What U.S. Has Caused For Iraqi Civilian People
Some of you have written to me with concerns for my safety in Iraq, but this was easily one of the safest assignments I have taken. In all my time in Iraq, in spite of an intense awareness of the threat of an impending attack by the United States, I never met a single Iraqi who had a harsh word for me. Iraqis are very good at distinguishing between the U.S. government an a U.S. citizen.
Some friends and family are also already wondering why I would want to go back to Iraq, as I am committed and already anxious to do. It just seems to me that as a photojournalist, Iraq is where I might best play a role in making a small difference. I did some work for Newsweek and Time magazines while in Iraq, but that kind of work has really become secondary for me. I do what I can to influence (in admittedly small ways) what kinds of stories those big magazines do, but ultimately their stories are nearly worthless at confronting the inhumanity of American foreign policy in the Middle East I will continue to work with Time and Newsweek (and with other corporate media) on stories that I don't find offensive, but the bulk of my efforts re now going into reaching alternative media and in supporting anti-war groups in the states. I hope I can find some time soon to come to the states for a speaking tour of sorts.
There's a lot talk about whether or not the United States will go to war with Iraq. What many people don't realize is that the United States is already at war in Iraq. I made 2 trips last month into the "no-fly"zone created by the United States, with Britian and France is southern Iraq. Acutally it would be better named the "only we fly" zone or the "we bomb" zone. "We" refers to the United States who does almost all the flying and bombing (France pulled out years ago), and Britian is largely a nominal participant.
There is another no-fly zone in the north, which the United States SAYS it maintains to protect the Kurds, but while the United States prevents Iraqi aircraft from entering the region, it does nothing to prevent or even criticize Turkey (a U.S. ally) from flying into northern Iraq on numerous occasions to bomb Kurdish communities. Turkey's bombing in Iraq is dwarfed by that of the United States. The United States has been bombing Iraq on a weekly and someties daiy basis for the past 12 years. There were seven civilians killed in these bombings about two weeks ago, and I'm told of more civilians last week, but I'm sure that didn't get much or prehaps any press in the United States. It is estimated that United States bombing has killed 500 Iraquis just since 1999.
Actually I believe that the number to be higher if you take into account the effects of the massive use of depleted uranium (DU) in the bombing. The United States has dropped well in excess of 300 tons of this radioactive material in Iraq (30 times the amount dropped in Kosovo) since 1991. Some of the DU is further containated with other radioactive particules including Neptunium and Plutonium 239, perhaps the most carcinogenic of all radio- active materials, and these particles are now beginning to show up in ground water samples.
I spent a lot of time in over crowded cancer wards in Iraqi hospitals. Since United States bombing began in Iraq, cancer rates have increased nearly six fold in the south, where the United States bombing and consequest levels of DU are most severe.
The most pronounced increases are in leukemia and lungs, kidney, and thyroid cancer asssociated with poisoning by heavy metals (such as DU). But the most lethal weapon in Iraq is the intense sanctions regime. The toll of the sanctions is one of most under-reported stories of the past decade in the United States press but invariably they will subtly discredit humantarian concerns by relying on Iraqi government statements rather than on the statistics of international agencies. My careless colleagues at Time magazine, for example, recently reported "the Iraqui government blames the sanctions for the deaths of thousands of children under the age of five." That's simply not true. The Iraqui government, in fact, blame the sanctions for the deaths of *more than a million* children under the age of five. But let's put that figure aside, for there's no need to rely solely on the Iraqi government, and let's refer instead to UNICEF and WHO reports which blame the sanctions directly fo the excess deaths of approximately 500,000 children under ther age of five and nearly a million Iraquis of all ages.
We all have an idea of the grief borne by the United States after Sept.11 attacks. Employing the crude mathematics of casualty figures, multiply that grief by 300 and place it on the hearts of a country with one tenth the population of the Inited States and prehaps we can get a crude idea of what kind of suffering has already been inflicted on the Iraqi people in the past decade.
The greatest killer of young children in Iraq is dehydration diarrhea caused by water-borne illnesses which are amplified by the international destruction of water treatment to sanitation faculties by the United States. The United States plan for destroying water treatment facilities and suppressing their rehabilitation was outlined just before the American entry into the 1991 Gulf War. Then January 1951, Department of defense document, " Iraq Water Treatment Vunerabilities," goes into great detail about how the destruction of water treatment facilities and their subsequent impairment by the sanction regime with level to "increased incidences, if no epidemics, or disease."
I can report from my time in Iraq that all is going to plan. Cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid (previously almost unheard of in Iraq) are now quite common. Malaria and, of course, dysentery are rampant, and immunities to all types of disease are extremely low. Even those lucky children who manage to get a sufficient daily caloric intake risk losing it all to diarrhea.
Around 4,000 children die every month from starvation and preventable disease in Iraq - a six-fold increase since pre-sanctions measurements. Treatment of illnesses in Iraq is complicated by the inability of hospitals to get the drugs they need through the walls of sanctions. In a hospital in Baghdad I encountered a mother with a very sick one year old child. After the boy's circumsion ceremony, the child was found to have a congential disease which inhibits his blood's ability to clot, which results in excesive bleeding. The child encountered further complications when he took a fall and sustained - head injury which was slowly drowning his brain in his own blood. In most any country he would take regular doses of a drug called Factor 8 and he could then lead a relatively normal life.
But an order for Factor 8 was put "on hold" by the United States (prohibited for import), so the doctors, the mother, and I could only watch the child die.
Much is made of Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, but it is the sanctions, the use of depleted uranuim, and the destruction of Iraqi's health and sanitation infrastructure that are the weapons of greatest mass destruction in Iraq. The situation is so bad that Dennis Halliday, the former Humanitarian Coordinator for the United Nations in Iraq, took the dramatic step of resigning his position in protest of the sanctions. "We are in the proces of destroying an entire society." Halliday wrote, "It is simple and terrifying as that. It is ilegal and immoral." And Halliday isn't alone. His succesor, Hans Von Sponeck, also resigned in protest and went so far as to describe the sanctions as genocide. These are not left-wing radicals. These are career bureaucrats who chose to throw away their careers and the United Nations rather than give tacit support to unethical policies driven by the United States.
Being in Iraq showed me the utter devastation [what the] United States policy (was, [ and the] sanctions) [that were] brought there. [This] has given me a vision of what horror a new war would bring. And, of course, an attack on Iraq would be just the beginning of a terrifying chain of reactions throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world. Having worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Palestine in the past year, I am intensely aware of how the fragile politics and power outside [of] Iraq can be dramatically unsettled by a United States invasion within Iraq. It's easy to imagine a[n] impending tragedy of enormous proportion before us, and I ask myself who must step-up and take responsibility for stopping it.
Clearly, the United States government is the most powerful actor, but it is equallly clear that we cannot turn aside and realistically expect the United States government to suddenly reverse the momentum it has created for war. So I feel the weight of responsibility on me, on United States citizens, to do whatever we can with our individually small but collectively powerful means to change the course of our government's policy. I try to picture myself 10-20 years in the future, and I don't want to be in the position where I reflect on the enormous tragedies of the beginning of the 21st century and admit that I did nothing at all to recognize or prevent them.
I don't know how this letter will sound to my friends and family who are living in the United States, in a media environment which does very little to effectively question United States policy and almost nothing to encourage ordinary people to participate in making a change. I imagine this letter may sound like the political rant of some kind of extremist or ant-American disident. But that's not how it feels to me. This doesn't feel like a political issue to me so much as it feels like a personal issue. I am appalled ona very human level and the suffering which United States policy IS ALREADY inflicting and I am terrified by the prospects for an even more chaotic and violent future.
And let's be honest about United States policy aims. Those in the United States government pushing for war say we are doing [this] to promote democracy, to protect the rights of minorities, and to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction.
But [don't] the United States allies have similarly un-democratic regimes? How many of us would advocate going to war with Turkey over the brutal repression of its Kurdish minority and of the Kurds in Iraq? And do we expect the United States to bomb Israel or Pakistan when each have hundreds of nuclear weapons? Let's remember that leaders in the previous weapons inspection team in Iraq had declared that 95% Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities were destroyed.
And let's not forget that the 1900's when Iraq[?] [Iran] was actually using chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iranian army, the United States had NOTHING to say about it. On the contrary, at that time President Reagan sent a United States envoy to Iraq to normalize dipomatic relations, to support its war with Iran, and to offer subsidies for perferential trade with Iraq. That envoy arrived in Baghdad on the very day that the United Nations confirmed Iraq's[?] [ran's] use of chemical weapons, and he said absolutely nothing about it.
That envoy, by the way, was Donald Rumsfield. While Iraq probably has very little weaponry to actually threaten the United States, they do have oil. According to a recent survey of the West Querna and Majnoon oil fields in southern Iraq, they may even have the world's largest oil reserves, surpassing those of Saudi Arabia.
Let's be honest about United States policy aims and ask ourselves if we can, in good conscience, support continued destruction of Iraq in order to control its oil. I believe that most Americans - Republicans, Democrats, Green, Purple or whatever - would be similarly horrified by the effects of sanitation on the civilian population of Iraq if they could simply see the place, as I have, up close in its human dimensions; if they could see Iraq as a nation of 22 million mothers, sons, daughters, teachers, doctors, mehanics, and window washers, not simply as a single cartoonish villian. I genuinely believe that my view of Iraq is a view that most Americans would see Iraq with their own eyes and not simply through the eyes of a medical establishment which has simplly gotten used to ignoring the deaths and destruction which perpeterate American foreign policy aims.
While the American media fixates on the evils of the "repressive regime of Saddam Hussein," both real and wildly exaggerated, how often are we reminded of the horrors of the last Gulf War when more than 150,000 were killed (former United States Navy Secretary, John Lehman, estimated 200,000).
I simply don't believe that most Americanss could come face-to-face with the Iraqi people and say from their hearts they deserve another war.
I believe in the fundamental values of democracy - the protection of the most powerless among us from the whims of the most powerful. I believe in the ideals of the United Nations as a forum for solving international conflicts non-violently. Those are mainstream values, and they are exactly the values that are most imperiled by present United States policy. That's why, as a citizen of the United States and as a member of humanity, I can't rest easily so long as I think there is something, anything, that I can do to make a difference.
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