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deranger


Registered: 01/21/08
Posts: 6,840
Loc: off the wall
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Sanctions and War on Iraq: In 300 words
#7911384 - 01/21/08 07:08 PM (16 years, 11 days ago) |
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Before we rush to war with Iraq again, Americans must know what happened in the last war. In 1991, we bombed Iraq's civilian infrastructure to "accelerate the effect of sanctions" knowing it would shut down their water and sewage systems.[1] The UN reported there would soon be "epidemic and famine" and "time was short" to prevent it. We said that "by making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people we would encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein."[2] And we waited for this to happen.
We used epidemic and famine as tools of our foreign policy. We did it to cause suffering -- and death -- to get regime change at low cost. We tried to force the Iraqis to do it. But it was not low cost.
We learned from the New England Journal of Medicine in 1992 what happened: "These results provide strong evidence that the Gulf war and trade sanctions caused a threefold increase in mortality among Iraqi children under five years of age. We estimate that an excess of more that 46,900 children died between January and August 1991."[3]
That report was virtually ignored in this country, so that by 1999 UNICEF had to report on 500,000 excess Iraqi children's deaths.[4]
A World-Trade-Center's worth of Iraqi children continue to die every month. Diarrhea is "the prime killer."[5] Meanwhile we live in a fantasy world of surgical bombing, with few civilian casualties, and the untrue belief that the oil-for-food program could possibly meet Iraq's needs.[6]
But these basic facts are unknown to most Americans. A second Gulf War, done the same way as the first, may just overflow the reservoir of anger and hatred we've created by our policies. No one knows what will happen then. Until we recognize what we've done, we cannot judge what might happen.
Taken from -
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/300words.html
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Minstrel
Man of Science


Registered: 03/15/05
Posts: 1,974
Loc: Hogtown
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Re: Sanctions and War on Iraq: In 300 words [Re: deranger]
#7911803 - 01/21/08 08:13 PM (16 years, 11 days ago) |
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All the moar reason to stay and keep up military action! America broke it, now they have to fix it.
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Madtowntripper
Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers



Registered: 03/06/03
Posts: 21,287
Loc: The Ocean of Notions
Last seen: 5 months, 23 days
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Re: Sanctions and War on Iraq: In 300 words [Re: Minstrel]
#7912706 - 01/21/08 10:37 PM (16 years, 11 days ago) |
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So why does that article put ABSOLUTELY ZERO responsibility on Saddam Hussein?
I'm not saying the sanctions weren't wrong, I was against them, and against the war.
But its revisionist history to say that the United States did this to those people by themselves.
-------------------- After one comes, through contact with it's administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action. If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it. - Ernest Hemingway If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent. -Cormac MacCarthy He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. - Aeschylus
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zappaisgod
horrid asshole


Registered: 02/11/04
Posts: 81,741
Loc: Fractallife's gym
Last seen: 7 years, 7 months
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Re: Sanctions and War on Iraq: In 300 words [Re: Madtowntripper]
#7915400 - 01/22/08 04:12 PM (16 years, 10 days ago) |
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You were against the FIRST Gulf War? What were you at the time? Six? The whole fucking world supported that one.
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Edited by zappaisgod (01/22/08 04:13 PM)
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Luddite
I watch Fox News


Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
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Re: Sanctions and War on Iraq: In 300 words [Re: deranger]
#7915450 - 01/22/08 04:22 PM (16 years, 10 days ago) |
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How Saddam 'staged' fake baby funerals
The Iraqi dictator says his country's children are dying in their thousands because of the West's embargoes. John Sweeney, in a TV documentary to be shown tonight, says the figures are bogus. Here he reports from Iraq on his findings Terrorism crisis - Observer special Observer Worldview
Sunday June 23, 2002 The Observer
The witness against the government of Iraq walked stiffly into the room, metal callipers buckled to heavy medical shoes. They had tortured her two years ago. She is now four. Her father had been suspected of involvement in a plot to kill Saddam Hussein's psychopathic son, Uday. He fled to the north of Iraq, but the secret police, the mukhabarat, came for his wife, still in Baghdad, and tortured her. When she wouldn't break, they tortured 'Anna' in front of her.
Her father, 'Ali', is a thick-set Iraqi who worked in Saddam's privileged inner circle. He described what they did to her: 'They had a wooden stick. They would squeeze her feet and ask "Has Daddy called you?" - she understood - "Does Daddy contact you?"'
She is a victim of Saddam's brutality, proof that he is prepared to dispense violence against even his country's children. By a cruel irony, her father is also witness to Saddam's efforts to portray those same children as victims of Western sanctions, which he claims have cost hundreds of thousands of young lives.
Osama bin Laden justified the 11 September attack on America by referring to a million dead Iraqi children - killed by sanctions. But there is a belief among many Iraqis that Saddam is inventing the numbers.
Ali, outraged that Saddam's torturers may have crippled his daughter for life, spoke openly about how the regime's propaganda has faked mass baby funerals - 'evidence' of the 7,000 children under five the regime claims are being killed each month by sanctions.
Small coffins, decorated with grisly photographs of dead babies and their ages - 'three days', 'four days', written usefully for the English-speaking media - are paraded through the streets of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, the procession led by a throng of official mourners.
There is only one problem. Because there are not enough dead babies around, the regime prevents parents from burying infants immediately, in the Muslim tradition, to create more powerful propaganda.
The taxi drivers do what they are told - as everybody does in Saddam's Iraq - to their evident disgust. Before Ali defected to the north, one friend of his, a taxi driver, explained how it worked: 'I went to Najaf [a town 100 miles south of Baghdad] a couple of days ago. I brought back two bodies of children for one of the mass funerals. The smell was very strong.'
Ali continued: 'The taxi driver didn't know how long they'd been in freezers, perhaps six or seven months. The drivers would collect them from the regions and would be informed of when a mass funeral was arranged so they would be ready. Certainly, they would collect bodies of children who had died months before and been held for the mass processions.'
A second, Western source, went to visit visited a Baghdad hospital and, when the official Iraqi minder was absent, was taken to the mortuary. There, a doctor showed the source a number of dead babies, lying stacked in the mortuary, waiting for the next official procession.
Anna was the youngest witness to child torture by the Iraqi government in an investigation, The Mother of All Ironies, to be broadcast by BBC2's Correspondent today. It found six other adult witnesses in the Kurdish safe haven in the north - the only part of Iraq where people are free to speak.
The most chilling witness was one of Saddam's torturers, who was captured spying against the Kurds this year. 'Kamal' told us: 'They would bring the son in front of his parents, who were handcuffed or tied, and would start off with simple methods of torture, such as cigarette burns. Then they started using other methods of torture, more serious ones.
'They would tell the father that they'd slaughter his son, and they'd bring a bayonet out, and if the parents didn't confess they'd kill the child. 'The interrogator has the right to kill the child, or perform any other butchery, whatever's necessary.' And then Kamal chuckled.
It is an absolute of the government of Iraq - and others - that thousands of Iraqi children are dying every month because of sanctions. We managed to get a cameraman to accompany a fact-finding trip into Iraq this year by the Great Britain-Iraq Society, led by its chairman, Labour MP George Galloway.
At the start of the trip Galloway, in Iraq for the ninth time in two-and-a-half years, said: 'Every six minutes an Iraqi child will have died under the embargo. That's every six minutes of every day, of every night, every year for 12 years.'
In 1999 Unicef, in co-operation with the Iraqi government, made a retrospective projection of 500,000 excess child deaths in the 1990s. The projection is open to question. It was based on data from within a regime that tortures children with impunity. All but one of the researchers used by Unicef were employees of the Ministry of Health, according to the Lancet.
The dead babies are blamed by Saddam's regime on cancers and birth defects which first appeared in 1991 and were, it says, caused by depleted uranium weapons. While no one should underestimate the lethality of these weapons and the stupidity of the US military machine, the claim does not make radiological sense. According to Dr Nick Plowman, head of clinical oncology at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, the claim 'is ridiculous. It flies in the face of everything learnt from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.'
Cancers do not develop overnight. Bombs that fell in 1991 could not have caused cancers or birth defects in that year. Fast leukaemias might occur in four or five years, heavy tumours around now, said Plowman.
Richard Guthrie, a chemical weapons researcher at Sussex University, said: 'It's much more likely to be chemical weapons. There are serious clusters of cancers in the south of Iraq near Basra. In the late Eighties, Basra was almost taken by Iranian human-wave offensives, and Saddam stopped these by dropping chemical weapons on them and, by accident, on his own people.
? John Sweeney's report will be shown in Correspondent on BBC2 at 7.15pm today
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,742303,00.html
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afoaf
CEO DBK?



Registered: 11/08/02
Posts: 32,665
Loc: Ripple's Heart
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Re: Sanctions and War on Iraq: In 300 words [Re: deranger]
#7915478 - 01/22/08 04:26 PM (16 years, 10 days ago) |
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BOLD MEANS BUSINESS
-------------------- All I know is The Growery is a place where losers who get banned here go.
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