D-Day of December 8th quietly approaches -- the day Iraq
must provide the UN Security Council with a complete
accounting of its weapons programs, plus its civilian
chemical/biological/nuclear production and research
activities. Even though UN weapons inspectors have
criticized the December 8th deadline as unrealizable,
the consequences for missing it will be catastrophic:
Iraq will be in "material breach" of UN resolution
1441, and therefore subject to swift and decisive
military action.
But at this point, UN 1441 seems little more than a
whitewash pretext for a US-led attack on Iraq. With US
warplanes patrolling Iraq's no-fly zone, bombing raids
against Iraq ongoing, multiple aircraft carriers on
alert and 60,000 US troops currently in or around the
Persian Gulf, it's clear the war has already begun,
"material breach" or not. When it's convenient for the
Bush administration, Iraq will be found to have
violated some aspect of the UN resolution, and the
current buildup and covert military activity will
explode into an all-out attack.
The justification (that Iraq's Hussein violates
international law with his weapons of mass destruction
and is thus a menace to world peace) seems a bit ironic
in light of US actions in Iraq these past eleven years.
Case in point. Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions
clearly states that destroying or rendering useless
items essential to the survival of civilian populations
is illegal under international law and a war crime.
Hard then to explain the 1991 US bombing of electrical
grids that powered 1,410 water-treatment plants for
Iraq's 22 million people. An excerpt from a 1998 US Air
Force document, entitled "Strategic Attack," chillingly explains:
"The electrical attacks proved extremely effective ...
The loss of electricity shut down the capital's water
treatment plants and led to a public health crisis from
raw sewage dumped in the Tigris River." A second US
Defense Intelligence Agency document, 1991's "Iraq
Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," predicted how
sanctions would then be used to prevent Iraq from
getting the equipment and chemicals necessary for water
purification, which would result in "a shortage of pure
drinking water for much of the population" leading to
"increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease."
So basically, in defiance of international law, the
United States knowingly destroyed Iraq's water supply,
then for the past eleven years has prevented the
contaminated drinking water from being treated, even
though it was obvious those most affected would be
millions of citizens doomed to preventable disease and
death. If that's not a material breach, what is?
Then there's the depleted uranium (DU) weaponry the
United States and its allies used on Iraq during the
Gulf War, despite foreknowledge its radioactivity would
make food and water in the bombed regions unsafe for
consumption on an indefinite basis (DU remains
radioactive for 4.5 billion years). Add in the fact
that trails of carcinogenic dust left in a DU bomb's
wake spread in the wind to be absorbed by plants and
animals, thereby devastating a region's food chain. Of
course, humans inhale and absorb DU dust as well, which
has most likely led not only to dramatically elevated
levels of birth defects and cancer cases among Iraqi
civilians, but also to a wide litany of suffering among
Gulf War vets; a recent study, for example, found that
even nine years after the war, veterans afflicted with
Gulf War Syndrome ailments still had DU traces in their
urine. This while there has yet to be any US
governmental study on the effects of DU inhalation.
We can expect DU to be used in the next attack on Iraq
too, in spite of the inhumane risks to civilians and
military personnel alike. According to a "Defense
Department report", the
US Military Services use DU munitions because of DU's
superior lethality" adding, "Gulf War exposures to
depleted uranium (DU) have not to date produced any
observable adverse health effects attributable to DU's
chemical toxicity or low-level radiation." With more
than one out of six American Gulf War vets having
reported health problems
since their service, and over 9,000 having died since
the war ended, not to mention the marked increase in
Iraqi birth defects and cancer cases in DU-bombed
regions, denial like that is nothing short of material
breach, an affront to both human rights and common
sense.
And what if the December 8th deadline is met, and no
weapons of mass destruction are found by U.N. weapons
inspectors inside Iraq? Says US Defense Secretary
Donald "What it would
prove would be that
the inspection process had been successfully defeated
by the Iraqis. There's no question but that the Iraqi
regime is clever, they've spent a lot of time hiding
things, dispersing things, tunneling underground." So
it would appear regardless of how the inspections turn
out, the Iraqis will be attacked anyway.
In facing a no-win situation, Hussein could seem like a
martyr to others in the region; he could also see
little option but to unleash whatever destructive
powers he has left. Backing someone like him into a
corner is foreign policy at its most disastrous, a
dangerous development for the entire region and very
bad news for the unfortunate service men and women
thrown into that quagmire.
It's clear that Saddam Hussein is a loathsome ogre who
has shown criminal disregard for his population. What's
also clear though is that the US record in the region
is disgraceful if not downright criminal. Consider that
for the two years following Hussein's infamous 1988 gas
attack on the Kurds at Halabja (an attack in which
US-built helicopters were apparently among those
dropping the bombs the US government
seemed quite uninterested
in his possession of chemical weapons, or any other
weapons for that matter. Remember too, that a 1992
Senate committee report entitled "US Chemical and
Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq,"
demonstrated that Hussein bought technology and
materials necessary to create nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons from none other than the States and
Britain - and continued to make purchases even after
the attack at Halabja. Factor in the water supply
degradation, DU toxicity and debilitating sanctions and
it's hard to imagine the average Iraqi embracing
American forces as welcome liberators.
The bottom line is that the US has some questions to
answer about its past conduct in Iraq, questions that
can't be answered by another full-scale war.
