As opposition to war in Iraq has mounted throughout the world in the past few weeks, one of the peace movement's most widely circulated and influential documents has been a public e-mail written by Dr. Charlie Clements, a New Mexico physician and president of WaterWorks, a nonprofit that helps communities with water-management issues. Clements recently returned from a twelve-day human-rights mission in Iraq sponsored by Brooklyn's Center for Economic and Social Rights. A Vietnam veteran who graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy, Clements warns that the Iraqi people, who have already suffered under the strain of nearly a dozen years of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, stand at the brink of societal disaster.
What was the most shocking thing you saw when you were in Baghdad?
Walking into a public hospital and seeing all the beds two and three full with mothers and their children who were clearly suffering from malnutrition. In one of these hospitals, I saw a mother who had traveled 200 kilometers with her young daughter, who suffered from leishmaniasis, a sand-fly-borne disease. The mother had come here because she heard the hospital had a supply of Pentostam, the medicine the girl needed. But they didn't have anything for her. The doctor who was treating her turned to me and said in English that it would be kinder to shoot her here than let her go home and die the lingering death that awaited her.
How will our invasion affect the average Iraqi citizen?
Sixty percent of Iraq's 22 million people depend on the United Nations for food rations, and almost all of that food comes in through the port of Basra, where it is distributed throughout the country. But the U.S. Army will want to keep the Iraqi army from moving around or re-supplying itself and will cut off roads and bridges. Food distribution will cease to function. The Pentagon has said that we will launch 3,000 cruise missiles in the first forty-eight hours of the war -- that comes out to almost one every minute.
So even if no bombs fall near your home, you will still be affected by the U.S. bombing.
Oh, yeah. The U.S. has also said it will drop these wind-dispersed carbon filaments to paralyze the electrical system. They get into every transformer and basically short them out. This will bring down the communication system throughout the country. It will also destroy the public health infrastructure, which is totally dependent on electricity. Unless people have filled up buckets in their home, there's also going to be a shortage of potable water.
So right from the beginning, we will shut down the food-supply system, bring down the electrical grid and shut down the water pumps.
The same thing will happen in the hospitals. They have better backup generators than the water pumps -- about seventy percent of capacity, as compared to ten percent for the pumps. But those backup generators are only intended to run for a few hours at a time. And those generators run on diesel fuel. But if the highways are not functional, there'll be no way to keep the tanks full. So after about ten or twelve days, the backup systems in place to keep the water pumping and the lights on in the hospitals will come to a halt.
A lot of people say, "Don't blame the U.S.; Saddam has brought all of this misery upon himself by refusing to cooperate with the UN and disarm." How do you respond to them?
I think there is enough blame to go around. Saddam Hussein and George Bush are in a game of chicken, with Iraqi civilians caught in the middle.
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