[Peace-discuss] dirty weapons

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=84a8df02a7c1f370

c5ca152d5ef14d6b
Pacific News Service
May 5, 2003
Dirty Weapons - Casualties From Iraq War Will Mount
Commentary, Chalmers Johnson,

-[B]y insisting on using such weaponry, the Pentagon
is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations
resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal
weapon of mass destruction.

Predictions of a new era of painless, precision
warfare neglect disturbing new data on the true number
of casualties from the first Gulf War. PNS contributor
Chalmers Johnson examines depleted uranium munitions
and their potentially devastating impact on civilians
and troops in Iraq and Kosovo. 

Speaking to the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln from
the ship's flight deck recently, President Bush
described a new era in warfare where modern weaponry
can bring down regimes "without directing violence
against civilians." In fact, in both Gulf wars,
unintended and potentially devastating consequences to
both civilians and U.S. troops contradict
administration claims of new, low-casualty combat.

The most important of these consequences is Gulf War
Syndrome, a potentially deadly medical disorder that
first appeared among combat veterans of the 1990-1991
Gulf War. Just as the effects of Agent Orange during
the Vietnam War were first explained away by the
Pentagon as "post-traumatic stress disorder" or
"combat fatigue," the Bush administration is
downplaying the potential toxic side effects of the
ammunition now being widely used by its armed forces
-- depleted uranium (DU) -- and its suspected role in
sickening soldiers long after they leave the
battlefield.

During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served
in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operation Desert
Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these, 148 were
killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action and 145
were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760
casualties -- quite a low number given the scale of
the operations.

However, as of May 2002 the Veterans Administration
(VA) reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had
died and 159,705 were injured or became ill as a
result of service-connected "exposures" suffered
during the war. Even more alarmingly, the VA revealed
that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of Gen.
Schwarzkopf's entire army, had filed claims for
medical care, compensation, and pension benefits based
on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991.
After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified
168,011 applicants as "disabled veterans." In light of
these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for
the first Gulf War is actually a staggering 29.3
percent.

Dr. Doug Rokke, a former Army colonel and professor of
environmental science at Jacksonville University, was
in charge of the military's environmental clean-up
following the first Gulf War. The Pentagon has since
sacked him for criticizing NATO commanders for not
adequately protecting their troops in areas where DU
ammunition was used, such as Kosovo in 1999. Rokke
notes that many thousands of American troops have been
based in and around Kuwait since 1990, and according
to his calculations, between August 1990 and May 2002,
a total of 262,586 soldiers became "disabled
veterans," and 10,617 have died. His numbers produce a
casualty rate for the whole decade of 30.8 percent.

The health effects of DU munitions are hotly debated.
Some researchers, often funded by the Pentagon, argue
that depleted uranium could not possibly cause these
war-related maladies. A more likely explanation, they
say, is dust and debris from the destruction of Saddam
Hussein's chemical and biological weapons factories in
1991 in the wake of the first Gulf War, or perhaps a
"cocktail" of particles from DU ammunition, the
destruction of nerve gas bunkers and polluted air from
burning oil fields. But the evidence -- including
abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities
in Iraq and also evidently in the areas of Kosovo
where, in 1999, the United States used
depleted-uranium weapons in its air war against the
Serbians -- points primarily toward DU.

Moreover, by insisting on using such weaponry, the
Pentagon is deliberately flouting a 1996 United
Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an
illegal weapon of mass destruction.

DU, or uranium-238, is a waste product of
power-generating nuclear reactors. It is used in
projectiles such as tank shells and cruise missiles
because it is 1.7 times denser than lead, burns as it
flies and penetrates armor easily. But it breaks up
and vaporizes on impact, which makes it potentially
deadly. Each shell fired by an American tank includes
10 pounds of DU. Such warheads are essentially "dirty
bombs" -- not very radioactive individually, but
nonetheless suspected of being capable in quantity of
causing serious illnesses and birth defects.

In 1991, U.S. forces fired a staggering 944,000 DU
rounds in Kuwait and Iraq. The Pentagon admits that it
left behind a bare minimum of 320 metric tons of DU on
the battlefield. One study of Gulf War veterans showed
that their children had a higher possibility of being
born with severe deformities, including missing eyes,
blood infections, respiratory problems and fused
fingers.

Rokke fears that because the military relied more
heavily on DU munitions in the second Iraq war than in
the first, postwar casualties may be even greater.
When he sees TV images of unprotected soldiers and
Iraqi civilians driving past burning Iraqi trucks
destroyed by tank fire or inspecting buildings hit by
missiles, he suspects they are being poisoned by DU.

Americans should pause before celebrating how few U.S.
soldiers were killed in Gulf War II. The full costs of
that brief war will not be known for at least a
decade. 
Johnson is author of "Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire" and, forthcoming,
"The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their
Country." A longer version of this article appeared on
tomdispatch.com, a weblog by Tom Engelhardt hosted by
the Nation Institute.