, shed on the lies and deceptions in the run-up to the Iraq conflict. The deaths, displacements and the physical debilitations of coalition forces and Iraqis have been discussed ad nauseum. What has been missing from the discourse, however, is the long-term and devastating environmental and health consequences of the war; what has been MIA in the dialogue is the Saddam-like repression and heavy-handedness of Maliki government.
Rise in cancer and birth defects
The U.S. invasion of Iraq has left, in its wake; an epidemic of cancer and birth defects suspected of being caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus.
According to a report by Al Jazeera, “official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.”
This represents a potential 4,000 percent increase in the cancer rate, making it more than 500 percent higher than the cancer rate in the United States.
Additionally, what this has taken place from the Iraq War’s beginning till now, is a rate of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah that has surpassed that of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the wake of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on them near the end of World War II.
Doctors in Fallujah began to see a rise in birth defects in late 2009. The Guardian then reported children born with birth defects, including a baby born with two heads and others with multiple tumors and nervous system defects. Some babies were even born with half of their internal organs outside of their bodies.
In a report from December of 2009, Dr. Samira Alani, a pediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital since 1997, said she had personally logged 677 cases of birth defects since October of the same year.
This rash in cancer and congenital birth defects has been traced to the use of weapons used by American and British forces using DU (depleted uranium).
Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, former director of the Oncology Center at the largest hospital in Basra, Iraq, stated at a 2003 conference in Japan:
“Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient. [Others, for example, were found to have] leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with 2 cancers – one in his stomach and kidney. Months later, primary cancer was developing in his other kidney – he had three different cancer types. The second is the clustering of cancer in families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer. Dr Yasin, a general surgeon here has two uncles, a sister and cousin affected with cancer. Dr Mazen, another specialist, has six family members suffering from cancer. My wife has nine members of her family with cancer.”
“Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning. They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most, however, cancer of the lymph system which can develop anywhere on the body, and has rarely been seen before the age of 12 is now also common.”
The Pentagon has admitted to using several hundred tons of DU during the ’91 Gulf War — it’s difficult to nail down the official figures from them from the most recent conflict. Estimates, however, range anywhere from another 200 tons and upwards to 800 tons.
American soldiers have not been immune to the effects of DU either. In a special investigation in 2004, Juan Gonzalez, of the New York Daily News, found that four of nine soldiers of the 442nd Military Police Company of the New York Army National Guard returning from Iraq tested positive for depleted uranium contamination. They were the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the Iraq War.
Isn’t it a cruel irony that the pretext for the Iraq war, given by the Bush administration, was that Saddam was attempting to acquire uranium from Niger for the purpose of building a nuclear weapon, and it is now depleted uranium used by U.S. and U.K. forces that has produced a mushroom cloud of cancer and birth defects in Iraq?
Saddam says: torture and execution in Iraq under Maliki
Ten years after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, the country remains caught up in human rights abuses — some of the same abuses that occurred under Saddam Hussein. Armed groups anti-government groups continue to kill and mutilate a great many civilians in suicide and other bomb attacks.
The government’s response, nevertheless, has been widespread detentions, torture, unfair trials and executions. An Amnesty International report details a decade of devastating governmental human rights abuses and sectarian violence in Iraq:
“Thousands of Iraqis are detained without trial or serving prison sentences imposed after unfair trials, torture remains rife and continues to be committed with impunity, and the new Iraq is one of the world’s leading executioners. The government hanged 129 prisoners in 2012, while hundreds more languished on death row.”
“Yet, when he launched the campaign of shock and awe in March 2003, that swept away Saddam Hussein’s regime within just four weeks, then U.S. President George W. Bush justified the military intervention partly on human rights grounds, pointing to the many grave crimes committed under the Iraqi leader. The decade since, however, as this report shows, has brought only limited change although tens of thousands of Iraqis’ lives have been lost, mostly during the political and sectarian violence that succeeded the armed conflict and continues to this day.”
The U.N. special rapporteur also, in addressing the issue of executions, called for over a year ago, the Maliki administration to stop all executions that were planned, because of the lack of due process and fair trials.
Since the death penalty was reinstated, there has been a deluge of executions and the current number of people on death row, according to the Iraqi government, is approximately 3,000 people. Sometimes there are as many as 12 to 20 executions on any given day. This includes non-Iraqi citizens (including people from Syria and Saudi Arabia), women and individuals under the age of 18.
British forces who helped operate a secret U.S. prison in Baghdad have spoken out for the first time about abuses they witnessed there. In a Guardian report, former British soldiers and air force personnel gave accounts of prisoners at the secretive Camp Nama being held for prolonged periods in cells the size of large dog kennels, subjected to electric shocks, routinely hooded and taken to soundproofed shipping containers for interrogations, after which they emerged in various states of physical suffering.
So this is what liberation looks like in post-Saddam Iraq. To be sure, the rule of Saddam Hussein was a tyrannical one and yet one cannot turn a blind eye to the very similar policies of the Maliki government. If rape, torture and execution by kangaroo courts and dictatorial mandate were immoral pre-2003 invasion, how can the current governmental climate in Iraq be viewed as otherwise?
Conclusion
If we live our lives under lies, it becomes difficult to see anything if it does not have anything to do with these lies – Le Roi Jones
International law is crystal clear about weapons that cause the kind of long-lasting health effects that artillery containing depleted uranium does. Any weapon that is known to have a lasting negative impact on the civilian population in the general area where it is used is an illegal or a highly restricted weapon.
And this is exactly what has happened in the wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In promising freedom from any horror, the possibility of being forced into the embrace of even greater horror is always present.
A country may withdraw its forces from another nation’s soil, but it cannot extract the legacy of disease, violence and lawlessness that is the consequence of its “benevolent liberation.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News’ editorial policy.