"Squeezed to Death" a look at the Iraq of 2000.

madfloridian

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue Apr-08-08 10:02 PM
Original message

"Squeezed to Death" a look at the Iraq of 2000.

Edited on Tue Apr-08-08 10:32 PM by madfloridian

The article is by John Pilger. It is an in depth look at Iraq in the year 2000. There is no resemblance to the country which was portrayed by our media, by our leaders, as an imminent threat.

We talked about this article here several times, and others by Pilger about Iraq pre our second attack on that country. I find it stunning to hear our leaders questioning the military leaders the way they did today. They call it protocol, but it is all a bunch of lies wrapped in sheets of propaganda.

Squeezed to Death

"Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. It swirls in school playgrounds and consumes children kicking a plastic ball. "It carries death," said Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist and member of Britain's Royal College of Physicians. "Our own studies indicate that more than 40 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long afterwards. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff of this hospital. We don't know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper scientific survey, or even to test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields."

That is the depleted uranium that our own government and military leaders declared safe as late as a couple of years ago.

Here is more on what our sanctions and continued bombings did to that country even before 2000.

Under economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council almost 10 years ago, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to clean up its contaminated battle-fields, as Kuwait was cleaned up. At the same time, the Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the Americans and British, has blocked or delayed a range of vital equipment, chemotherapy drugs and even pain-killers. "For us doctors," said Dr Al-Ali, "it is like torture. We see children die from the kind of cancers from which, given the right treatment, there is a good recovery rate." Three children died while I was there.

I don't know if any of that has changed about the refusal to let them have needed drugs.

More from Pilger:

Baghdad is an urban version of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The birds have gone as avenues of palms have died, and this was the land of dates. The splashes of colour, on fruit stalls, are surreal. A bunch of Dole bananas and a bag of apples from Beirut cost a teacher's salary for a month; only foreigners and the rich eat fruit. A currency that once was worth two dollars to the dinar is now worthless. The rich, the black marketeers, the regime's cronies and favourites, are not visible, except for an occasional tinted-glass late-model Mercedes navigating its way through the rustbuckets. Having been ordered to keep their heads down, they keep to their network of clubs and restaurants and well-stocked clinics, which make nonsense of the propaganda that the sanctions are hurting them, not ordinary Iraqis.

In the centre of Baghdad is a monument to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which Saddam Hussein started, with encouragement from the Americans, who wanted him to destroy their great foe, the Ayatollah Khomeini. When it was over, at least a million lives had been lost in the cause of nothing, fuelled by the arms industries of Britain and the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States: the principal members of the Security Council. The monument's two huge forearms, modelled on Saddam's arms (and cast in Basingstoke), hold triumphant crossed sabres. Cars are allowed to drive over the helmets of dead Iranian soldiers embedded in the concourse. I cannot think of a sight anywhere in the world that better expresses the crime of sacrificial war.

This is one of the most shocking paragraphs in the long article. Calling vaccines for children "weapons of mass destruction."

Just before Christmas, the department of trade and industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were banned, he said, "because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction - sanctions - seemed not to occur to him.

Our former Democratic president made it clear even as late as 2004 that he supported Bush's efforts in Iraq. He even "repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq"...by his own words.

I remembered who the consultants were who were advising our Democrats to vote for the war because it was favored in the polls.

The B Team...about Democracy Corps

On the other side of the aisle are the shining lights of the Democratic Party, James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Bob Shrum (the consultant who ran Kerry’s campaign and shied away from confronting the Swift Boat Veterans). These three men founded the Democracy Corps, a nonprofit “dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people.” Recall that on Oct. 3, 2002, prior to the Iraq war resolution votes, Democracy Corps advised Capitol Hill Democrats: “This decision will take place in a setting where voters, by 10 points, prefer to vote for a member who supports a resolution to authorize force (50 to 40 percent).” In other words, Carville and friends advised Democrats to cater to public opinion and let Bush have his war.

In September 2002, an editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote a courageous article about the goals of the PNAC. It also was discussed on line, it was shared with our congress folks. It was a losing fight on the side of the anti-war...the agenda was set.

The president's real goal in Iraq

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.
The pieces just didn't fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.

In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

I watched some of the hearings today, then I had to turn it off. I remembered the last hearings. I remember the overwhelming congressional vote to condemn Move On for the ad about Petraeus.

I watched him today as long as I could. I saw how careful the questioning was. I remembered these articles we shared here before the war, and I think we need to keep remembering.