Reflecting on the human costs of Iraq Published: Sunday, September 19, 2010, 4:05 AM
The United States is my motherland, and I love my mother -- drunk or sober. But the recent three-part series "Iraq: What we learned" (Sept. 5-7) left me feeling shocked and ashamed. We seem to care only about how those seven years have affected us.
We need to sober up and face the results for the Iraqi people -- innocent of 9/11 but selected by us as scapegoats. The United Nations estimated the Iraqi population at about 26 million in 2003. Of that number, an estimated 5 million became internal or external refugees. Depleted uranium has poisoned the environment. A recent study of cancer rates in Fallujah found a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancers. While Hiroshima produced a 17-fold increase in leukemia, there is a 38-fold increase in Fallujah.
Jim Fine is a Middle East expert for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, with more than 30 years' experience in that part of the world. Last month, he reported this:
"In the last 20 years U.S. policy toward Iraq has been responsible for the death of over two million Iraqis, and probably closer to three million. That's on the order of one in ten Iraqis. The death toll is about equally divided between the 12-year period of stringent economic sanctions that the U.S. and its allies imposed on Iraq and the post 2003 war period."
A 94-year-old friend who served at Utah Beach on D-Day often tells me, "The first casualty of war is the truth." Well, let's recover what we can of the truth about Iraq's situation today, repair what we can for them,and beg God to forgive us.
Suzanne Miller, Cleveland Heights
Poster Comment:
Remember back in the first Iraq war?
our ambassador told Saddam Hussein that it wasn't a concern of the US if 2 arab countries fought each other. Hussein asked her if the US would care if he invaded Kuwait. That was her answer.
at the conclusion of that short war we'd killed 100,000 Iraqis and lost 100 ourselves. Remember how Iraqi military people tried to escape by traveling home on that highway? And our military used it as a shooting gallery just killing them like in a computer game?
then we forced their top generals to sign a peace treaty. We told them we'd keep killing if they did not sign. and that treaty required that Iraqi aircraft not fly in certain parts of the country. Allegedly we made that requirement in order to protect certain portions of the Iraqi population from their government. Their government broke the treaty rules and flew jets where they were not supposed to fly. and so we imposed economic sanctions. Our military patrolled the ocean to enforce this. The sanctions killed a million or a million and a half people. because their government flew jets in a location inside their country that we told them they could not fly over. and 95% of the dead were children under 5?
For 20 years we've been doing everything possible to hobble and subjugate their country. We did it to get rid of their leader Saddam Hussein whom we had supported with lavish funding and special CIA protection stemming from when Saddam was 18 and wanted by his own government for murder. The American CIA took him into protection at age 18 because Hussein had committed political murders and was wanted for murder and then to be hanged by his own government. We protected him from death, sheltered him until he was past age 30, brought him back and into power. Then when he tried to convince other arab oil producers not to support the US dollar we let loose with pure terror against his country.
3 million Iraqis that we killed in 20 years. millions more made refugees fled to other countries. mass unemployment. poverty. disease. birth defects.
the people who rule our country have brought forth bad fruit. here is a bible verse.
Psalm 137:8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy [shall he be], that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.