Toxic Playground

There is a critical issue of rising concern among medical specialists around the world, which, having long been underreported is imperative to bring to light – that is, the escalating rate of deformities among newborn babies in Iraq.

Some may disregard this fact as old news, since the media has only passively mentioned it a few times as the aftermath of the Gulf War. However, the urgency of the matter comes to light as we are told that these deformities have seen a significant increase since 2003 – the beginning of George Bush’s “War Against Terror“. The rate of birth defects, after increasing 10–fold from 1989 to 2001, continues to rise at an astounding speed. Since August 2003, government hospitals have reported 650 cases of infant deformities, with at least 4 cases a week and 15 cases this April – that is a 20 percent increase from the 1991 US–led Gulf War. The deformities are characterized by excess fingers, unusually large heads, no arms, or no legs… and sadly, that doesn’t even begin to cover the majority of more graphic malformations. To further add to the detriment, nearly 90% of these cases are unable to maintain any chance of survival past one week.

This medical crisis is being directly blamed on the widespread use of munitions containing depleted uranium (DU) by the US and Britain in both the 1991 Gulf War, and even more so in the 2003 War on Terror, despite knowing full well the effects of this arson. Unsurprisingly, the US military denies any relationship between these problems and the use of DU, in spite of the fact that medical researchers have clearly linked it to cancer, chemical toxicity, and kidney damage. In an act of sheer insensitivity, the US Sanctions committee has refused to allow Iraq the right to import clean–up equipment required to begin decontaminating their country of the depleted uranium that the US has thoughtlessly been bombarding them with since 1991 – all 315 tons of it to be exact.

The American military can sit atop their mountain of lies and denials for as long as they want, but it is more than a mere coincidence that the areas hit the hardest by this atrocity are those in the southern part of Iraq – particularly Basra and Najaf – who have experienced far more than their share of bombing. The College of Medicine at Basra University has published a study revealing horrific changes in the rate of child cancer from 1990 to 1999; the time of the first Gulf War. In the province of Basra alone, cancer among children jumped by 242% with the rate of leukemia rising to 100%. As terrible as those results were, the rates have increased by up to 5 times within the past 6 years, and 56% of all cancer patients are now children under the age of 15.

These horrifying numbers continue to rise at such astounding speed because although most of the fighting took place outside major populations in the first Gulf War, the 2003 invasion witnessed the shameless bombardment of targets inside densely populated cities such as Baghdad. There is now mounting fear that Iraq will face an epidemic of cancers by the end of the decade, even though their medical system is already buckling under pressure, unable to handle the current crisis.

Dr. Amar is the head of one of Iraq’s main hospital treating cancer patients, and told the Sydney Morning Herald this April, “We don’t have drugs to treat tumors. I have a patient with tumors who is unconscious and I don’t have drugs or a bed in which to treat him. Two or three days ago we had to cancel all surgery because we had no gauze and no anaesthetic. Our wards are like stables for horses, not humans. We can’t properly isolate patients or manage their diets…. If you are sick, don’t come to this hospital for treatment. It is collapsing around us. We are going down in a heap.“

One can only watch in amazement at the arrogance and self–importance that has driven a government to tear through all the barriers of legality and ethical behavior, in order to display its perceived God–like power. How many other nations can pound a city with 500 bombs in a single day, with each bomb costing a million dollars? Not Iraq, certainly. And as we sit in our homes, dismissed to the role of handcuffed spectators, our intelligence is ridiculed with the petty reassurance that reducing a whole nation to nothing but rubble while committing mass homicide is of course perfectly acceptable as long as it is deemed “collateral damage“.

Iraqi children have been suffering the detriments of war for years. But thanks to American technological advances, they now suffer the effects of war even before taking their first breath. Iraqi liberation at its finest, indeed.

Email • Print • Share on Facebook • Add to del.icio.us • Stumble It!