The Iraq War 2

Over two years after the invasion of Iraq I think it's time to have another look at this war and the occupation, what is happening and where do we go from here? But this is hard. My opposition to this war of course colours my every thought about the war, the responsible policitians, the destruction and the resistance. And in the sense that the war continues as it started, with the distortions and spins of the political elites in the UK and the US, then nothing has changed.

Perhaps the London bombings bring the greatest sense of perspective. The London bombings were an outrageous and dastardly act of betrayal by four young men, who's own families had sought refuge and a future in a new country, England, and who seemed to have made some success for themselves and for their families. That these youngsters should have allowed themselves to be poisoned by such a perverted creed that they were prepared to blow themselves and their fellow countrymen and women to smithereens, is a shocking illustration of the destructive power of zealotry.

So London tasted for a brief, but horrible moment, the fear, the panic, the pandemonium and the sorrow that such bombings bring. But there is another city in another country where this is the daily experience, and has been for over two years. During this two years an average of thirty-five innocent civilians have died every day, totalling about 25,000 since the war in Iraq started. Stating this is not to diminish the pain that those who have lost loved ones or have been badly hurt in London, but to bring home an awareness and understanding of the never-ending level of pain and despair in Baghdad. This continuous suffering has been inflicted on a poverty stricken populace by the illegal invasion of that country, and the inability of the occupying forces to keep the population safe, which in turn is an abrogation of responsibility by the wantonly careless and the criminally liable.

That the people of Iraq have any sort of faith in any sort of God is remarkable. This population have had sorrows inflicted on them for so many years that one wonders how faith could survive. From Saddam and his murderous government, to the Iraq-Iran war, the Gulf war, the sanctions and now the steady dismemberment of the country by anarchy, faith indeed must have deep roots to survive. To say one feels sorry for the people of Iraq is something akin to saying to someone who survived the Holocaust that they must have had a rotten time. There is no word I can think of for "sorry" that adequately conveys my emotions in considering the visitation of this amount of suffering to the people of Iraq.

There has been a meeting of the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul in late June this year. This body, constituted similarly to the (Bertrand) Russell Tribunal of the 1960's, which was set up to examine the legality and war crimes associated with the Vietnam War, has been examining the Iraq War from an international legal framework and has published a Declaration of Conscience. The World Tribunal consisted of many expert delegates from all over the world, including of course the UK, the US and Iraq. Please read this - the list of illegalities consequent on the war are long and worrying. If you haven't heard of the World Tribunal on Iraq, it wouldn't be surprising, it was not covered by the BBC, CNN, or any news media here in NZ. To the mainstream newsmedia, it was non event, which is why if you confine your knowledge of what goes on in the world to the mainstream media, you will remain utterly and perpetually ignorant, which of course is the overriding function of the mainstream news media.

There is an excellent article from the BBC today (19/7/05) written by John Simpson, one of those intrepid and truly brave reporters, like Jonathan Pilger and Robert Fisk; several times each year John visits Baghdad to report on the changes he sees. And it is obvious, things are not getting better, they are getting worse. He says "I've been to Iraq eleven times since the fall of Saddam - each time the security situation has been markedly worse than the time before" . The simple fact that the most important road in Iraq is the "most dangerous road in the world", and that this road from the so-called Green Zone to the airport is unsecured, proves that the occupying force is inadequate and impotent. The American army, that all-powerful conquering force, the creator of awesome explosions and employer of radioactive munitions, is reduced to existing in a twilight zone of their own making, a self-imposed gulag of American dreams, scattered like so many half-submerged islands in a rising tide of anarchy.

And what do Bush and Blair, twin architects of so much mischief have to say? Blair angrily denies that the bombings in London were the result of the Iraq war. Blair says such terrorist acts existed long before the war in Iraq. He is partly right, terrorism didn't just arrive with the Iraq war, it also arrived with the Iraq sanctions, the Palestinian-Israeli situation and the American bases in Saudi Arabia. But read this press statement from the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) - it is a sober and sombre account of how this unjustified and stupid war has increased the likelihood of just such an attack. The title of the first part, "Riding Pillion for Tackling Terrorism is a High-Risk Policy", says it all. This is part of what they say later in their press release "there is 'no doubt' that the invasion of Iraq has imposed particular difficulties for the UK and for the wider coalition against terrorism.  According to the paper, the situation in Iraq has 'given a boost to the Al-Qaeda network's propaganda, recruitment and fundraising', whilst providing an ideal targeting and training area for Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists." A recent opinion poll, published in the Guardian, indicates that two thirds of Britons believe there is a link between the Iraq War and the London bombings, and fully three quarters are saying there will be more attacks. So far from fighting terrorism and bringing it to heel, this war is watering the seeds of terrorism and reaping a growing harvest of unrest and radicalism. O.K., Tony, you are partly right, but you are mostly wrong, and the British people, and its soldiers, and even more the people of Iraq, will continue to pay the price of the mostly wrong, until the UK can extricate itself from this deteriorating situation.

Another article is based on an interview with Robert Pape, an associate professor at the University of Chicago. He has been collecting information about every suicide terrorist act from 1980 to 2004. From this database he has been able to draw some interesting conclusions. He says "The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territories that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka, to Chechny to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaigne - over 95 percent of all the incidents - has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw. This leads to a fundamentally important point. Bush says we need to fight terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them over here. To this Robert Pape can now say "Since suicide-terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us. He continues by talking about the presence of tens of thousands of American troops stationed on the Arabian Peninsula and how this form of terrrorism will continue until the American troops withdraw. The American troops are there of course because of America's massively important strategic interest in oil. While Robert Pape does not consider this further, I can't help thinking that America would be better served by dealing with its insatiable and irresponsible demand for oil directly. (See my articles on peak oil and global warming).

If you do read this article, it is worth exploring the American Conservative Magazine site. The site was set up by Pat Buchanan and others, American Republicans and conservatives, who are greatly opposed to the take over of the American right by the Neo-Cons, and who represent what has previously been main-stream American conservatism. This page explains the background of their philosophies. It ends "We believe conservatism to be the most natural political tendency, rooted in men's taste for the familiar, for family, for faith in God. We believe that true conservatism has a predisposition for the institutions and mores that exist. So much of what passes for contemporary conservatism is wedded to a kind of radicalism - fantasies of global hegemony, the hubristic notion of America as a universal nation for all the world's peoples, a hyperglobal economy. In combination with an increasingly unveiled contempt for America's long-standing allies, this is more a recipe for disaster. Against it we take our stand. Reading this quite gave me the warm and fuzzies!

Mr Bush's latest pronouncement about the war and its progress has not changed. Speaking to troops in Fort Bragg at the end of June, Bush invoked the 11th Sept again and again, and his words seemed to be stuck in some sort of time warp. "Americans want our troops home as quickly as possible, but he ruled out any change in strategy, nor would he give any sort of deadline for troop withdrawal, no any increase in troop numbers. He called on Americans not to loose "our heart, our nerve.... or forget 9/11" (Link) "We fight because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand... so we will fight them there, we will fight them accross the world, and we will stay until the fight is won" Bush also cited"significant progress" in Iraq. According to the web article I am quoting, Bush invoked 11th September five times in his speech, and by implication several more times. Although he has previously agreed that there is no evidence that Saddam Husseins's Iraq was involved in the attacks, he used much of his speech to portray the foes in Iraq and the perpetrators of the 2001 attack as the same. So when I introduced this article on the Iraq war by saying that things have not changed, that the distortions and the spins are the same, this speech tells you why. Democratic leaders said that Bush's vision was out of touch with reality, and Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, is reported as saying "The White House is completely disconnected from reality.....it's like they're just making it up as they go along"

The simple fact is that the invasion of Iraq has not gone the way the Americans thought it would; certainly the invasion was spectacularly successful, but they are not going to win their objective, a democratic and peaceful secular muslem state, sympathetic to the West and and able to provide the West, and America in particular, with the oil they think they desperately need. That goal remains as remote as ever, in fact, as John Simpson can attest directly, things are worsening all the time. An article in the Independent, from correspondent Patrick Cockburn covers the same ground, it is entitled "Iraq - this is now an unwinnable conflict". This page from the Times on the web, published 18/7/05, bears the title "Weekend of slaughter propels Iraq towards all-out civil war." The article goes on to say that Iraq's security forces have been overwhelmed by the scale of the suicide bombings - eleven on the Friday alone. "What is truly happening, and what shall happen is clear: a war against the Shias" says Sheik Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a prominent Shia cleric and MP. So far the Shia leaders have managed to restrain the Shia militias from any outright attack on their Sunni assailants, but the fear is that this restraint may not last with the continued violence against them, which the occupying force and the new Iraq military cannot seem to control.

A full scale civil war is a horrifying scenario, how would America and Britain deal with this? Iraq could fragment into its constituent parts, and one might even see the British troops have to side with the Shias in the south of the country in a war against the Sunnis, and what would America do, if the Sunnis were loosing, aid the Sunnis? (I think that would be keeping on the Sunni side of life!). Would we see British and American troops fighting each other? And yet of course the possibility of a civil war and the break up of the country was foreseen by many as a possible consequence of the invasion of Iraq. For instance, what would happen in the north, a Kurdish controlled region, would that drag in Turkey, who would be most disturbed to see any sort of Kurdish independence in the north, as also would the Iranians? The present anarchy, dreadful as it is, could be nothing to a fully fledged conflagration in the Middle East. Whilst I would hope this could be avoided, such a conflagration is what many of the insurgents and al-Qaeda have been hoping and striving for all along. The invasion of Iraq was exactly the sort of overreaction that al-Qaeda hoped to get from the Americans, and anyone else that was foolish enough to tag along, pillion passengers as Chatham House so eloquently put it. Mr Bush did exactly what Osama bin Laden had thought he would do. Osama's strategic thinking puts all the American and British experts to shame.

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Iraq War Reparations

What are Iraq war reparations, you may ask? I confess, until now, I'd never heard of 'em. But check it out. Iraq war reparations are completely and utterly and abominably fascinating. As an illustration of exactly why the world is cuckoo, read about Iraqi war reparations. Iraqi war reparations have have the hallucinatory logic and the surrealism of Alice in Wonderland, and the terrifying inevitability of a Franz Kafka story. Read here my understanding, as much as any sane person can understand, the story of the Iraqi war reparations.

Following the Gulf War, as a condition of the ceasefire, Iraq was made to agree on providing monetary reparations to countries and individuals and corporations adversely affected by the invasion of Kuwait. Also, Iraq was made to agree to make reparations to Iran, as a consequence of the war against that country which commenced in 1980. This article in the Guardian of 16th Oct 2004 explains something of Iraqi war reparations very nicely. The headline is "Why is war-torn Iraq giving $190,000 to Toys-R-Us ? It explains how the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) was set up after the Gulf War to oversea the reparations that Iraq had agreed to pay, under the conditions of the ceasefire, of the people, companies and countries that had been affected by the invasion of Kuwait. Up until the overthrow of Saddam, Iraq had paid $18 billion, mostly to Kuwait. But what this article reveals is how these payments are still continuing. Money is still going to Britain and the US, but even more money is flowing to corporations. Mulitnational oil companies have received over $21 billion since the Gulf War ceasefire. And the money keeps on flowing - Halliburton ($18m), Bechtel ($7m), Mobil ($2.3m), Shell ($1.6m), Nestlé ($2.6m), Pepsi ($3.8m), Philip Morris ($1.3m), Sheraton ($11m), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321,000) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In fact $1.8 billion has been paid since the overthrow of Saddam, which is more that than the US has provided in infrastructural investments or more than the combined education and health budget of Iraq.

Basically the UNCC has been seen as a slush fund for multinationals and oil emirates - but while this was happening under the Saddam regime, no-one really cared. But the slush fund continues, and every dollar from Iraq given to these recipients, is another dollar not spent on humanitarian aid or infrastructural development in Iraq. Iraq even now is being forced to borrow more and more money, whilst hundreds of millions of dollars leave the country in reparations, $377 million in October 2004 alone. What one should particularly understand is that so much of the money owed by Iraq at the overthrow of Saddam was to countries and corporations that supplied Iraq with the billions of dollars worth of armaments with which he fought two useless and destructive wars.

But wait, the plot thickens, just like any good plot, or porridge. Since America (and the UK et al.) have taken over Iraq, these reparations, which America was only too happy to foist on this impoverished country after the Gulf War, have now become the responsibility of the occupying powers. Now the last thing that America wants to have responsibility for is the liability for further billions of dollars of reparations. In particular a likely reparation bill of about $30 billion to Iran (though Iran is claiming $100 billion) is really likely to stick in the American craw. So the US have appointed former Secretary of State, James Baker III as a "Special Envoy", who's main role is to meet with all the heads of states and business in the Middle East and persuade them to forego the debts owed by Iraq. Now read this article by Naomi Klein, Canadian reporter and activist. While James Baker is acting as the (unpaid) Special Envoy to the White House, the same James Baker is continuing to be employed by merchant bank and defence contractor, the Carlyle Group, where he is a senior "counsellor" and share-holder to the tune of $180 million.

Now this is the best bit. James Baker has been attempting to contract to the Kuwaiti government, though I think it is true that no deal has been formally agreed, for a consortium to take over the Kuwaiti's claims to some $57 billion of unpaid Iraqi reparations. The idea is that Kuwait would give this consortium, controlled by the Carlyle Group and other organisations, such as the Albright Group, headed by another former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, a $2 billion dollar fighting fund, and the ownership of the debt. Kuwait has been told by James Baker, in his capacity as Special Envoy, that Kuwait might be lucky to see anything of the reparations, considering how hard he, and the American government, are working with everyone in the Middle East and elsewhere, to get these debts forgiven. But, if Kuwait agrees to the proposals made, James Baker, in his alter ego as the Carlyle Group counsellor and shareholder, along with his good friend, Madeline Albright, and other influential lobbyists, would use his, and their influence, to improve the return to Kuwait by lobbying world leaders to "maximise" the reparations payable to Kuwait, with a 5% commission to the consortium. The article continues for seven further pages - it ends with the information that James Baker hasn't been able to get any country to formally renounce its claims to Iraqi reparations. Indeed other Arab countries such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran have claimed an extra $82 billion in environmental damages, like so many vultures picking over the corpse of Iraq, and thereby displaying exemplary Arab solidarity with the suffering Iraqis. Such is the story of Iraqi war reparations, whereby billions of dollars are being confiscated from a country where the average income is $2 per day, where anarchy is law, and suffering the daily bread.

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Depleted Uranium

This page would also be a good place to discuss the use of depleted uranium (DU) in munitions used by America and Britain in the Iraq war. This sort of munition has also been used in Kosovo and the first Gulf War. The use of depleted uranium is highly controversial and has been blamed for the "Gulf War Syndrome" in US and British servicemen. The military who use depleted uranium rounds say they are not dangerous, that the radioactivity is minimal, there is no evidence that they cause harm, and that they are too valuable not to use. Those who disagree are horrified that the military are spraying tons of uranium over the battlefields and in cities, for DU munitions are used against enemy positions in buildings and bunkers, affecting enemy troops, civilian populations, polluting the soil and ground water, and indeed hurting one's own troops as well.



What is depleted uranium? Uranium is a very dense and, like lead, toxic metal. However it is more than half again as dense as lead, and its particular metallic characteristics make it very suitable for armour piercing rounds. For instance, each 30 mm round fired by an A 10 "Warthog" aircraft, contains 275 g of depleted uranium. 120 mm tank shells contain 4 kg of depleted uranium. When such a round hits a tank, say, the metal pierces the armour, it ignites and vapourises the metal of the tank, enters the tank in a fireball of burning uranium at a temperature of over one thousand degrees Celsius, incinerating in a fraction of a second the occupants of the tank and vapourising the surface of the interior. Most of the uranium is vapourised too, to condense out into a ceramic dust of uranium oxide less than 0.1 micrometre diameter. These particles are easily inhaled, and will lodge in the lungs or be carried in the blood stream to other organs in the body. These pariticles have been found dispersed over tens of kilometres from the original strike. The amount of depleted uranium used so far in the Iraq war is estimated at over 2,200 tons, over seven times as much as in the first Gulf War, about 300 tons. There are quite a number of internet site concerning this, just Google "depleted uranium" or check out this site. There are good military reasons why depleted uranium is an excellent munition for armour piercing, it is probably "the best", whereas alternatives, such as tungsten, are not so effective. Also of course it is cheap, dirt cheap, in fact munitions manufacturers are given the stuff for free, as then it doesn't have to be stored elsewhere. The USA has (1998) 496,000 tons of the stuff in storage.




But not only is depleted uranium chemically toxic, it is also radioactive. To hear the military, you would think that all the radioactivity had been removed, not true. Most of the U235, which constitutes about 1% of the original uranium, has been removed, but U238, which is the depleted uranium and 99% of the original metal, is also radioactive, emitting alpha particles. If the depleted uranium is derived from nuclear power station reprossessing, then there is also likely to be contamination with other radioactive materials such as Plutonium, Neptunium and Americium. Whilst the amounts of these pollutants are tiny, these elements are potentially much more radioactively destructive. U238 decays slowly, with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years, but its daughter decay products, Thorium 234 and Protoactinium 234 are much more radioactive, emitting more penetrating beta particles, so the radioactivity of depleted uranium gradually increases over about 30 weeks until it reaches a steady state of radioactivity about three times greater than U238 on its own. Whilst it is true that in the metallic state, outside the body, alpha particle are not penetrating, as tiny inhaled or ingested particles of DU, they certainly are.

Whilst there is little actual scientific evidence on the harmful effects of DU, possibly the research hasn't been done, or if it has, it has been suppressed, the paper mentioned above says there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence that it is harmful, causing extensive radiological, environmental, chemical and biological effects. This paper, from the Hague Peace Conference 1999, by Dr Rosalie Bertell, gives a detailed examination of the health effects of depleted uranium, especially as it occurs in battlefield and other areas where DU ammunition has been used, causing a widepread aerosol of ceramic like particles of uranium oxides, which can be ingested or inhaled. She absolutely refutes the military claim that particulate uranium oxide is only a chemical toxin. Exposure to uranium oxides is regulated in the US by its radiological properties. There is bound to be a combined effect of toxicity and radiological damage in any human tissue in which the uranium ends up. Prof.Doug Rokke is an ex-director of the Pentagon's depleted uranium project and onetime US army colonel, states use of DU is a "war crime".




However, there are contrary views. An editorial in the British Medical Journal 20/1/2001 by Prof Melissa A McDiarmid, professor of medicine at the Maryland School of Medicine, downplays the risks. She reviews research related to exposure to uranium dust in uranium miners and process workers - the research she quotes concludes, from a review of eleven studies in uranium miners, that "there is no unequivocal evidence that inhalation, oral or dermal exposure (of uranium) induces cancer in humans" She also quotes a Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterens Illnesses, which fails to show any connection between depleted uranium and such illness. Though with what we know about how such committees work, and the way research and advisory papers can be edited or altered, I would not necessarily trust the conclusions of such a committee. Prof. McDiarmid also references a study of 60 Gulf War veterens, the victims of friendly fire, who have various amounts of DU shrapnel in their bodies. Whilst no excess of cancers were demonstrated, she doesn't mention the adverse effects measured on the reproductive and central nervous system (impaired neurocognitive performance). Nor would ten to twelve years since exposure be long enough to exclude a cancer causing potential, and of course this study doesn't address what might happen in young children or pregnant mothers.

What is needed is proper research into the effects of depleted uranium, at the place it is used, on the troops of both sides, and the civilian population, and the environment. The UN would be the best body to support this research. If long term effects can be demonstrated in any of these areas, then it is likely that the use of DU is illegal under the terms of the Geneva and other international conventions, as are other methods of warfare such as dumdum bullets, biological agents and gas. To those of who remember the Vietnam war, and the forty years it has taken to get the authorities to admit the long term sequelae of the use of "Agent Orange", this sort of issue with DU seems very much déja vu. Wikipedia has a good article about depleted uranium, the article concludes with a summary of the findings of a United Nations Human Rights examination of DU, in which it is stated that DU weaponry should be included as a weapon of mass destruction because of its long term and indiscriminate effects. But perhaps we don't need to go to the expense of undertaking a UN sponsored investigation, which would likely be blocked by the Americans in any case. Much the easiest way to prove if the American military and government really do consider depleted uranium harmless or not would be to distribute twenty kilogrammes of DU dust on the lawns of the White House or in and around the Capitol building, and see what happens.

President Bush and Tony Blair went to war with Iraq on the basis of Iraq's possession of so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction. Despite intensive searches for such weapons, nothing was found. Instead the Americans and British have been using their own Weapons of Mass Destruction and inflicting permanent physical and environmental damage on the Iraqi civilian population. This not only includes the possible effects of DU, but also the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. This is hypocracy of the highest order, and the possible illegal use of such weapons in an illegal war should surely bring the impeachment of these two leaders for crimes against humanity.