Left I on the News

...was the deliberate murder of a million Iraqs, 500,000 of them children, by the United States Government.

The recent attack in Syria, which is presumed to have been carried out using some sort of poison gas, is described as "the largest use of chemical weapons since the Syrian civil war began." 25 years earlier, an even larger attack launched on Iran by Iraq, with the assistance of the United States, killed thousands of people.

But shortly after that attack, there occurred another attack, this one directly perpetrated by the United States, which killed a million people, half of them young children. Although it's not commonly thought of in the same category, that attack was, in fact, a biological weapons attack, planned and carried out by the U.S. with callous disregard for the lives of its Iraqi victims.

How was this attack carried out? Step one was a war crime all by itself, one of staggering dimensions - the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Iraqi water system during the first Gulf War in 1990-91. Article 54 of the Geneva convention states:

"It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive."

But what followed - a decade of sanctions imposed on Iraq - was even worse, and what caused those deaths. It was the U.N. sanctions, which had as a key component forbidding Iraq from important "dual-use" chemicals, most notably chlorine, which were needed to repair the water filtration system. And those sanctions were kept in place under completely false pretenses since the U.S. government knew well that Iraq had destroyed its stocks of chemical and biological weapons. And why did this qualify as a "chemical and biological weapon of mass destruction"? Because untreated water contains pollutants and bacteria, which when ingested can (and did) cause epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid. The U.S. had no need to introduce these "chemical and biological weapons" into the Iraqi water supply, it simply had to make sure that what was there naturally could not be removed, and death would follow.

Was this all an accident? An unforeseen consequence of the sanctions? The answer to this is "no," and it was provided by Professor Thomas Nagy of George Washington University back in 1991. Professor Nagy uncovered documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency which prove unequivocally that the U.S. knew exactly what it was doing, reaching the conclusion (before the policy was put into effect) that "Failing to secure supplies [of essential chemicals for water purification] will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease." In other words, the U.S. embarked on (and carried out) a deliberate policy of genocide in its war against the Iraqi people.

A million Iraqis, half of them young children who are the most vulnerable to such diseases, died as a result of this chemical and biological warfare carried out by the U.S. all in the guise of, as U.S. politicians were fond of saying, "keeping Saddam in a box." Unfortunately for a million Iraqis, the box they were in was a coffin, manufactured in the United States.