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<H2 class=date-header><SPAN>Monday, May 27, 2013</SPAN></H2>
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<H3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name"><FONT size=5>We've moved on
from the Iraq war – but Iraqis don't have that choice </FONT></H3>
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<DIV id=main-article-info><A
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/26/iraqis-cant-turn-backs-on-deadly-legacy"><FONT
size=5>reprinted from the Guardian UK</FONT></A><BR><BR><FONT size=5>Like
characters from The Great Gatsby, Britain and the US have arrogantly turned
their backs and left a country in ruins<SPAN class=facebook-share><A
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<LI><A href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/johnpilger" rel=author
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" itemscope=""><FONT size=5><IMG
class=contributor-pic-small title="Contributor picture" alt="John Pilger"
src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/5/24/1369394499789/John-Pilger2.jpg"
width=60 height=60> </FONT></A></LI>
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<DIV class=contributor-full><SPAN itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"
itemscope="" itemprop="author"><SPAN itemprop="name"><A class=contributor
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/johnpilger" rel=author
itemprop="url"><FONT size=5>John Pilger</FONT></A></SPAN></SPAN><FONT
size=5> </FONT></DIV></LI>
<LI class=publication><A href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian"
itemprop="publisher"><FONT size=5>The Guardian</FONT></A><FONT size=5>,
<TIME itemprop="datePublished" pubdate=""
datetime="2013-05-26T13:00EDT">Sunday 26 May 2013 13.00 EDT</TIME>
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<DIV id=main-content-picture itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject"
itemscope="" itemprop="image"><FONT size=5><IMG
alt="Iraqi children take cover from sand in Basra 2"
src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/5/26/1369583426757/Iraqi-children-take-cover-008.jpg"
width=460 height=276 itemprop="contentUrl representativeOfPage"> </FONT>
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<DIV class=caption itemprop="caption"><FONT size=5>Iraq's ministry of social
affairs estimates 4.5 million children have lost one or both parents. This means
14% of the population are orphans. Photograph: Reuters</FONT></DIV></DIV>
<DIV id=article-body-blocks><BR><FONT size=5>The dust in </FONT><A title=""
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iraq"><FONT size=5>Iraq</FONT></A><FONT
size=5> rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your
eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming
children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr </FONT><A title=""
href="http://www.rauhanpuolustajat.fi/kuvat/seminaariraportti.pdf"><FONT
size=5>Jawad Al-Ali</FONT></A><FONT size=5>, "the seeds of our death". An
internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in
Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable.
"Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month.
Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of
the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with,
then long after. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have
it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the
genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my
garden have mutated and can't be eaten."<BR><BR>Along the corridor, Dr Ginan
Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was
trying to save. Many had </FONT><A title=""
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroblastoma"><FONT
size=5>neuroblastoma</FONT></A><FONT size=5>. "Before the war, we saw only
one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many
cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in </FONT><A
title=""
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki"><FONT
size=5>Hiroshima</FONT></A><FONT size=5>. The sudden increase of such congenital
malformations is the same."<BR><BR>Among the doctors I interviewed, there was
little doubt that </FONT><A title=""
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium"><FONT size=5>depleted
uranium</FONT></A><FONT size=5> shells </FONT><A title=""
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Depleted_uranium&action=edit§ion=20"><FONT
size=5>used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war</FONT></A><FONT size=5>
were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf war
battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an </FONT><A
title="" href="http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/a-10/"><FONT
size=5>A-10 Warthog attack aircraft</FONT></A><FONT size=5> carried over 4,500
grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of
nuclear warfare."<BR><BR>Although the link with cancer is always difficult to
prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself".
The British oncologist </FONT><A title=""
href="http://www.karolsikora.com/"><FONT size=5>Karol Sikora</FONT></A><FONT
size=5>, chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme in the 1990s,
wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment,
chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and
British advisers [to the Iraq sanctions committee]." He told me, "We were
specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The
WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in
politics."<BR><BR>Recently, </FONT><A title=""
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Sponeck"><FONT size=5>Hans von
Sponeck</FONT></A><FONT size=5>, former assistant secretary general of the
United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US
government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where
depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental
dangers." A WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted with the Iraqi
ministry of health, has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains
"damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its
researchers, remains "top secret". The report says birth defects have risen to a
"crisis" right across Iraqi society where depleted uranium and other toxic heavy
metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the
alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire
families.<BR><BR>Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the </FONT><A title=""
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/20/iraq-car-bombings-kill-dozens"><FONT
size=5>killing of 57 Iraqis in one day</FONT></A><FONT size=5> was a non-event
compared with the </FONT><A title=""
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2013/may/24/woolwich-new-video-shows-suspect-charging-at-police-live-updates"><FONT
size=5>murder of a British soldier in London</FONT></A><FONT size=5>. Yet the
two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F
Scott Fitzgerald's </FONT><A title=""
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/movie/150967/great-gatsby"><FONT size=5>The
Great Gatsby</FONT></A><FONT size=5>. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald
wrote, "</FONT><A title=""
href="http://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=The_Great_Gatsby&action=edit§ion=9"><FONT
size=5>smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or
their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess</FONT></A><FONT
size=5>".<BR><BR>The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a
sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in
Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "</FONT><A title=""
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/25/george-w-bush-presidential-library-dedication-live"><FONT
size=5>presidential library and museum</FONT></A><FONT size=5>" and Tony Blair
into his jackdaw travels and his money.<BR>Their "mess" is a crime of epic
proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social
affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have </FONT><A title=""
href="http://childvictimsofwar.org.uk/get-informed/iraq/"><FONT size=5>lost one
or both parents</FONT></A><FONT size=5>. "This means a horrific 14% of
Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are
headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are
rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has
brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.<BR><BR>In her book </FONT><A
title=""
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/oct/12/gareth-peirce-fight-human-rights"><FONT
size=5>Dispatches from the Dark Side</FONT></A><FONT size=5>, Gareth Peirce,
Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his
propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote,
"human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any
means possible, and permanently … in Blair's language a 'virus' to be
'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the
affairs of other nations.' The very concept of war was mutated to 'our values
versus theirs'." And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal
government communiques, reveal no dissent". For foreign secretary Jack Straw,
sending innocent British citizens to Guantánamo was "the best way to meet our
counter-terrorism objective".<BR><BR>These crimes, their iniquity on a par with
Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the </FONT><A title=""
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki"><FONT size=5>kabuki</FONT></A><FONT
size=5> theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is
of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our
backs?</FONT></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>