This War Is Genocide

Note: While this post does contain some new links, it is largely a restatement of two previous posts: "A Final Solution For The Cradle of Civilisation?" and "The Whole World Is Watching". Why? Simply that the text of this post will be submitted for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's approval.

Imagine that Seattle were bombarded with 400 Cruise Missiles every day for a period of weeks. Imagine further that concomitant to this bombardment, Seattle would be attacked by tiny "microwave bombs", each designed to instantly destroy all electronic devices within a 1 or 2 mile radius. Imagine still further that the ordnance raining down upon Seattle were fitted with a heavy metal nuclear waste product which, upon impact, would aerosolize, releasing dust-sized particles with a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years into the atmosphere. Finally, imagine that food and relief shipments into Seattle would be indefinitely cut off owing to region-wide chaos induced by the bombs.

The people of Iraq will not have to imagine this nightmare scenario. For despite the President's warm and fuzzy assurances that Iraqi civilian casualties will be kept to a minimum, this is the fate which will soon engulf them (or may already have by the time you read this).

The President's platitudes are belied by the most cursory of logical examinations. If civilian casualties are to be kept to a minimum, why are United Nations workers and other foreign residents of Baghdad being instructed to leave? Why are those Iraqi citizens who can afford to do so streaming into Syria and Jordan in advance of the U.S. bombs -- while "panic grips the city's poor"?

Though the United States refused to participate in a summit last month in Geneva to prepare for the humanitarian crisis expected to befall the Iraqi people, its leaders know full well the calamitous outcome being warned against by the United Nations and the relief agencies planning to deal with war's aftermath.

For example, a classified UN planning document, leaked last month to the public, warns that, "The improvement in malnutrition rates since 1996 is highly fragile and depends on a continuing distribution of food and regular supply of potable water. An estimated 4.2 million children under five and one million pregnant women are highly vulnerable. In the event of a crisis, 30 percent of children under 5 would be at risk of death from malnutrition." The leaked documents reveal that the UN is expecting a "humanitarian emergency of exceptional scale and magnitude."

The Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, in a November report, concluded that, "Heavy bombardments and the use of military forces will have incalculable consequences for a civilian population that has already suffered so much. It would be difficult to imagine a single, more effective way of wreaking devastation on an already devastated country and creating a major humanitarian crisis with hundreds of thousands of innocent victims."

Public Health physician and Vietnam Veteran Charlie Clements, after returning from an assessment mission in January, wrote that, "I have worked in war zones before, and I have been with civilians as they were bombed by U.S.-supplied aircraft. I don't think I've experienced anything on the magnitude of the catastrophe that awaits our attack on Iraq," and in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine warned that, "Food distribution will cease to function."

The International Study Team, subsequent to its fact-finding mission to Iraq, "is forecasting, should war occur, a grave humanitarian disaster. While it is impossible to predict both the nature of any war and the number of expected deaths and injuries, casualties among children will be in the thousands, probably the tens of thousands, and possibly in the hundreds of thousands."

A Russian military expert, in discussing the U.S. war plan, claims that the destruction of Iraq will be so comprehensive that there won't be any need for ground operations, because after the air campaign, "There will simply be nobody" left to shoot at -- only a "burning desert".

It should be noted that these warnings, dire as they are, do not take into account the long-term health and environmental impacts which will result from the United States' use of radiological weaponry -- so-called "Depleted" Uranium and/or natural Uranium munitions.

This war, in short, is nothing less than the premeditated mass-murder of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the -- mostly children -- in the short-term, and the permanent poisoning of the environment (the radioactive dust left behind is virtually impossible to clean up). The Bush Administration, in tightly controlling ("embedding") the establishment media, and in reportedly promising to destroy independent media uplinks, is already preparing to hide its crimes from the world.

As American citizens, our task now is to do everything in our power to expose the State Department's lies, to publicize as widely as possible the consequences of this war, and to hold the planners and perpetrators of this monstrous undertaking accountable for their actions; in the hopes that we can mitigate the destruction, and prevent it from ever happening again.

Posted by Eddie Tews at March 16, 2003 02:07 PM