Unmasked War Against Iraqi Children By Ghali Hassan

Unmasked War Against Iraqi Children

By Ghali Hassan

04 August, 2004
Countercurrents.org

"Why do' they' hate us?" George W. Bush, September 2001.

A humanitarian crisis has been looming in Iraq since the 1991 U.S. war due to shortage of drinking water and increase in waterborne diseases that kill children. Despite abundant supplies of water from the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Shatt-Al-Arab waterway formed by the confluence of the two rivers,
because of the destruction to Iraq's infrastructure and the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq by the U.S-UN.

During the 1991 U.S. war on Iraq the country's eight multi-purpose dams had been repeatedly hit, simultaneously wrecking flood control, municipal and industrial water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power. Four of seven major pumping stations were destroyed, as were 31 municipal water and sewerage facilities - 20 in Baghdad, resulting in sewage pouring into the Tigris. Water purification plants were incapacitated throughout Iraq.

According to a new report by the London-based health organisation MEDACT, the British affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), "lack of access to safe drinking water, and human waste backed up and out of drains led to infectious diseases like cholera, typhoid". While Iraq had built one of the most advanced health systems in the developing world before the U.S. war in 1991, that war and the monstrous sanctions had a disastrous impact on Iraq's performance. One in eight children fewer than five, died before their fifth birthday; one in four was chronically malnourished; a quarter of all newborns were underweight; while maternal mortality stood at 294 for every 100,000 births, roughly the same level as Peru and Bangladesh. The report expressed particular concern for the health of young children, babies and the weak (1).

In 2001, Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business and Public Management at George Washington University investigated the U.S. Government "declassified" documents of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) that "proving" beyond a doubt that, the malevolent intent to target sites of vital civilian importance in the first U.S. war on Iraq (2). Professor Nagy cites macabre foreknowledge of the effects of bombing water purification and sewage treatment facilities, which provide clean water to the Iraqi people.

The four "declassified" DIA documents are available on the Internet. One documents stated clearly: "Conditions are favourable for communicable disease outbreaks, particularly in major urban areas affected by coalition bombing. Infectious disease prevalence in major Iraqi urban areas targeted
by coalition bombing (Baghdad, Basrah) undoubtedly has increased since the beginning of Desert Storm. Current public health problems are attributable to the reduction of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water purification and distribution, electricity, and the decreased ability to
control disease outbreaks"(3).

This document, "Disease Outbreaks in Iraq", lists the "most likely diseases during next 60-90 days (in descending order), Diarrheal diseases (particularly children), Acute respiratory illnesses (colds and influenza), Typhoid, Hepatitis A (particularly children), Measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children), Meningitis, including meningococcal (particularly children), Cholera (possible, but less likely). The Documents adds: "MOST LIKELY DISEASES DURING THE FOLLOWING 90-180 DAYS, Diarrheal diseases (particularly children), Acute respiratory illnesses (colds), Typhoid, Hepatitis A (particularly children), Conjunctivitis (Eye infections), Measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children), Coetaneous leishmaniasis, Meningococcal meningitis (particularly children), Malaria, Cholera (possible, but less likely)". Why the U.S. and its allies targeted the Iraqi children in particular?

The other document, "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," is dated January 22, 1991 and stated: "Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralised and frequently brackish to saline". It continues: "With no
domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent UN sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could
lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease". As reported in The Sunday Herald on 17 September 2000 "Water-borne diseases in Iraq today are both endemic and epidemic. They include typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, cholera and polio (which had previously been eradicated), along with a
litany of others"(4).

Furthermore, Professor Nagy noted: "As these documents illustrate, the United States knew sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq". Indeed Professor Nagy wrote: "The U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. And it was more concerned about the public relations nightmare for Washington than the actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent Iraqis".

According to Pentagon officials, that was the intention. In a June 23, 1991, Washington Post article, Pentagon officials stated that Iraq's electrical grid had been targeted by bombing strikes in order to undermine the civilian economy. "People say, 'You didn't't recognize that it was going to have an
effect on water or sewage,'" said one planning officer at the Pentagon. "Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions-help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."

Article 54 of the Geneva Convention states: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive."

"This is precisely what the United States government did, with malice aforethought", Professor Nagy noted: "It destroyed, removed, or rendered useless Iraq's drinking water installations and supplies. The sanctions, imposed for a decade largely at the insistence of the United States, constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention. They amount to a systematic effort to, in the DIA's own words, "fully degrade" Iraq's water sources"(2).

Iraq cannot legally import or export any goods outside the UN sanctions system. Chlorine and essential equipment parts needed to repair and clear the water system have been banned from entering the country under the UN "hold" system, which was imposed by the U.S-UK members of the Security Council.

Ohio Democrat Representative Tony Hall has written to American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, saying he shares concerns expressed by UNICEF about the "profound effects the deterioration of Iraq's water supply and sanitation systems on children's health". Diarrhoeal diseases he says are of "epidemic proportions" and are "the prime killer of children under five". "Holds on contracts for water and sanitation are a prime reason for the increase in sickness and death". Of 18 contracts, wrote Hall, all but one on hold were placed by the government in the US. However, Madeleine Albright was one of the architects of this genocidal policy on Iraq. She thought, "the price is worth it". That was exactly what the Nazis thought of Jewish
children.

Professor Joy Gordon of Fairfield University who analysed large amount of UN data on the effect of the sanctions, wrote in November 2002 Harper's Magazine: "In early 2001, the United States had placed holds on $280 million in medical supplies, including vaccines to treat infant hepatitis, tetanus,
and diphtheria, as well as incubators and cardiac equipment. The rationale was that the vaccines contained live cultures, albeit highly weakened ones. The Iraqi government, it was argued, could conceivably extract these, and eventually grow a virulent fatal strain, then develop a missile or other
delivery system that could effectively disseminate it. UNICEF and U.N. health agencies, along with other Security Council members, objected strenuously. European biological-weapons experts maintained that such a feat was in fact flatly impossible. At the same time, with massive epidemics
ravaging the country, and skyrocketing child mortality, it was quite certain that preventing child vaccines from entering Iraq would result in large numbers of child and infant deaths"(5). The UN has estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions, and that 5,000 Iraqi children continue to die every month for this reason. No one can say that the United States didn't't know what it was doing. The deliberate killing of Iraqi children is an act of war crimes and those Western perpetrators should be indicted for war crimes.

The humanitarian crises in Iraq are increasing as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces. In March 2004, a fact-finding mission by the Belgian NGO Medical Aid for the Third World found that even the devastating effects of the US-UK sanctions have not been overcome, including
their veto of medicines, and that infant mortality is apparently increasing and general health declining because of deteriorating living conditions: lack of access to food, potable water, or medical aid and hospitals, and a sharp decline in purchasing power - largely the result of the remarkable failures of what should have been one of the easiest military occupations ever against a defenceless nation.

An Iraqi political group, the Struggle Against Hegemony Movement, published its finding on Monday, says more than 37,000 Iraqi civilians were killed between the start of the US-led invasion in March 2003 and October 2003. The finding is consistent with earlier findings by Western groups.

A high UN official has raised the spectre of a serious humanitarian crisis (i.e. lots of people dying) in Basra this summer due to lack of drinking water as people need for a population of 1.3 million, and the temperature has soared to 50 C / 122 F: "We are confronting a potential serious humanitarian crisis," Ross Mountain, acting special representative of the U.N. Secretary General for Iraq, told Reuters in Amman on 30 July 2004.

Still not satisfied with the destruction of Iraq's water, the U.S. handed Iraq water systems to Bechtel, an American firm with a controversial history of water privatisation in the Developing World. Bechtel is attempting to control not only the process of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, but also control over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers themselves. Bechtel has been embroiled in a lawsuit with Bolivia for their plan to privatise the water there, which would drastically raise the cost of clean water for the poorest
people in the country. Bechtel presence in Iraq is a recipe for disaster

For thousands of years, the Tigris and the Euphrates has been the lifeline of the Iraqi people. It was here, in the Tigris and Euphrates River basin that the world's first cities, with perhaps as many as 50,000 inhabitants appeared. The cradle of ancient civilisations. Along with monumental architecture and the beginnings of writing. Epic literature codes of laws, and contributions to astronomy and mathematics all followed in succeeding millennium. What rights do Americans have to commit such heinous crimes against the history of humanity and the Iraqi people?

Furthermore, Western contractors are cutting into billions of dollars set aside for 90 planned water projects, allowing them to supply only half of the potable water originally expected, Nasreen Berwari, the "minister" of municipalities and public work in the appointed Iraqi government told The New York Times on 26 July 2004. So far, the US have only spent a total of $366 million of the $18.4 billion Iraq "reconstruction" package that have been handed to US corporations.

People in the West, particularly Americans, have been carefully screened (by Fox News, NBC and the likes) from seeing any sign of vast devastation, suffering and genocides caused by their government wars of aggression and committed in their names. How many more thousands of Iraqi children have to
die in order to awake the consciences of Westerners liberals? The liberal and mainstream media of the West, whose main concerns are "morality" and "human rights", live in silence when the genocide of Iraqi children perpetrated by Western leaders.

The media attention is now devoted to Sudan, "[w]e are shown starving babies now, but no TV station will show the limbless or the dead that we cause if we attack Sudan. Humanitarian aid should be what the Red Cross always said it must be - politically neutral. Anything else is just an old-fashioned
colonial war - the reality of killing, and the escalation of violence, disguised with the hypocritical mask of altruism", writes John Laughland of Sanders Research Associates in the UK.

For Iraq to recover 'liberation' is urgently needed- in Iraq, in Palestine and in every country where colonial powers are becoming entrenched.

Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He can be contacted on:
[email protected]

Notes:

(1) MEDACT (2003). Continuing Collateral Damage: The Health and
Environmental Costs of War on Iraq.
http://www.medact.org/tbx/pages/sub.cfm?id=775
(2) Thomas J. Nagy (2001). The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S.
Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply. The Progressive, September.
(3)
http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/declassdocs/dia
/19950901/950901_0pgv072_90p.htm
l
http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/declassdocs/dia/19950901
/950901_511rept_91.html

(4) Felicity Arbuthnot (2000). Allies deliberately poisoned Iraq public
water supply in Gulf War. http://www.sundayherald.com
/print10837
(5) Joy Gordon (2002). Cool War, Harper's Magazine, November.
http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html

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