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The
Killing Fields: Ghosts of the Walking Dead
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions
against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know,
is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard
choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.
--60
Minutes (5/12/96)
Oil, Simply Oil
By
Manuel Valenzuela
01/26/06 "ICH"
-- -- The story of Iraq and its people since 1991 is one of
immense tragedy, of a fate cruel and evil that has befallen innocent
human beings whose only crime has been living inside what was once
the ancient land of Mesopotamia. It is ironic that the land that
first gave rise to human civilization has been made to suffer
tremendous hardship in the last fifteen years, severely decimated
and destroyed, its wounds hemorrhaging from incessant human
cruelty. The heart of the Fertile Crescent has become a barren
wasteland, its waters, the Tigris and Euphrates, those veins of
sustenance for our ancient forefathers, transformed into rivers of
waste and pollution and decaying death, their fertility now mutated
into toxicity.
Its cities and peoples, descendants of a
civilization thousands of years old, rich in both culture and
history, have been made to suffer the severe consequences of sitting
atop modern humanity’s most coveted natural resource, a black gold
sought by nations and corporations of the rich and powerful north, a
devil’s excrement that fuels economies and human greed, feeding
apathy and wickedness, corruption and colonialism, and, as always,
expanding comfort and excessiveness in the lands of the pillagers.
To those nations whose unlucky possession of oil has brought nothing
but exploitation and misery, like Iraq, the black gold fever created
has yielded a curse upon both peoples and lands, for in their
strategic location exists the energy needed to feed today’s
wealthiest and most powerful nations.
These countries will stop at nothing in order
to possess, and control, the drops and gallons and barrels and
pipelines and valves and oil wells saturated with ever dwindling
supplies of oil, becoming blind to the corrosive effects their
exploitation has on both native people and land, in the process
ripping apart ground, polluting environment, poisoning air,
intoxicating water, corrupting leadership and condemning the
citizenry to the sins of human nature possessed by greed, addicted
to money and infatuated by power.
The destiny of modern Iraq was sealed millions
of years ago, when fossil fuels underwent their natural evolution,
over epochs becoming the black blood hiding underneath sand dunes
and desert landscapes. Due to the changing patterns of an ever
evolving planet, a land once lush in forest, jungle and one can
imagine bountiful vegetation became, over eons of change, the vastly
different landscape we are familiar with today. Black gold replaced
green Eden, to remain hidden for millions of years until that day
when man developed the technologies in need of fuel. This bone
marrow, dormant and undisturbed, lay below ground, remaining unknown
to primitive man for its use and capabilities had yet to be
understood.
This resource, useless to peoples ancient and
primitive, was to find access to the surface in the late 19th
century. It would be the beginning of the end for nations such as
Iraq, their fate now in the hands of nations addicted to
colonization and imperialism, for in oil the Western powers saw
hegemony, control and advantage. Thus, from the nadir of Earth the
devil’s excrement rose, becoming, over a century later, a most
troubling demon possessing humanity and destroying, in the span of a
little more than a century, the planet's environment.
At the time ignorance made the effects of
fossil fuel use unknown. Meanwhile, the northern thirst for oil,
insatiable thanks to industrialization and expansion of economies,
began to imprison, exploit and colonize the lands and peoples of the
Middle East, enriching a few tribal leaders, making kings of goat
herders and creating tyrants of former shepherds. The market
colonization of Arab and Muslim lands had begun, like a gold rush
birthing a fever that has yet to stop.
In the process, lands that should never have
been joined in unison were stitched together by Western powers
ignorant to the region’s history, culture and idiosyncrasies.
Rivals and hated enemies suddenly found themselves living in the
same country, surrounded by Western imposed invisible borders,
forced to subsist and govern together. The traditional lands of
entire peoples were without understanding divided apart or granted
to other entities, thereby planting the seeds for future conflict.
Ethnicities found themselves split apart by imaginary lines, with
large segments of their populations living in different nations,
their congruity eviscerated, their connections to each other
severed.
Unwanted European minorities, for centuries
oppressed and subjugated, hated and ostracized in their native
lands, at times ethnically cleansed and nearly exterminated, were
conveniently gotten rid off from European nations and sent to the
land of the Palestinians, free to colonize a region for millennia
owned and lived in by Palestinian indigenous peoples. Given the
right to oppress and ethnically cleanse native Arabs by England, who
possessed the lands of Palestine, the European ethnic minority,
claiming the land as their Biblical right, systematically began a
campaign of terror against the natives, cleansing hundreds of
thousands, murdering many and taking the lands, and wealth, of the
Palestinian people, creating their own colony while occupying other
people’s rightful land.
Thus, to atone for the sins of Europeans Israel
was allowed to be born at the expense of the indigenous population,
thereby condemning the Palestinian people to pay perpetual
sacrifices and compensation to a people persecuted by Europeans, not
Arabs. In the dispossession of natives Israel was created, born in
sin and human malice, a gift from England and Europe to make up for
their past evils, becoming a short sighted endowment but a ticking
time bomb in the much more important long term. Today Palestine is
a land of colonizers, settlers, occupiers and institutionalized
apartheid, an area in turmoil and perpetual hatred, with
Palestinians robbed of their lands, homes, farms and wells,
imprisoned in walled and fenced-in ghettos and Bantustans, displaced
and sent to rot in refugee camps and territorial hellholes.
Palestine has become a land of engendered
revulsion, a place where two peoples are forced to live side by side
under a history saturated with violence, oppression, plunder and a
hunger for vengeance. It is a tinderbox threatening not just to the
greater Middle East, but to the world at large. The manipulations by
the British during the first half of the 20th century at
trying to engineer a new nation governed by foreigners with only
ancient continuity with the land, through the subjugation of the
native population, was a clear example of forethought being but an
afterthought, and today the world entire must bear the consequences
of this foray into colonizing stolen land.
The lands of the Middle East were carved up by
the great Western powers, intent on exploiting every inch of land
and drop of oil. They became colonizers, devastating economies,
damaging cultures, impoverishing lives and pillaging wealth, both
natural and economic. In time despots were appointed, supported and
given comfort, named kings, princes, dictators and so-called
presidents by leaders of northern lands unfamiliar with the ways of
the Middle East, becoming, more than anything else, the tyrants,
puppets and, most importantly, the strongmen of the West, able to
maintain their power by suppressing and controlling their own
people, depending on the morsels and crumbs given by the West for
continued hegemony.
While they reaped the enormous wealth spawned
by oil, allowing European companies complete pillage of black gold,
the strongmen impoverished their subjects, ruling them with an iron
fist, providing for their exploitation and raped destinies, with
millions becoming severely under educated and, as a result,
fervently religious, made susceptible to the fundamentalist
teachings of mullahs and extremists. Tyrants and kings ruled
unopposed, confident that Europe and later America would support
their every move and decision.
Democracy and freedom in the Middle East became
invisible and non-existent principles, far away realities seen only
through the filtered media controlled by the state, promises made
real only to the populations of the same Western nations that
supported despots and incompetent rulers where oil flowed.
Elections are either non-existent or rigged charades designed to
convince few. The rights of women have always been relegated to
that of property, with men allowed to dictate the destiny of
females. Liberty and human rights were and have never been allowed
to cement themselves. On the contrary, suppression and torture have
metastasized themselves into Arabic countries, with full support and
encouragement of the West, to the great detriment of millions of
people.
The only interest the West, and particularly
America, has with the Middle East is ownership and control of oil.
For over a century Western meddling in the region has concentrated
on the availability of black gold. It has been to the great
detriment of nations such as Iraq that its underground is saturated
with the resource the West cannot live without. Thanks to oil the
people of Iraq, composed of three distinct ethnicities, mistrustful
and historically spiteful of each other, have been thrown into a
land whose Western imposed borders are a relatively new phenomenon.
Iraqis, along with all other Middle East peoples, have been forced
to endure Western – and American – sponsored dictators for decades,
with oil interests trumping those for freedom, democracy and human
rights. It is the story of those condemned by the devil’s
excrement.
Saddam as Both Friend and Foe
Saddam Hussein was for decades an American
supported and financed dictator put in power to become the
tyrannical glue that held Iraq together, for years doing as he was
told, becoming Washington’s thug in power, free to do as he wished
regarding the internal manifestations of Iraq, financed militarily
and economically as long as he kept the oil spigots running and as
long as he kept the price of a barrel of crude within the price
range limitations of his handlers in Washington.
For decades he persecuted and oppressed both
the Kurds and Shia, with a wink and a nod from the US government,
enriching himself as he feasted on the spoils of Iraqi oil and
American military and economic generosity. It was good to be the
prostitute of the empire. When asked by Washington to destabilize
Iran through war after the American sponsored tyrant and dictator –
or shah – was deposed and the American Embassy – CIA station – held
hostage thanks to the Iranian Revolution, Saddam embarked on a
decade long battle against his eastern neighbor, using the vast
arsenal of American manufactured weapons to punish Iran for its
temerity in dethroning the empire’s despot that had for years been
oppressing Iranian citizens, exploiting the nation’s wealth and
pillaging its oil, all in the interests of the United States.
Saddam, in gleeful cheer, was to unleash hell upon those who had
dismantled one of the largest CIA operations in the Middle East, a
network center masquerading as an embassy where all orders to the
shah originated from and where many Iranian internal problems arose
out of.
As the war raged on the madness of Saddam
became apparent, and, in a calculated and predictable move he, using
chemical weapons technology supplied him by America’s government and
corporate world, sent into the air WMD aimed at Iranian forces,
killing untold thousands with weapons banned by international law,
though with the full consent of American officials. It was these
same WMD that would later be used by Saddam against the Kurds of
northern Iraq, again killing untold hundreds or thousands in the
dictator’s bid to oppress a rebellious minority.
Saddam was a wicked tyrant, yet he was our
wicked tyrant, and so not a word was uttered about his war crimes
and crimes against humanity, and especially muted to our ears and
made blind to our eyes was his use of American WMD technology
against both Iranians and Kurds. He was our evildoer, just like so
many before and after him, from all corners of the globe, from
Marcos to Suharto to Pinochet to Batista to Mobutu, all dictators
whose hands were made bloody by the support and encouragement
America’s government engendered. Saddam maintained power in large
part thanks to American generosity and financing, much the same as
dozens of US supported dictators have for decades. It was only when
he was no longer needed to further the interests of America that he
became expendable. It was when his character exceeded his allotted
power, when his ego thought itself capable of more than he could
handle that he went from ally shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld to
dictator and tyrant used to manipulate the fears of bed-wetting
Americans.
Once expendable, Saddam became, like all
once-favored despots and freedom fighters whose usefulness has
expired, a bogeyman used to captivate the minds of American
citizens. Almost overnight Saddam became the reincarnation of
Hitler, a dictator that prevented “freedom and democracy” from his
people, a madman that had attacked his neighbor Kuwait, even though
his neighbor was siphoning oil away from Iraqi fields and even
though Kuwait had once been claimed by the peoples and lands of
modern day Iraq, taken away from them by British interests at the
turn of the 20th century and made a sovereign nation
ruled by British supported monarchs. The machines of propaganda had
been turned on and miraculously, Saddam’s use of WMD was shouted for
the world to hear, images of rotting Kurdish corpses used to turn
friend into foe, his mustache spawning fear and insecurity in the
minds of America’s citizens. The merciless engine of propaganda had
been turned on.
Saddam’s mistake in invading Kuwait would doom
Iraqi citizens for the next fifteen years, unleashing the human
wickedness inherent in a war culture lacking the empathy and
understanding of both history and culture. America’s weaponized
instruments of death and army of conditioned automatons devastated
Iraq and its population during the Gulf War, bombing cities,
decimating infrastructure and destroying the ministries of
governance. The aerial campaign, which in essence was the muscle of
the war, dropped hundreds of tons of missiles upon unsuspecting
targets, their potent payload killing untold numbers of innocent
civilians.
Cluster bombs, banned by the international
community, were indiscriminately dropped from the sky above.
Tomahawk missiles rained down upon homes and shelters and
hospitals. The terrorism of the rich was unleashed on millions of
Iraqi civilians. It can be surmised that tens of thousands of Iraqi
civilians died at the hands of American terrorism, yet the real
number will never be known because America does not do body counts,
caring not an ounce for humans that are not American. From babies to
pregnant women to mothers to boys and girls to peasant fathers to
grandmothers and grandfathers, the toll of death was undoubtedly
massive, for the aerial reign of terror was incessant, at all hours
of the day and night.
It was in this war where the concept of smart
bombs was introduced and experimented in, resulting in massive error
in targeting and countless “collateral damage.” Here in America,
however, the spin masters at the Pentagon only showed us the
minority of video that resulted in direct hits, becoming part of the
propaganda that conditions and makes silent the masses. Led to
believe that our toys were performing perfectly, we were never made
aware of the utter devastation upon Iraq and its people. The misery
and hatred and death and maiming engendered by our terrorism was
conveniently whitewashed, made to disappear in a war with images
only of “smart bombs” destroying their target.
In the end, Saddam was left in power, much to
the detriment of millions, and much to the poor health of hundreds
if not thousands of Kurds and Shia rebels who had been given
assurances from America that they would be supported in their
attempt to oust a clearly weakened Saddam. They, of course, were
betrayed by George Bush, Sr., which resulted in the subsequent
slaughter of most rebels by Saddam’s forces. In his infinite wisdom,
Bush the Wiser decided against sending his forces to invade and
occupy Baghdad, knowing full well the consequences of such an
idiotic move. Instead, he maintained an aerial bombing campaign
that would last until the start of the next Gulf War.
More cruel and evil than the actual bombing or
the Gulf War was the economic genocide imposed on the Iraqi people
under the guise of sanctions. During the 1990’s, under the rubric
of WMD disarmament and failure to obey United Nations resolutions,
Iraq was stripped of its ability to purchase and import vital
medicines and nutrient rich food. For over ten years these
sanctions debilitated Iraq’s once shining health system and social
services, creating an anemic organization unable to provide adequate
healthcare to its citizens along with the necessary foodstuffs
needed for survival.
Thanks to these sanctions, sponsored, supported
and policed by America, anywhere from 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 Iraqi
civilians died, 500,000 of them children below the age of five.
Dying of malnourishment, disease, illness, hunger and lack of
medicine, where ordinarily under normal conditions few would die,
Iraqis were made to bear the spear of American imposed genocide.
Quite simply, that is what the sanctions should be called in the
books of history, for in few instances do we call the death of over
one-million innocent civilians, half of them young children, merely
sanctions. Make no mistake about it, America stands guilty of
genocide and mass murder, as well as in callously perpetuating a
suffering never before seen in the lands of Mesopotamia.
The economic sanctions imposed devastated an
entire generation of children, resulting in the death of half a
million under age five as well as stunting the growth, and the
development of the brain in millions more thanks to the
unavailability of food and medicine. Collective punishment of an
entire population was introduced to 25 million Iraqis, most of whom
had to survive on rations and through smuggled medicines, all made
to suffer for a WMD program that had been abandoned and dismantled,
as well as for a war culture that refused to feel the empathy for
human suffering and the full consequences to its actions. The human
calamity that ensued is a crime against humanity, holding hostage
millions who lay on the brink of death, absorbing immeasurable
damage to body and mind, unable to escape the mass murder taking
place around them. Economic genocide is genocide nonetheless, and
America should be ashamed for what it helped perpetuate. Yet
according to Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, “the
price [was] worth it.”
During the next decade of sanctions, hospitals
and schools fell into disrepair, sewers ran open and onto streets,
the Tigris and Euphrates filled with human waste and garbage,
electricity and food were in short supply and the entire population
took a nose dive backwards in time. Meanwhile, the aerial terrorism
that only wealthy nations can maintain never let up, resulting in
perpetual terror and fear, not to mention incredible levels of
stress and anxiety, and in the random bombing of homes and buildings
and places of governance. For over a decade the people and nation
of Iraq was not allowed to escape the human hell brought to its
borders. The powers that were had decided to make Iraq an example,
ruining the lives of its people, murdering 1.5 million people,
letting an entire nation rot in the refuse of human decrepitude and
to severely regress backwards in time a nation that had previously
been among the emerging modern and secular nations of the Middle
East.
With the start of the Iraq/Bush War in 2003,
what seemed bad was about to get much, much worse, as the entire
military apparatus of the world’s foremost war culture was brought
inside the once ancient lands of Mesopotamia. Thousands of tons of
munitions, artillery and missiles have exploded inside Iraq,
devastating, once again, homes, cities, streets, buildings,
hospitals and ministries. Though liberated from the reign of
Saddam, Iraq still finds itself lacking adequate electricity,
gasoline, medicines and other vital supplies. The reconstruction
promised by America has never and will never be delivered, as
billions of dollars budgeted for rebuilding a nation in ruins have
disappeared, pillaged by war profiteers and corrupt politicians from
both sides of the ocean.
Anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 innocent
civilians have died as a result of America’s occupation of Iraq, all
dead because of lies, deceit, greed and love of the Almighty dollar,
all dead thanks to incompetence, imbecility and ignorance, all dead
thanks to America's silence, indifference, complicity and our
addiction to comfort. The occupation has resulted in a classic
guerilla warfare resistance by Iraqis fighting for the freedom of
their nation and the expelling of occupying forces. This has
resulted in tremendous suffering, deep insecurities and fears and an
escalating cycle of violence, both against civilians and American
forces, that threatens to leave Iraq in a perpetual state of
violence and chaos. The initial stages of civil war are apparent,
and the real threat of Balkanization, where Iraq splits up into
three separate mini-states, cannot be ruled out.
The Killing Fields
Meanwhile, all around Iraq and its cities a
clandestine yet deadly killer lurks, invisible and unseen,
devastating in its capacity to destroy human DNA, a silent death
sentence that has and will befall hundreds of thousands, perhaps
millions of unsuspecting human beings, both Iraqi and American.
This killer festers in the air, water, food supply, vegetation and
ground, infiltrating the porous bodies of human beings, cementing
itself for life. It lingers on streets and rivers and buildings and
homes, carried by wind and rain and through the daily weather
patterns of Mesopotamia.
Slowly a land once fertile, an oasis between
ancient rivers, the cradle of civilization is being contaminated by
the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, poisoned, since 1991, by
radiation equivalent to between 250,000 and 400,000 Nagasaki bombs.
Thanks to the thousands of tons of ordinance, munitions, missiles
and bombs dropped during the Gulf War, and the tens of thousands of
tons of ordinance, missiles and bombs dropped by America during the
Iraq/Bush War, all saturated with depleted uranium (DU), the nation
of Iraq is being destroyed from within by an invisible demon sent
from the home of the brave and the land of the free. Many of its
citizens are dead Iraqis walking, becoming ghosts of walking dead,
unaware of the poison inside their bodies and the death that most
certainly awaits them.
Depleted uranium is a silent mass murderer, a
clandestine nuclear bomb whose mushroom cloud is never seen
exploding, yet the radiation and heavy metals excreted from the
weapons it envelopes when they strike their target, the heat
evaporating uranium particulates into the air, become airborne
contagions that latch onto our carbon and organic bodies. It
attacks our organs and our bones, our nerves and blood, mutating our
DNA genetic sequence, destroying our immune systems, penetrating our
reproductive systems and causing various terminal cancers. It is
the ultimate weapon of genocidal intentions, a perfect weapon if one
wishes to slowly make putrid the human body, embedding itself into
our DNA, guaranteeing that it passes onto the next generation of
human being, usually resulting in macabre and grisly consequences.
Today in Iraq, thanks to the Gulf War, cancers
have skyrocketed beyond the pale of comparison, leaving doctors
dumbfounded how so many clusters of Iraqis with various cancers can
exist when so few existed before. Today the natural rate of
deterioration of the body once DU enters it is over, resulting in an
exponential and ominous increase in fatalities, most by cancer,
disease and immune system chaos. Depleted uranium used fifteen
years ago is now being felt where American ordinance was dropped
from the sky above, as lands, food supply, water and air once
contaminated, inhaled and ingested release the WMD lingering in
their midst.
Child deformities, stillbirths, mutated
fetuses, miscarriages and birth defects have been springing up for
quite some time now, as the DU embedded in the sperm and eggs of
parents transfers over to the embryo. The mutations taking place,
along with the deformities now apparent yet hardly ever seen in
human society, are gross distortions of human normalcy, creating
beings the likes of which have never been seen before. The photos
of what DU can do to newborn babies and fetuses are available on the
Internet. Entire regions, towns and neighborhoods are experiencing
clusters of these mutations in their newly born babies, with doctors
unable to explain the sudden rise in defects and deformities that
did not exist previously.
What we are seeing is the beginning of decades
of death in Iraq from the aftereffects of DU, an epidemic of
radiation poisoning caused by American WMD. An entire population
has been exposed to nuclear radiation by America and its government
– which has been aware of the effects of DU for some time – and soon
the world will be witness to the death of hundreds of thousands, if
not millions of Iraqi citizens. The world has entered a black hole
into a genocide that will possibly last for centuries. We will see
the Iraqi nation’s cancer rate skyrocket to levels we though
impossible, affecting large segments of the populace, as well as the
subsequent deaths of terminally ill patients, most of them children
whose bodies have embedded inside them the deadly remnants of their
parents’ depleted uranium. We will witness, as we already can
through the grisly photos of DU mutations in babies, the horrific
rise in child birth defects and deformities and miscarriages and
stillbirths that are already causing thousands of potential Iraqi
parents to strongly consider ever giving birth for fear of producing
in their child a gross distortion of a human baby.
The devastating increase in malignancies and
cancers, now a great worry, will in the next few decades grow
exponentially, laying waste to a large segment of the Iraqi
population. In essence, they have been given a death sentence by
George W. Bush, who, when future historians see the complete damage
DU has caused, will be compared to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao
in terms of numbers of murders committed, easily surpassing the 1.5
million dead Iraqis as a result of America’s economic genocide of
the 1990’s.
Millions of Iraqis, forced through the
consequence of their lives to live inside the smoldering radiation
that is Iraq, unable to leave a land now poisoned and made toxic
through America’s weapons of death and destruction, will have to
face a future of uncertainty and trepidation, slowly becoming aware,
if they are not already, that inside them lives a WMD that can not
only kill them, but their sexual partner as well along with severely
deforming any child they might decide to bring into this world.
Inside a bubble of death they will live, forever to breathe the
particulates of a pestilence first imported in 1991, unable to
escape its damaging grip on organic human bodies.
Iraq has been transformed into a vast killing
field, a wasteland overrun by the remnants of America’s silent WMD,
a cheap and money saving weapon devastating to the human body,
capable of killing perhaps millions of innocent human beings,
capable of altering entire genetic sequences resulting in the severe
birth defects, stillbirths, miscarriages and deformities now
appearing almost daily in Iraq. The Cradle of Civilization has
transmuted into the Iraqi Killing Fields, a place where only death
and disease now prosper, where millions of walking dead stir up the
dust of the same killer elements that will invariably leave them
without life.
How many will eventually die in the next ten,
twenty, thirty, fifty years? How many Iraqis have been sentenced to
death, becoming dead men and women walking, not knowing when or if
the silent WMD will strike them ill or dead, not knowing if they
will produce a grossly deformed human child whose few days living
will be remembered for the devastation of its genetic blueprint?
Are the walking dead living cadavers waiting only for time to take
its course and destiny to fulfill its mission? Will entire
generations of Iraqi children be prevented from living thanks to
their premature death and gross deformities, never having a chance
at life thanks to embedded WMD in their parents’ bodies? Are we
seeing the last remaining lines of Iraqi’s distinctive ethnicity,
with those now living becoming the last vestiges of what was once
considered an Iraqi?
It is not necessary to construct gas chambers, incinerators,
gulags or concentration camps to exterminate millions of human
beings. We are seeing this reality today in Iraq, in multiple forms,
in degenerate warfare, in countless acts of war crimes and crimes
against humanity being perpetrated by American forces. In the end,
millions have and will die at the hands of America and George W.
Bush, some quicker than others, some in silent placidness and some
in terrible agony, some by bullets and bombs, some by water-borne
disease and malnourishment, some by radiation-filled cancers,
mutated deformities and destroyed immune systems. The seeds of the
Iraq Holocaust have been firmly planted in the now barren lands of
the Fertile Crescent.
The Killing Fields of Iraq have risen like a phoenix torched by
the radiation of depleted uranium, its invisible mist traversing
barren desert and congested cities looking for organic bodies to
invade. Its poison will last 4.5 billion years, lingering in the
environs of Mesopotamia and beyond, traveling by wind and weather
and water, exporting Iraq’s misery to other lands and peoples. In
silence and clandestine suffering disease and cancer and deformities
will permeate Iraqi society, hovering like a never ending cloud
cover inside Iraq, millions made to suffer the consequences of
American made depleted uranium and George W. Bush imported misery.
The Killing Fields will in the next few decades take the life of
tens of thousands, certainly, millions, perhaps. Yet it will not
only be Iraqis made to suffer the consequences of America’s
invisible yet devastating nuclear war upon Iraq. Already, 11,000
American soldiers, veterans of the first Gulf War, have died thanks
to Gulf War Syndrome, cancer and disease. Over 350,000 veterans,
out of 700,000 who served, have asked for serious disability, most
of these veterans being in their late twenties and early thirties,
in the prime of their lives, cleared as healthy before the war in
military conducted medical physicals. Depleted Uranium is the most
likely culprit, as many more get diagnosed with terminal diseases
and illnesses every year. Many veterans of Gulf War One and now the
Iraq/Bush War have themselves been giving birth to deformed and
defective children, much like their Iraqi counterparts.
Depleted Uranium, it seems, does not discriminate nor does it
need a passport to infect human beings. It has been imported into
America by our returning soldiers, a great percentage of which most
likely have remnants of depleted uranium buried deep inside them.
How many American veterans of Gulf War One and the Iraq/Bush War
will in the next few decades succumb to cancer or destroyed immune
systems? How many of their children will be born like those in
Iraq, unable to live more than a few days or months because their
bodies are infested with DU, their appearance no longer presenting
the appearance of a human child?
It is estimated that 40,000 to 80,000 more veterans will die in
the next twenty to thirty years as the effects of DU run their
course. How many more will produce offspring with genetic birth
defects, gross mutations of fetuses, miscarriages and stillborns?
So much for Bush’s hypocritical culture of life. How many of our
soldiers and veterans are dead men and women walking, waiting out a
cruel game of DU lottery, hoping their bodies were spared the poison
now rampant in Iraq? How many will have their lives altered, never
to regain normalcy, never able to bear children, always to wonder if
they will be next to fall.
The Killing Fields of Iraq do not discriminate and they do not
stop at the border. They do not bother with uniform colors or the
crossing of oceans. They are the deadly consequence of criminality
and indifference, of greed and emphasis on the bottom line. Sadly,
the nuclear silence now deafening in Iraq will alter the course of
Iraqi history, not to mention the lives of thousands of Americans
veterans who, after a year or perhaps five of living normal lives,
will begin feeling the damage DU is doing to their body.
Depleted Uranium is but the next stage in America’s indifference
to the Arab world, an indifference that has lasted decades, with the
US concerned only for the Middle East’s vast yet dwindling oil
wealth, not its human capital nor its interest in freedom, democracy
or human rights. In a twisted form of karma, DU has returned the
favor to thousands of American soldiers, returning its deadly poison
back to the same nation that created it, penetrating the porous skin
and bodies of soldiers once occupying Iraq, now a land devastated
with the invisible radiation of American DU ordinance. It has
attached itself to our soldiers, in time to haunt their health and
their families, possibly becoming manifest in the deformities of
American babies.
Only the future knows who and how many Iraqis and Americans will
be forced to confront premature death. Many will never know what
happened to them. Many will come to the realization that the great
military industrial complex, putting profit over people, as it
usually does, and America’s upper echelons of governance, straight
from the Pentagon and Oval Office, knowing full well the dangers of
DU, nonetheless decided to commandeer the future lives of millions,
deciding the lives of Iraqi civilians and American soldiers were not
worth the millions of dollars saved by using cheaper DU.
The great sadness is that the Iraq Killing Fields, with its
ghosts of walking dead, will remain unknown to the vast percentage
of humanity, for this scandal will never be allowed to see the light
of day, neither by America’s government or the corporate world that
owns both it and the media. Greater in scope than Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the potential number of deaths greater than some evildoers
of times past, Iraq’s Killing Fields will continue killing and
deforming, mutating DNA and inflicting untold levels of misery,
simply because of its clandestine approach to death, its silent and
whispered calls to disease. Its secrecy and cover-up will only be
surpassed by its criminality and by the complete callousness of
government officials to the plight they helped birth.
There will be no blood and no violence, no bombs or bullets,
though abundant suffering. The calamity will not bleed, so it will
not lead. It will be boring to the average American, becoming an
unspoken genocide free of the violence we are so addicted to and
enamored with. The front lines of this battle will be inside
hospitals and in the homes of the afflicted, left to confront a
destiny not of their own choosing, unable to understand how an
invisible weapon of mass destruction could be allowed to be used on
civilians and on cities, on humans and on soldiers on both sides.
Many will die in disbelief, their lives wasted, slowly rotting from
the inside out, seeing their babies deformed, born stillborn or
mutated, their last remaining years spent living as ghosts of
walking dead, becoming prisoners only of time and of anger.
Iraq’s Killing Fields are as real as the sun, as dangerous as a
nuclear weapon, as devastating as any plague. The devastation
taking place inside it is anathema to humanity, a war crime and
crime against humanity, a malfeasant manifestation by Machiavellian
miscreants. If the world entire were made aware of its seriousness,
of its criminality and of the callousness of American leaders the
backlash would be a giant tsunami of anger. Alas, the quietness of
the crime will be elevated, and silence will be the only noise
emanating from the plains of the Killing Fields.
Meanwhile, the Killing Fields of Iraq continue to radiate their
toxic and deadly poisons, contaminating more Iraqis and Americans
with each passing day, like a parasite forever attaching radiation
and heavy metals inside human hosts. Only in 4.5 billion years will
DU disappear, by then humanity will have ceased to exist. Iraqis’
Ghosts of Walking Dead await humanity’s attention, wanting nothing
more than to receive assistance in combating a silent yet
devastating killer that is forever altering the Iraqi landscape.
Mired by decades of war with Iran and later the United States,
1.5 million of its citizens, including 500,000 children dead due to
economic genocide, 100,000 to 200,000 dead due to American invasion
and occupation, and now afflicted by an enemy they can neither see
nor touch, the Ghosts of Walking Dead await our response to their
hushed and clandestine call for help. In their whispered plea can
we see a perpetual future of cancer, death, disease, mutation,
deformity and entire generations now endangered and at serious risk
of devastation. In their whispered plea can we also see what might
happen to tens of thousands of our own men and women, themselves
hosts carrying the demons of the Iraqi Killing Fields back home.
The Killing Fields can be felt, their warm winds echoing the
cries for help, their plains saturated with the clouds of poison,
and of outrage, seeking our full attention in understanding a silent
and clandestine genocide taking place where fertility once permeated
and where the cradle of civilization once nurtured us before sending
us all on our way to all corners of the planet and to most uncertain
destinies.
Is the price of what America has done in our name worth our
silence and indifference?
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