Preemptive War Criminals
by Jeff Gates
Half the Iraqi population is under 15 years of age, including half of the five million Iraqis living in Baghdad. As part of the U.S. military’s “Rapid Dominance” posture, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proposes a “Shock and Awe” strategy designed to devastate Iraq’s capital city. Day One of the war calls for launching 500-800 Cruise missiles on Baghdad packing an explosive punch equivalent to a nuclear device. As a war planner boasted to CBS News, “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.” On Day Two, the Pentagon proposes to do it again, launching another 500-800 high-explosive missiles.
Not since the blanket bombing of European cities during World War II has such premeditated devastation been planned for a civilian urban population. A team of international investigators recently completed the first pre-conflict field research, concluding that casualties among Iraqi children will likely be in the thousands, probably in the tens of thousands, “and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.”
Even without another Gulf War, the impact on Iraqi children has been horrific. In the late 1980s, the mortality rate for Iraqi children under five was 50 per thousand. By 1999, it had reached 130 per thousand. In 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked her view of sanctions in light of the fact that an estimated 600,000 Iraqi children had died due to sanctions-related effects, largely dysentery after the U.S. bombed sewage and water purification facilities and then used the embargo to block the import of replacement parts and medicines. Albright’s assessment: “We believe it is worth the price.”
Two UN chiefs of Iraqi sanctions have since resigned in protest over their impact: Peter van Walsun, chief of the UN Sanctions Committee, and Hans von Sponeck, chief UN coordinator. Noting that “chronic malnourishment cannot be repaired,” American Denis Halliday, former UN representative in Baghdad, charges “we are running a genocide program in Iraq,” thus far killing almost three times more Iraqis than the number of Japanese killed in U.S. atomic blasts in WWII.
Reversal of Fortune
Before the Gulf War, Iraq was a rapidly developing country, with a living standard approaching that of southern Europe, featuring free education, ample electricity, modern farming, a large middle class and, according to the World Health Organization, access to health care for 93 percent of the population. A once proud and prosperous nation fell apart as 525,000 Iraqis were killed in wars since 1980, including 375,000 in an 8-year Iraq-Iran conflict in which the U.S. sold arms to both sides.
As a portion of their population, Iraqi casualties in that conflict were equivalent to 5.6 million deaths in the U.S. population, more than 100 times the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War. With their economy in tatters, many Iraqis left the country. With the collapse of oil revenues, education collapsed, helped along by the U.S. who insisted that printing equipment for schools be banned as a “dual use” item disallowed under its interpretation of the sanctions. That same rationale was used by the U.S. to block the import of textbooks, medical journals, dialysis machines, dental supplies, yogurt production equipment, disinfectants, pesticides, insecticides and, until recently, cancer medications because they contain minute traces of radiation.
Compared to other economies in the region, Iraq experienced dramatic improvements, especially after Hussein nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Despite his nefarious treatment of political enemies and ethnic minorities, that diversion of oil-based income from off-shore investors to Iraq enabled the typical Iraqi’s well-being to surge ahead of their neighbors, including Iraq’s embrace of a culture of modernity that remains missing in its neighbors.
Since the Gulf War, Iraqi culture has collapsed. Violent crime soared as cultural, social and ethical values were steadily degraded in a nation where the first human civilization emerged 6,000 years ago. In this ancient cradle of humanity featuring hundreds of thousands of historic sites, child beggars now work alongside prostitutes as Iraqi society fell apart. Corruption has become endemic. Iraqi living standards are now equivalent to Sudan as their nation was reduced to something akin to a vast refugee camp.
In March 2002, after numerous objections from the U.S., a UNICEF official was allowed to report on the inhumane conditions in Iraq since the imposition of sanctions. Fully 25 percent of children in south and central Iraq suffer from chronic malnutrition, which is typically irreversible, and nine percent from acute malnutrition. One in four Iraqi babies is born prematurely and underweight. Few survive. With only six week’s supply of food in the country, UN agencies estimate that an invasion risks the deaths of nearly 1 million children.
The UN Genocide pact, which the U.S. refuses to join, forbids the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction. In January 1991, before the Gulf War, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency projected that sanctions would destroy Iraq’s ability to provide safe drinking water within six months. As U.S. war planners rightly predicted, “epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.” They could have added to that list water-borne diseases, leprosy, cancers, heart defects and child starvation. Seasoned weapons experts now charge that sanctions are a modern-day implement of war, an inexpensive weapon of mass destruction.
In the Gulf War, an estimated 150,000 Iraqis were killed as the U.S. exploded ordnance equivalent to seven Hiroshimas, unleashing more explosive force in six weeks than during the entirety of the Second World War. U.S. casualties totaled 148 (1000:1 ratio), mostly from accidents and friendly fire. But that didn’t end the deadly effects of the war. Of the 696,778 U.S. troops who served in the Gulf War, more than 220,000 have applied for medical benefits. As of May 2002, 159,238 had been awarded service-connected disability due to a war-related ailment vaguely described as Gulf War Syndrome.
Foreseeable Criminality
The counterpoint to preemptive war is preemptive war crimes and the need -- quickly and preemptively – to indict foreseeable war criminals. Under the Geneva accords, weapons can only be used in the field of battle, defined as military targets of the enemy during war, and can only be used for the duration of the conflict. International law also forbids the use of weaponry that is either unduly inhumane or has an unduly negative effect on the natural environment. Yet American and British troops are poised to deploy in the Gulf once again armed with depleted uranium munitions which, on explosion, create a firestorm of fine radioactive ceramic particles that are easily inhaled and readily absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain.
By the Pentagon’s own studies prior to the Gulf War, exposure to this aerosol uranium under battlefield conditions can lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, neurocognitive disorders, chromosonal damage and birth defects. In 1990, the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority estimated that if 50 tons of depleted uranium (“DU”) munitions were left in the Gulf, those would lead to 50,000 extra cancer deaths in the following decade. Experts estimate that 300 to 900 tons of DU debris were left behind, its residue travelling wherever the wind blows. Children are 10 to 20 times more sensitive to the effects of radiation than adults.
In Basra, the southernmost point of entry for any U.S.-led invasion, pediatricians report an increase of six to 12 times in the incidence of childhood leukemia and cancer as radiation levels in flora and fauna reached 84 times the safe limit recommended by the World Health Organization. In practical effect, the first Gulf War was a nuclear war. Dr. Huda Ammash, a U.S.-educated environmental biologist at Baghdad University, calculates that the 10-year impact of this radiation is equivalent to 100 Chernobyls.
Iraqi doctors reported 11 birth defects per 100,000 in 1989. By 2001, the rate was 116 per 100,000, including a doubling of congenital malformations in newborns among exposed populations and an increase in late-term spontaneous abortions due to congenital effects (reportedly now two or three cases each day). A photographic record from Basra General Hospital chronicles babies born with no eyes, brains, limbs or genitalia, with internal organs on the outside, and with grotesquely deformed heads and bodies.
Due to the risk, Iraqis of child-bearing age now often choose not to marry as everyone knows couples coping with grievously ill or deformed babies. Iraqi men in their mid-30s are now dying at record rates. “They are not ill,” reports Felicity Arbuthnot, “they just give up – especially young men between the ages of about 30 to 35. Their youth has been sacrificed to the embargo and they see middle age approaching with no hope, no dreams, no aspirations or ability to provide for those they love.” If cancers continue to grow at the present rate, an estimated 44 percent of the population of southern Iraq will develop cancer by the time today’s 15 year-olds are 25.
Iraqis are not the only people in harm’s way. Depleted uranium remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years. One-third of U.S. tanks used in Desert Storm were armed with DU munitions, ensuring whole-body radioactive exposure by U.S. troops. Likewise for those handling aircraft ordnance, including airmen, pilots and mechanics. Of the 29,000 British troops who served in that conflict, more than 8,000 are ill and over 400 have died. In 1999, a coroner in the north of England reported that he handled one suicide a week among Gulf War vets. Similar health effects are being recorded among troops from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and among others exposed to DU munitions, including residents of Kosovo and Bosnia.
Historically, war crimes have been committed against an enemy. In this case, the crimes include both the premeditated slaughter of innocents and the premeditated impairment of our own troops as, without informed consent, many military personnel were exposed to a toxic soup of unproven vaccines (for anthrax, nerve gas, etc.) and then ordered to deploy using munitions laced with a known trans-generational toxin, deadly both to those exposed and to their unborn offspring.
To preempt the rush to preemptive war, sovereign nations must mount a preemptive strike against those who dare wage this war. That’s best done by ensuring that U.S. war planners and civil leaders are preemptively indicted as war criminals. That indictment should include not only Gulf War and sanctions-related activities but also those foreseeable war crimes they have shown their intention to commit.
Former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance and author of Democracy at Risk, Jeff Gates is president of the Shared Capitalism Institute
by Jeff Gates
Half the Iraqi population is under 15 years of age, including half of the five million Iraqis living in Baghdad. As part of the U.S. military’s “Rapid Dominance” posture, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proposes a “Shock and Awe” strategy designed to devastate Iraq’s capital city. Day One of the war calls for launching 500-800 Cruise missiles on Baghdad packing an explosive punch equivalent to a nuclear device. As a war planner boasted to CBS News, “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.” On Day Two, the Pentagon proposes to do it again, launching another 500-800 high-explosive missiles.
Not since the blanket bombing of European cities during World War II has such premeditated devastation been planned for a civilian urban population. A team of international investigators recently completed the first pre-conflict field research, concluding that casualties among Iraqi children will likely be in the thousands, probably in the tens of thousands, “and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.”
Even without another Gulf War, the impact on Iraqi children has been horrific. In the late 1980s, the mortality rate for Iraqi children under five was 50 per thousand. By 1999, it had reached 130 per thousand. In 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked her view of sanctions in light of the fact that an estimated 600,000 Iraqi children had died due to sanctions-related effects, largely dysentery after the U.S. bombed sewage and water purification facilities and then used the embargo to block the import of replacement parts and medicines. Albright’s assessment: “We believe it is worth the price.”
Two UN chiefs of Iraqi sanctions have since resigned in protest over their impact: Peter van Walsun, chief of the UN Sanctions Committee, and Hans von Sponeck, chief UN coordinator. Noting that “chronic malnourishment cannot be repaired,” American Denis Halliday, former UN representative in Baghdad, charges “we are running a genocide program in Iraq,” thus far killing almost three times more Iraqis than the number of Japanese killed in U.S. atomic blasts in WWII.
Reversal of Fortune
Before the Gulf War, Iraq was a rapidly developing country, with a living standard approaching that of southern Europe, featuring free education, ample electricity, modern farming, a large middle class and, according to the World Health Organization, access to health care for 93 percent of the population. A once proud and prosperous nation fell apart as 525,000 Iraqis were killed in wars since 1980, including 375,000 in an 8-year Iraq-Iran conflict in which the U.S. sold arms to both sides.
As a portion of their population, Iraqi casualties in that conflict were equivalent to 5.6 million deaths in the U.S. population, more than 100 times the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War. With their economy in tatters, many Iraqis left the country. With the collapse of oil revenues, education collapsed, helped along by the U.S. who insisted that printing equipment for schools be banned as a “dual use” item disallowed under its interpretation of the sanctions. That same rationale was used by the U.S. to block the import of textbooks, medical journals, dialysis machines, dental supplies, yogurt production equipment, disinfectants, pesticides, insecticides and, until recently, cancer medications because they contain minute traces of radiation.
Compared to other economies in the region, Iraq experienced dramatic improvements, especially after Hussein nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Despite his nefarious treatment of political enemies and ethnic minorities, that diversion of oil-based income from off-shore investors to Iraq enabled the typical Iraqi’s well-being to surge ahead of their neighbors, including Iraq’s embrace of a culture of modernity that remains missing in its neighbors.
Since the Gulf War, Iraqi culture has collapsed. Violent crime soared as cultural, social and ethical values were steadily degraded in a nation where the first human civilization emerged 6,000 years ago. In this ancient cradle of humanity featuring hundreds of thousands of historic sites, child beggars now work alongside prostitutes as Iraqi society fell apart. Corruption has become endemic. Iraqi living standards are now equivalent to Sudan as their nation was reduced to something akin to a vast refugee camp.
In March 2002, after numerous objections from the U.S., a UNICEF official was allowed to report on the inhumane conditions in Iraq since the imposition of sanctions. Fully 25 percent of children in south and central Iraq suffer from chronic malnutrition, which is typically irreversible, and nine percent from acute malnutrition. One in four Iraqi babies is born prematurely and underweight. Few survive. With only six week’s supply of food in the country, UN agencies estimate that an invasion risks the deaths of nearly 1 million children.
The UN Genocide pact, which the U.S. refuses to join, forbids the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction. In January 1991, before the Gulf War, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency projected that sanctions would destroy Iraq’s ability to provide safe drinking water within six months. As U.S. war planners rightly predicted, “epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.” They could have added to that list water-borne diseases, leprosy, cancers, heart defects and child starvation. Seasoned weapons experts now charge that sanctions are a modern-day implement of war, an inexpensive weapon of mass destruction.
In the Gulf War, an estimated 150,000 Iraqis were killed as the U.S. exploded ordnance equivalent to seven Hiroshimas, unleashing more explosive force in six weeks than during the entirety of the Second World War. U.S. casualties totaled 148 (1000:1 ratio), mostly from accidents and friendly fire. But that didn’t end the deadly effects of the war. Of the 696,778 U.S. troops who served in the Gulf War, more than 220,000 have applied for medical benefits. As of May 2002, 159,238 had been awarded service-connected disability due to a war-related ailment vaguely described as Gulf War Syndrome.
Foreseeable Criminality
The counterpoint to preemptive war is preemptive war crimes and the need -- quickly and preemptively – to indict foreseeable war criminals. Under the Geneva accords, weapons can only be used in the field of battle, defined as military targets of the enemy during war, and can only be used for the duration of the conflict. International law also forbids the use of weaponry that is either unduly inhumane or has an unduly negative effect on the natural environment. Yet American and British troops are poised to deploy in the Gulf once again armed with depleted uranium munitions which, on explosion, create a firestorm of fine radioactive ceramic particles that are easily inhaled and readily absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain.
By the Pentagon’s own studies prior to the Gulf War, exposure to this aerosol uranium under battlefield conditions can lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, neurocognitive disorders, chromosonal damage and birth defects. In 1990, the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority estimated that if 50 tons of depleted uranium (“DU”) munitions were left in the Gulf, those would lead to 50,000 extra cancer deaths in the following decade. Experts estimate that 300 to 900 tons of DU debris were left behind, its residue travelling wherever the wind blows. Children are 10 to 20 times more sensitive to the effects of radiation than adults.
In Basra, the southernmost point of entry for any U.S.-led invasion, pediatricians report an increase of six to 12 times in the incidence of childhood leukemia and cancer as radiation levels in flora and fauna reached 84 times the safe limit recommended by the World Health Organization. In practical effect, the first Gulf War was a nuclear war. Dr. Huda Ammash, a U.S.-educated environmental biologist at Baghdad University, calculates that the 10-year impact of this radiation is equivalent to 100 Chernobyls.
Iraqi doctors reported 11 birth defects per 100,000 in 1989. By 2001, the rate was 116 per 100,000, including a doubling of congenital malformations in newborns among exposed populations and an increase in late-term spontaneous abortions due to congenital effects (reportedly now two or three cases each day). A photographic record from Basra General Hospital chronicles babies born with no eyes, brains, limbs or genitalia, with internal organs on the outside, and with grotesquely deformed heads and bodies.
Due to the risk, Iraqis of child-bearing age now often choose not to marry as everyone knows couples coping with grievously ill or deformed babies. Iraqi men in their mid-30s are now dying at record rates. “They are not ill,” reports Felicity Arbuthnot, “they just give up – especially young men between the ages of about 30 to 35. Their youth has been sacrificed to the embargo and they see middle age approaching with no hope, no dreams, no aspirations or ability to provide for those they love.” If cancers continue to grow at the present rate, an estimated 44 percent of the population of southern Iraq will develop cancer by the time today’s 15 year-olds are 25.
Iraqis are not the only people in harm’s way. Depleted uranium remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years. One-third of U.S. tanks used in Desert Storm were armed with DU munitions, ensuring whole-body radioactive exposure by U.S. troops. Likewise for those handling aircraft ordnance, including airmen, pilots and mechanics. Of the 29,000 British troops who served in that conflict, more than 8,000 are ill and over 400 have died. In 1999, a coroner in the north of England reported that he handled one suicide a week among Gulf War vets. Similar health effects are being recorded among troops from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and among others exposed to DU munitions, including residents of Kosovo and Bosnia.
Historically, war crimes have been committed against an enemy. In this case, the crimes include both the premeditated slaughter of innocents and the premeditated impairment of our own troops as, without informed consent, many military personnel were exposed to a toxic soup of unproven vaccines (for anthrax, nerve gas, etc.) and then ordered to deploy using munitions laced with a known trans-generational toxin, deadly both to those exposed and to their unborn offspring.
To preempt the rush to preemptive war, sovereign nations must mount a preemptive strike against those who dare wage this war. That’s best done by ensuring that U.S. war planners and civil leaders are preemptively indicted as war criminals. That indictment should include not only Gulf War and sanctions-related activities but also those foreseeable war crimes they have shown their intention to commit.
Former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance and author of Democracy at Risk, Jeff Gates is president of the Shared Capitalism Institute
