A New Generation's Vietnam

I have just returned home from a three-week trip to Iraq organized by the peace group Voices in the Wilderness. I toured the country's cities, suburbs and rural areas, meeting everyone from housewives to teachers to government officials. I feel now as I felt a generation ago during the Vietnam War: We are destroying an innocent people in the name of geopolitical "realities" that, ultimately, make no sense.

President Bush says that the danger to the United States of "weapons of mass destruction" justifies the devastation caused by a 12-year American-led campaign of bombing and sanctions. The idea would be laughable if it were not taken so seriously by so many in America. Iraq was a third-rate military power before the first Gulf War and the sanctions. The former U.S. Marine heading the previous U.N. inspection teams says 90 to 95 percent of Saddam Hussein's remaining weapons of mass destruction were found and destroyed. Almost no one thinks Iraq possesses nuclear weapons or the capability to get a missile anywhere near the United States. Aside from Great Britain and Israel, virtually no other country perceives Iraq to be a danger worth the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

I spoke to one woman who lost her daughter three years ago in what the Pentagon called "a mistake." She lives in a suburb of Basra in the south in the so-called "no-fly" zone, a band of Iraqi airspace forbidden to Iraqi military flights and patrolled by U.S. and British warplanes. The stated purpose of the U.N.-instituted zone was to protect potentially disloyal tribes from Iraqi government attack. But 12 years later, American and British planes continue to bomb the area regularly in response to anti-aircraft fire from Iraqi guns.

The guns fire because Iraq doesn't recognize the zone and perceives the planes as intruding into their air space. It's a purely symbolic gesture, out of pride I suppose, since the planes fly too high to be reached by the antiquated guns. Iraq hasn't downed a single manned plane in 12 years. But the United States bombs in response anyway, and civilians are killed with some regularity.

This woman's young son, who was with her when we talked, lost half of his left hand in one such attack. He has some 30 pieces of shrapnel in his back. Voices in the Wilderness is trying to get him to the United States for restorative surgery. I'll be bringing back X-rays and some records for doctors back home.

I've visited pediatric cancer wards in both Basra and in the northern city of Mosul where the incidence of certain cancers (especially leukemia) is three to four times higher than before the Gulf War. The exact cause of the rise has not been scientifically determined, in part because baseline demographic statistics no longer exist in Iraq, and also because no one has done the sophisticated studies. One likely cause is the radioactive depleted uranium dust from American munitions used during the Gulf War. Increased pollution (due in part to the sanction-induced lack of scrubbing equipment in oil refineries and cars), poor nutrition, waterborne contaminants and general ill health surely play a role.

In a Basra pediatric hospital, I talked to a very poor, uneducated woman in her mid-30s from a remote village. Dressed in a black abeya that covered everything but her face and hands, this woman sat cross-legged on her 6-year-old daughter's bed, watching her child die of leukemia. The pediatrician explained to me that of five chemo-therapeutic agents for treating cancer -- all of which have a finite shelf life and must be used simultaneously for proper effect -- only three will likely get through. The other two will be delayed until the others have expired.

We visited a number of water treatment plants. Some were damaged in direct bombing attacks during the Gulf War. Many others, however, are just falling apart with age because sanctions deny the requisite spare parts or the manufacture of new ones. Without purified drinking water, the mortality rate of children under five years of age is now two and a half times higher than before the war. Thirteen percent of Iraqi children now die before age 5, usually due to contaminated water.