IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN:
DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

by Larry Everest
 

 

"I went to the shelter the next day after the bombing. There was flesh all over the place, and you could hear children screaming in the rubble, but you couldn't get to them. I remember one woman with tears coming down her face, but making no sound, looking for her children. She found seven of them, but hadn't found her two-year-old. There were only charred bodies that she couldn't recognize. She was saying 'maybe it's him, maybe it isn't.' I'll never forget it. When I'm thinking or relaxing it plays over and over in my mind." 

         Dr. Ameed Hamid,
Director, Iraqi Red Crescent Society
describing the February 1991 incineration of 500 Iraqis
in the Amiriya bomb shelter in northwest Baghdad.

 

"Afghan refugees say they feel targeted by U.S. - ‘We see only our mothers and children dying. Why do you kill us?'
USA Today, Friday, October 12, 2001

 

In some ways it feels like deja vu all over again.

 

In 1991, as the U.S. prepared to assault Iraq, George Bush Sr. declared, "We have no argument with the people of Iraq, indeed, we have only friendship for the people there." Now, as the U.S. pounds Afghanistan, George II says, "The United States respects the people of Afghanistan...The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends."

 

Now, as then, the official talk is of "surgical" strikes and "smart bombs." Now, as then, the Pentagon is keeping a tight leash on the media, which willingly refuses to detail the war's full impact on civilians, much less its long-term consequences.

 

And the deadly parallels may be expanding. U.S. and British planes have been pounding Iraq for a decade, flying over 280,000 sorties since the Gulf War ended. Now, in the wake of September 11, a crusade is underway, led by the Wall Street Journal and others, to blame Baghdad for the current anthrax scare – despite the absence of any proof – to expand the U.S.'s new war to Iraq.

 

I traveled to Iraq several months after the Persian Gulf War ended in 1991 to video and document the impact of war and sanctions on Iraqi civilians. Here are some snapshots from that trip, snapshots of what Iraqis faced – and are still facing – and premonitions of the horrors the Afghani people are no doubt experiencing today and the horrors that may again rain down on the people of Iraq.
 

 

SMART BOMBS AND DUMB BOMBS

 

"We are in the intensive care unit of Basra Teaching Hospital and you can see that the unit has been severely damaged and almost destroyed by the air raid which occurred on the 26th of January. ...One of the bombs was actually dropped on the hospital grounds...As a result of the explosion and blast, the structure of the building was damaged and there are many holes; the windows broke and many window frames buckled from their places. Three patients died in this unit as a result of the air raid because the central oxygen supply was destroyed and the ceiling fell on them."
Dr. Walid al-Rawi, Director of Basra's Teaching Hospital

 

During the Gulf war U.S. media coverage focused on high-tech "smart" bombs, but such weapons made up only 7% of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq. The rest were old-fashioned gravity bombs which missed their targets three times out of four.

 

In Baghdad, I visited workers living on a small side street in the downtown area. A bomb or missile had hit their neighborhood--totally destroying a half dozen nearby apartment buildings, collapsing one section of their roof and damaging a nearby church.

 

In Basra, workers showed me where bullets had ripped down through their roofs. In one neighborhood, across a highway from the port area, I saw a series of bomb craters, 10 to 15 feet across, marching straight toward a residential area. All that was left of the area was the burned-out shell of a 1963 Chevy Impala. I drove by destroyed food warehouses and the bombed-out shell of a Pepsi warehouse. I later learned that 14 people were killed, 46 wounded and 128 homes damaged or destroyed in the Pepsi bombing. In the southern city of Amarah, doctors at Saddam General Hospital recorded 82 deaths and 800 wounded during the Gulf war--80 to 90% civilians.
 

 

TERROR FROM THE SKY

 

"I have a son 5 years old. During the air raid he was shaking, shivering, saying 'Bush is coming, Bush is coming.' After the ceasefire American airplanes were flying over Baghdad, crossing the sound barrier, making this explosive sound, frightening the children, and writing with blue smoke, 'USA.' What was the purpose except frightening Iraqi children?"

         Dr. Ameed Hamid, Director, Iraq's Red Crescent Society

 

The people of Iraq endured 43 nights of continuous bombing by U.S.-led forces in 1991. U.S. Air Force Lt. General Charles A. Horner, who had overall command of the air campaign, called such psychological terror a "side benefit" of U.S. bombing. "The message is loud and clear that they are involved in a war and it's not going well."
 

 

SLAUGHTERING RETREATING SOLDIERS

 

In Amarah, Dr. Salem Mohammed al Saedi, the regional health director, told me Iraqi soldiers had been slaughtered 100 miles from the fighting in southern Iraq and some 140 miles north of Kuwait. I'd seen the grim evidence while driving across southern Iraq – burnt-out wrecks of every type of vehicle imaginable--from tanks to school buses–littered the roadsides.

 

"They [the U.S.] bombed the soldiers when they were retreating, and that was a tragedy I saw in front of my own eyes. We're 186 kilometers from Basra and it's 40 kilometers from Basra to Sufwan [Iraq's border with Kuwait], and they attacked soldiers who were retreating on foot. ...We have a health center in a small village 30 kilometers east of Amarah called Khahala. Once Dr. Salem and I went there, and we found 504 casualties; from 7 o'clock in the morning until the ceasefire 13 hours later, there were 504 casualties."
 

 

THE DESTRUCTION OF IRAQ'S CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE

 

"Since the war Iraqi children have been exposed to biological warfare, massive biological warfare. When you destroy the infrastructure of a country, sewage with all its germs will flow into the streets; you stop pure water from reaching the children; you give them malnutrition; you prevent medicines from reaching the country. So it's an excellent environment for death and disease."

         Iraqi relief official

 

During the Iraq war, U.S.-led forces totally destroyed 11 of Iraq's 20 power generating stations, and damaged another six. While the war was raging, U.S. officials claimed that this massive destruction was aimed at shortening the war and saving American lives. But in the July 8-14, 1991 issue of the Washington Post Weekly, Col. John A. Warden II, deputy directory of strategy, doctrine and plans for the Air Force, admitted the strategy was designed to tighten the U.S. stranglehold over Iraq: "Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity. He needs help. If there are political objectives that the UN coalition has, it can say, 'Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.' It gives us long term leverage."

 

Since then, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents have surfaced showing that the U.S. deliberately destroyed Iraq's water system by bombing dams and water and sewage facilities and then prevented Iraq from rebuilding it through punitive sanctions that prohibit the import of needed equipment and chemicals. Without electrical power Iraqis cannot get enough clean water, and sewage goes untreated -- leading to sharp increases in death and disease.

 

 

STARVATION IN THE FERTILE CRESCENT

 

At the Children's Welfare Hospital in Baghdad, Satenya Naser was trying to comfort her emaciated, one-and-a-half-year-old son Hamid, but he cried at the slightest touch. When I met Satenya, she was in her in mid-30s. Her look was direct, steady. Since January she had only been able to feed Hamid rice water. "Milk isn't available," Satenya explained, "but even if it was available it is too expensive for me."

 

Hamid's diet and the contamination of Baghdad's water supply after the U.S. bombing combined to give him a severe case of diarrhea. It lasted four months, and Hamid lost half his body weight--he was down to 15 pounds and looked half his age--before he was admitted to the Hospital. He had the blotchy skin and distended belly characteristic of kwashiorkor, severe protein deficiency due to malnutrition. Hamid was so weak he couldn't even lift his bony arm.

 

Satenya lived with her husband and nine children in a two-room house on the outskirts of Baghdad. Her husband, an unskilled laborer, made 120 dinars a month. A tin of powdered milk, which cost 3 dinars before the war, had risen to 35--over $100 at the official exchange rate. "How can I buy milk for my children?" she asked.

 

Doctors also described an enormous range of psychological traumas caused by the war--from increased bed wetting to severe phobias. Some infants were brought to the hospital after eating dirt in an unconscious effort to compensate for their iron and calcium deficiencies. In Baghdad, down the hall from Hamid, lay a 10-year-old boy from Kurdestan who stopped eating and talking when his neighborhood was bombed. "He looked like a ghost when he first came to the hospital," Dr. Arabi said, "He's kept alive by intravenous fluids, but still won't speak."

 

By 1997 the UN reported that over 1.2 million Iraqis had died since the Gulf war as a result of medical shortages, including 750,000 children below the age of five. Two years later UNICEF found that 4,000 to 6,000 Iraqi children under five were dying each month due to sanctions – a World Trade Center catastrophe every 30 days.

 
 

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Larry Everest is a correspondent for the Revolutionary Worker newspaper and producer of the video: Iraq: War Against the People (available for $12 plus shipping from Revolution Books Berkeley: 510.848.1196/revolutionbooks@earthlink.net). He can be reached at larryeverest@hotmail.com.