Hearts and Minds and Bombs and Terror
 

Paul Johnson, the Lockheed-Martin employee working on the Apache helicopters in Iraq, was killed by Muslim insurgents for the same reason that we weren't greeted with garlands of flowers when our ground troops landed there.

First of all let's establish that, as the Commission on 9-11 found, and as Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Powell finally admitted, Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on 9-11. It also had no WMD and posed no threat to us or to her neighbors.

From 1982 to 1988 Saddam Hussein was our ally and we gave him a lot of assistance in the Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980. We supplied him with intelligence information, satellite photos of Iranian troop movements, weapons, Huey helicopters, Howitzers and other equipment as well as weapons grade chemical and biological exports. In July of 1984 the CIA began giving Iraq intelligence to calibrate its mustard gas attacks against Iranian troops. In March 1986, the US was the only country to abstain from signing a UN Security Council statement condemning Iraq for the use of chemical weapons. Two months later, the US Dept. of Commerce approved the shipment to Iraq of lethal strains of botulism and anthrax. Iraq used those chemical weapons to put down a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq in February 1988, With this knowledge the US still shipped Iraq chemicals used in the manufacture of mustard gas only two months later,

In 1990, Saddam complained to the US, his ally, that Kuwait was slant drilling into Iraqi oil wells near the southern border. Ambassador April Glaspie brought a message from Secy. of State James Baker that we won't interfere in Arab to Arab conflicts. With this implied green light from America, Saddam invaded Kuwait in August of that year and annexed it. Before Britain redrew the map of the Middle East after WW1, Kuwait had been Iraq's southern- most province. The US gave a deadline of January 1991 to Saddam to withdraw all troops.

Saddam ignored the ultimatum, and the US, along with a coalition of 27 other countries, with UN approval, began a devastating air assault. Contrary to the Geneva Conventions, we targeted Iraq's infrastructure, We destroyed their water treatment plant, sanitation facility, sewage plants, communications, hydroelectric power and dams. Without a pure water supply and no television, radio or newspaper to warn them not to drink the contaminated water in the Tigris, the Iraqi civilian population were exposed to a variety of water borne diseases. This posed a major public health crisis.

Only six weeks after US intervention, Saddam ordered a total retreat of all his troops from Kuwait. As they began to make their way back to Baghdad along the "Highway of Death", US planes began a systematic bombing, strafing and napalming of everything on the highway that moved. This included an army in retreat, troops carrying a white flag and civilians from various other Middle Eastern nations who had been working in Kuwait. There was no place to take any cover from the massacre that US pilots described as a "turkey shoot" and like "shooting fish in a barrel" along that black asphalt ribbon stretching through the flat desert sand. When it was over, plow blades were attached to the front of Abrams tanks and dead and wounded alike were pushed into trenches and covered over.

Death from the air didn't stop after the "cease fire". US and UK planes continued bombing in the no-fly zones in both northern and southern Iraq. Those rural areas are dotted with small farms and flocks of sheep. The sorties continued for twelve years despite the lack of any military target.

The situation was worsened by the imposition of the most stringent sanctions ever imposed on a country that imported 70% of its needs. They were denied the necessary parts and equipment to repair the infrastructure along with medical supplies and food.

To add to the epidemics caused by the lack of any pure water, and malnutrition, the tons of depleted uranium munitions (DU) used in Iraq has brought an increase of 1000% in cancers and 600% in birth defects according to a 2002 UN subcommittee report. When DU munitions explode, they release micro particles of uranium oxide which when inhaled or ingested release radiation to the surrounding organs. It has contaminated the water table, the food chain and sterilized the land. Depleted uranium has a half life of 4.5 billion years.

More than one and a half million Iraqis lost their lives as a result of the first Gulf War, with 500,000 being children under five.

Before Desert Storm, Iraq had a large middle class that compared favorably to European middle class. In the secular government, every Iraqi, including women, had access to free education and free health care in state-of-the-art medical facilities. Baghdad was a model, modern city. Now the country is decimated, the population, half of which are under sixteen, are under a sentence of slow death from depleted uranium radiation.

The twelve year continual siege culminated in a new "shock and awe" display of bombing in a residential section mistakenly thought to be a place where Saddam was holding a meeting. It was March 2003 and we were embarked on yet another assault on Iraq and her people.

This was the environment where the Bush administration thought we would be greeted with garlands of flowers as liberators. Are they that delusional? Are they that removed from reality that they could think Iraqi parents could just watch their children starve to death, watch their parents suffer with cancer without medication to dull the pain, bury husbands, wives, brothers and sisters during the past 12 years and expect to win their hearts and minds during our occupation of their country? Now that these besieged people have finally had enough, they are using any desperate means at their disposal to drive out our invading force, and are called terrorists and barbarians. We arrest and torture them to liberate them from being arrested and tortured by Saddam Hussein. And we expect them to be grateful.

The sanity of anyone who could believe that logic has to be called into question.

06-18-04