Even the name "Gulf War" is a lie. The so-called Gulf "War" of 1991 was in fact a one-sided American/British state terror campaign directed primarily against the entire Iraqi civilian population and infrastructure. 177 million pounds of bombs were dropped on the people of Iraq in the most concentrated aerial bombardment in the history of the world. In the 110,000 sorties of the six-week onslaught the cowardly American and British pilots (and to a lesser extent French and Saudi pilots) mass-murdered at least 200,000 people, using
depleted uranium missiles,
napalm,
cluster-bombs,
fuel-air bombs,
cruise missiles and other so-called "smart bombs."
The slaughter of civilian people in the Amariyah bomb shelter was a prime example of this American/British state terrorism. The large shelter was in a residential neighborhood on the west side of Baghdad. Because of the bombing the neighborhood had no electricity or water. People were living in the shelter, hoping to escape from the bombs. Most of them were women, children, elderly, and invalids from a new housing development.
On Feb. 14th, 1991, at about 4:30 am while everybody was sleeping, an American Tomahawk penetrator missile blasted through the steel-reinforced concrete ceiling of the shelter, creating a huge hole about 6 feet wide. Minutes later a second bomb came through the hole, exploded, and burned everyone inside to death. With this one strike American/British war heroes murdered over 400 helpless people.
The Highway of Death
This brutal, bloody terror-campaign, romantically called "Desert Storm," was a cowardly turkey shoot, a horrendous mismatch of military power. Not content with mere victory, sadistic American forces even slaughtered Iraqi soldiers as they tried to flee in a panicked retreat along the main highways from Kuwait to Iraq. It was known as the
Highway of Death.
Cowardly U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force jet pilots caught one sixty-mile-long column of fleeing Iraqi soldiers and Palestinian civilian families in vehicles on the Kuwait to Basra highway — and pounded them ruthlessly with bombs and machine-gun fire.
The road, clogged by four lanes of one-way, bumper-to-bumper traffic, was carpet bombed by B-52s dropping 1,000-pound bombs, and repeatedly hit with laser-guided missiles and "smart" bombs.
All the Iraqi soldiers, as well as Palestinian workers and their families, were slaughtered without mercy. The bloodthirsty American pilots gleefully described the massacre as "shooting in a sheep pen."
Depleted uranium
weapons
Bullets, shells and missiles tipped with
radioactive depleted uranium
made every weapon in Iraq's arsenal obsolete. The higher weight of DU shells allows American tanks to shoot twice as far, giving them a range of two miles.
During the Desert Storm terror campaign at least 944,000 rounds of DU ammo were fired from American A-10 Warthogs all over Iraq and Kuwait. The A-10 is an aircraft built around a 30mm, 7-barrel gattling gun that can spew 3900 rounds per minute.
When a depleted uranium tipped shell strikes a tank or armored personnel carrier it easily penetrates the armor and burns the crew alive. The impact also vaporizes the depleted uranium, creating an aerosol of radioactive heavy-metal particles which can spread as far as 190 miles on the wind.
When inhaled or ingested, the depleted uranium particles cause chemical and radioactive damage to the bronchial tree, kidneys, liver and bones. Cancer often results, and the effects can even include genetic damage.
The Dutch
Laka Foundation estimates that the United States terror campaign left behind 300-800 tons of radioactive waste from this ammunition all over Kuwait and Iraq — poisoning the air, the land, the water and the people everywhere.
Afterwards, wherever the depleted uranium firing had been concentrated, there were cancer epidemics among Iraqi civilians living nearby. In the ten years since then, sanctions, polluted water and depleted uranium together have killed somewhere between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 Iraqi civilian people. At least 600,000 of the dead are children. Cancer rates have quadrupled in areas of southern Iraq bombed by the American and British state terrorists.
The American/British terror campaign continues to this day.
Since it began, thousands of Iraqi babies have been born with horrible birth defects. This is something that has never before been seen in Iraq.
More than 120,000 American Gulf War veterans are chronically ill — suffering from
Gulf War Syndrome.
A U.S. Department of Veterans study of 251 veteran's families found that 67% had children with severe illnesses or birth defects.
From
Rogue State
by William Blum:
In 1995, Iraqi health officials reported alarmingly high increases in rare and unknown diseases, primarily in children, and presented a study of this state of affairs to the United Nations.
The increases occurred in leukemia, carcinoma, cancers of the lung and digestive system, late-term miscarriages, congenital diseases, and deformities in fetuses, such as anencephaly (absence of a brain), and fused fingers and toes, not unlike those found in the babies of Gulf War veterans.
The Austrian president of the International Yellow Cross, Dr. Siegwart Gunther, stated that there was one significant common denominator: the allies' use of depleted uranium in the bombing of Iraq.
Cluster bombs
The Gulf "War" terror campaign saw the most intensive use of
cluster-bombs
in the history of armed conflict, both air and ground delivered. Southeast Asia, particularly
Laos,
was more extensively saturated with the deadly weapons during the racist genocide campaign known as the "Vietnam War." But the American war crimes against the Iraqi people were committed in a more concentrated, high-tech form.
Over the course of only 43 days and nights, approximately 62,000-80,000 air-delivered cluster bombs were dropped on the Iraqi people by the American-led state terrorists. In addition, 10,000 MLRS rockets and 100,000 "Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munition" artillery shells were fired. All this translates to about 24-30 million "submunitions" or bomblets. Assuming a dud rate of 5%, it is estimated that the number of dangerous land-mine cluster bomblets lying on or just under the surface of the ground in Iraq and Kuwait would be from 1.2 to 1.5 million. At least.
In the desert, however, the percentage of these duds rose to 30%. So the number of unexploded ordnance still lying in wait for unsuspecting Iraqi children and civilian people could be as high as 7 to 9 million bomblets.
The US General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that at least twenty-five US military personnel were killed and many more injured by these submunitions — fired by their own forces.
A Human Rights Watch report says that of the estimated 24 to 30 million bomblets dropped during the Desert Storm terror campaign, the 1.2 to 1.5 million (at least) that did not immediately explode led to the bloody deaths of 1,220 Kuwaiti and 400 Iraqi people — mostly children — and over 2,500 maimed. And that was in just the first two years after the end of the "war."
With the passage of time cluster bombs become more unstable, making deadly accidental explosions increasingly likely. American cluster bombs will butcher Iraqi children and civilian people for many years to come, as they have done to the people of Southeast Asia for the last 35 years.
Slow Genocide by Economic Sanctions
Iraqi mother and
dying child
|
The Pentagon and CIA discovered their political limitations during the Vietnam Genocide. The filthy American war criminals spent 14 years slaughtering over
three million Vietnamese people
with carpet-bombing, napalm, Agent Orange, cluster bombs and racist terrorization by hundreds of thousands of murdering, raping, baby-killing American troops.
And still they could not subdue the heroic Vietnamese people.
Fearing a repeat of that humiliation, the U.S. Corporate Mafia Government tried a new strategy with the Iraqi people: bomb them into a pre-industrial condition and then grind them into submission with sanctions. No need for invasion and occupation, the Pentagon figured.
So the American/British war criminals systematically targeted Iraq's civilian infrastructure. Schools, hospitals, factories and every industry connected to food production, water purification and irrigation were targeted for destruction.
U.S. Air Force and Navy pilots destroyed a baby formula plant, food warehouses, pharmaceutical plants, fertilizer plants, pesticide plants, storage facilities, refrigeration facilities, electrical generation and communication plants and every single grain silo in the country. All these were destroyed in order to intensify the impoverishing effect of the sanctions.
In the process, U.S. and British pilots slaughtered at least 200,000 Iraqi men, women and children. And of course all these murdered human beings were dismissed by the Pentagon as "collateral damage."
In the 10 years since that carnage, the United Nations estimates that over one million Iraqi civilians — including 600,000 children below the age of five — have died as a result of American sanctions alone.
One of the most important strategies of the 1991 terror-campaign against the civilian Iraqi people was the bombing of numerous water-purification plants. After that the American sanctions prevented Iraqis from getting enough replacement parts to repair most of the plants.
So, just as the evil U.S. and British governments planned, the lack of clean drinking water in Iraq has caused a massive human catastrophe. It is contaminated water, more than anything else, that is killing Iraqi babies and small children, by the thousands, every month. Because they are the most vulnerable they are dying from diarrhea and dysentery primarily, and also diseases such as typhoid, hepatitis, cholera and polio — all caused by bacteria and viruses within the contaminated water.
And just to make the whole diabolical scheme complete, the American sanctions also prevent the Iraqis from acquiring sufficient medicine to treat these deadly diseases.
In an interview of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on CBS's 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl asked her if the death of these 600,000 Iraqi children was "worth it."
Albright's reply:
"...we think the price is worth it."
"It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in."
— General Colin Powell
War Criminal
when asked about the number of Iraqi people
who were slaughtered by Americans
in the 1991 "Desert Storm" terror campaign
"If they turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs [surface-to-air missiles]. 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's a lot of oil out there we need."
— U.S. Brig. General William Looney
Washington Post, August 30, 1999
referring, in reality, to the brutal mass-murder
of hundreds of civilian Iraqi men, women and children
during 10,000 sorties by American/British war criminals
in the first eight months of 1999
In December 1998, in order to intensify the suffering of the Iraqi people, the United States and Britain began a campaign of continual low-level bombing of Iraq's
infrastructure, including strafing raids against Iraqi agricultural developments. In the past two years the cowardly American/British pilots have flown over 32,000 sorties, murdering at least 350 more civilian people, including many children, and injuring another 1000 people as of mid-2001.
"It's been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the United States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent, indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price."
— Noam Chomsky
Author of
The Culture of Terrorism
The Assyrian people of Iraq
Particularly punished by the sanctions are the ethnic minorities in Iraq that were already severely oppressed, such as the Christian Assyrians. These people have been victims of Iraqi and Kurdish terrorism and oppression for generations, and now American sanctions punish them too, along with everybody else. Perhaps more so because of their already impoverished and powerless state.
For more information:
Assyrian International News Agency
http://www.aina.org/
Assyrian Democratic Movement
http://www.zowaa.com/english/index.html
Ninevah Online
http://www.nineveh.com/
Atour: The State of Assyria
http://www.atour.com/"
"Assyrians After Assyria"
A very informative historical lecture by Dr. Simo Parpola, University of Helsinki
http://www.ashur.com/DrParpola.htm
Related pages
The Highway of Death
Iraq's Poisoned Water:
The deliberate genocide of the Iraqi people by America and Britain
Bibliography:
American Sanctions Against the Iraqi People
Related sites
Birth defects of Iraqi babies caused by American/British depleted uranium weapons radiation
http://www.wakefieldcam.freeserve.co.uk/extremedeformities.htm
WARNING —
the photos of bizarrely deformed infants on this page are horrifying and nauseating. View at your own risk. The photos are worse than those from Nazi concentration camps, but they are a painfully necessary part of the public record of American/British WAR CRIMES.
See these photos and behold the future — of America and Britain.
To the cowardly pilots, military/corporate slime and politicians of America and Britain: you will not live this down.
The Amariyah bomb shelter: a sea of flames, no place to hide
http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/iraq_amiria_e/index.html
From the Chugoku Shimbun (Hiroshima) newspaper site.
Ten years since the Gulf War — US and Britain insist sanctions continue against Iraq
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jan2001/gulf-j19.shtml
A good overview of the Desert Storm terror campaign, subsequent sanctions and the present situation.
Defying the Sanctions: A Flight to Iraq
by Michael Parenti
http://www.michaelparenti.org/DefyingSanctions.html
"...on the second day of our visit [in November 2000], US warplanes fired four missiles at the village of Hmaidi in the southern province of Basra, one of which struck the Ali Al-Hayaini school, wounding four children and three teachers. Several homes were also hit."
WAR CRIMES
http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-index.htm
"A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal." By Ramsey Clark and others.
The Massacre of Withdrawing Soldiers on "The Highway of Death"
by Joyce Chediac
http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-death.htm
"I want to give testimony on what are called the "highways of death." These are the two Kuwaiti roadways, littered with remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait on February 26th and 27th 1991 in compliance with UN resolutions.
"U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel," said one U.S. pilot. The horror is still there to see."
Report presented at the New York Commission hearing, May 11, 1991.
WSWS : News & Analysis: Iraq
http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/news/me-iraq.shtml
This is the index page for an extensive collection of news articles and high-quality political analysis about Iraq.
The bombing of Iraq:
A shameful chapter in American history
http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/dec1998/iraq-d19.shtml
This brief essay addresses the renewed bombing of Iraq, begun in December 1998 and continuing to this day. Written by Martin McLaughlin and David North of the Socialist Equality Party soon after the bombing started, it is an excellent political analysis and an eloquent and passionate denunciation of the ongoing U.S. war crimes against the Iraqi people.
"Today's [American] generals are nothing more than bureaucrats of mass slaughter, working their way up the Pentagon hierarchy, spending a term at the top issuing orders to destroy helpless populations, then retiring to well-paid positions on corporate boards or as 'consultants' to the TV networks covering the next American blitzkrieg."
International Action Center — Iraq Sanctions Challenge
http://www.iacenter.org/iraqchallenge/
The courageous people at the International Action Center have completed their fourth trip to Iraq. Each time they bring donated medicines to Iraq that are blocked by the American/British sanctions, and then report back on the conditions suffered by the Iraqi people — conditions routinely covered-up by the mainstream corporate mass-media.
MORE BOMBS OVER BAGHDAD
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.iacenter.org/maj_iraq.htm
"Once again, after almost a decade has passed, the fiendish roar of American and British jets echoed in the suburbs of Baghdad, Iraq, and a deadly rain of bombs once again hits one of the oldest cities on earth.
"Immediately, the corporate media rushed to the airwaves to promote the bombings, and [illegitimate] Bush Administration officials announced that the aerial attacks on the Iraqi capital were acts of 'pre emptive self-defense.'
"Once again, the corporate-political media launch into the demonization game, with attacks on a 'Hitler'-like Saddam Hussein, with foreboding threats of Iraq developing 'weapons of mass destruction,' — yeah, uh huh."
International Action Center — Iraq Sanctions: The Silent Weapon
http://www.iacenter.org/iraq.htm
Pacifica Radio — Watch on Iraq
http://www.pacifica.org/programs/iraq/index.html
Pacifica Radio — Watch on Iraq — links
http://www.pacifica.org/programs/iraq/links.html
BLOODY HELL: The Price Soldiers Pay
http://www.warishell.com/warishell/index.htm
The website and book Bloody Hell provide a platform for veterans to speak for themselves. Page after page of searing testimony to the brutal, bloody, unmerciful, dehumanising, haunting, destructive, grim black void of war. The pain. The lies. The reality.
The aftermath.
Veterans For Peace
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
Veterans for Peace, Inc. is a non-profit educational and humanitarian organization with a long record of accomplishments since its creation in 1985. They are now involved in The Iraq Water Project — an effort to help rebuild water-treatment facilities that were destroyed and poisoned by U.S./British bombers, or rendered inoperable by American economic sanctions.
Waterborne diseases account for most of the child fatalities caused by American sanctions — at least 4,000 per month of the children who die are under the age of 5 years old.
Gulf War Veteran Resource Pages
http://www.gulfweb.org/
Bibliography
American Sanctions Against the Iraqi People
Rogue State:
A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
by William Blum
Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum
The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee
Against Empire
by Michael Parenti, Ph.D.
The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti, Ph.D.
Censored 2000:
The Year's Top 25 Censored Stories
by Peter Phillips & Project Censored
The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky
The Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
by Edward S. Herman
Derailing Democracy:
The America the Media Don't Want You to See
by David McGowan
Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti, Ph.D.
The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media:
Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News
by Norman Solomon
On Killing:
The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
Dave Grossman
published by: Little, Brown
Examines the consequences of conditioning American soldiers to overcome the instinctive loathing of killing. Shows how it has increased post-combat stress disorder and how contemporary society — especially the media — replicates the U.S. Army's conditioning techniques, resulting in increased violence in American society.
Available from:
Edward R. Hamilton, Bookseller
