IRAQ – MORALITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES









Where
they create desolation, they call it peace


"They
know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the
way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right
now. It's a good thing, especially when there is a lot of oil out
there we need." --Air force Brigadier General William Looney,
head of the US Central Command's Airborne Expeditionary Force.
"More
than 4,500 children under the age of 5 are dying each month from
hunger and disease." -UNICEF, October 1996.

"I
want every Iraqi soldier bleeding from every orifice." --
General Norman Schwarzkopf .
Leslie
Stahl: "We have heard that a half million children have died
(as a result of sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more
children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth
it?"

Madeleine
Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the
price, we think the price is worth it." -- A CBS Sixty
Minutes interview between Leslie Stahl and U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, on 12 May 1996


In July 1989 (before the sanctions), 387 children under the age of
five died in Iraq.

In July 1998 (after the sanctions), 6,495 children under the age of
five died, a 16-fold increase from before the sanctions.

"Surely
the extermination of Jews in gas chambers is not comparable to the
slow death inflicted in Iraqi children by deprivation. But from
another angle the latter is even more despicable. The genocide
against Jews was perpetrated in the greatest secret and without the
blessing of the "civilized world". The crimes against Iraqi
civilians are committed in full day-light, with the blessing of the
ruling "civilized nations" and with the tacit support of
the educated classes in these nations. Those who keep silent and are
legally able to speak up, are morally accomplices to this crime."
-- Elias Davidsson, Musician and a Palestinian Jew, 16/4/1999



So
again the world stands on the brink of another slaughter of the
weak and the downtrodden. Two puppets of the oil oligarchy, placed
in a position of power to represent their people have turned Judas
to the trust of their own citizens. They now lie and blaspheme in
the world forums arguing and justifying the use of naked aggression
against a people who have already been pile-driven to their
supplicant knees. Bush and Blair now covet their death. They long to
hear the screams of jets and whistle of bombs, they want to harvest
tears and slaughter. A dozen or more years have passed since they
have last had a “turkey shoot†like the one on the “Highway of
Deathâ€. Its been awhile since the world has seen the charred
death-mask of a human being. It has been a so very long a time since
the calibration of “smart†bomb and cruise missile delivery
systems on living targets.

Finally
when the fingers get tired from pushing buttons and triggers; when
the eyes get tired of the lines on the aiming reticle of a F-16
heads-up display; when the snow-plough and bulldozer drivers have
covered the dying, the frozen with fear Iraqi conscripts and the
mercifully dead in the sandy trenches of the defence lines, when the
acrid smell of napalmed human beings melt into the cooling air of a
desert dusk, the raison d'etre of the genocide will insidiously seep
into the value of shares on Dow Jones and FTSE. “Food for Oilâ€,
the ignomious paradigm of the present will finally be replaced by
what it truly should be called “Blood for Oilâ€. It has a similar
ring and the same difference.
The
end of the Cold War was marked by celebration of fireworks to mark
the birth of Daddy Bush's "New World Order" and the venue
was Iraq, everybody was invited and most came brandishing their new
toys.

It
took all of 6 weeks and 88,500 tons of bombs and 30,000 tons of
artillery shells on military and civilian targets. 2,095 HARM
missiles; 217 Walleye missiles; 5,276 guided anti-tank missiles;
44,922 cluster bombs and rockets; 136,755 conventional bombs; 4,077
guided bombs. While watching and amazing at the accuracy of the
"smart" bombs, we failed to realise that only 9% of the
bombs dropped were of the "smart" variety. Worse still,
only 30% of those lived up to their nomenclature.
The
mainstream media pool were fed their lines and the rose-tinted
stories were regurgitated, appropriately censored, for our benefit
during prime time TV. The whole gamut of emotion was covered as we
watched pictures of F-16s with glowing afterburners taking off,
almost forlornly against the backdrop of a golden sunset; the
black-and-white footage of a precision guided bomb obliterating a
target and the anxious moments on the carrier as the crew awaited
the return of the aircrafts. Our brave boys were back, they were safe
and we felt a quiet pride as our leaders expounded the fact that our
planet was inordinately safer still.
No
one reported the screaming and wailing down below!
The
immediate cost? Not the nauseous years of infamy of sanctions... just
the 43 days.

35,000
civilians killed better known to our free and objective mainstream
media by the conscience salving obscenity “colateral damageâ€.
150,000
to 220,000 Iraqi soldiers dead, buried unknown in mass graves.
More
than 9,000 homes destroyed.
31
bridges
Innumerable
water treatment, sewage, electricity grids, telephone exchanges etc.
(Iraqis have always possessed an inordinately large number of
command-and-control centres)
One
building which the Pentagon, even now, maintains was a “legitimate
military target†is Al-Amiriya bomb shelter. Presumably the US
thought that all Baghdad required was a museum of murals, painted and
pasted by the residue of 408 splattered women and children.
No!
No one reported the screaming and wailing then.
And
now Baby Bush and his Brother-in-Arms Blair want to do it all over
again.
Ubi
solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.... Where they
create desolation, they call it peace!


-- Avijit Dutta