Fallujah -- Dresden in Iraq

Although studiously ignored by the mainstream news media, last month came reports that the U.S. used napalm and chemical weapons in its assault upon the city of Fallujah. The assault of November 2004 resulted in the near-total destruction of the city, as well as the deaths of thousands of non-insurgent Iraqi civilians. If the reports about napalm and chemical weapons are true, not only would the U.S. be in violation of international law, it would be guilty of the very crimes against humanity that it previously leveled against Saddam Hussein and used as a justification for invading Iraq.

Reportedly, Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli of the Iraq Ministry of Health held a press conference last month and charged the U.S. with using napalm, mustard gas, and nerve gas when it attacked Fallujah in November 2004. Dr. ash-Shaykhli described "melted" bodies and fires that could not be put out with water. Similarly, Dr. ash-Shaykhli described entire sections of the city where nothing, neither cats nor dogs nor birds, was left alive, suggesting the use of chemical weapons.

Promptly, the United States denied Dr. ash-Shaykhli's allegations about mustard and nerve gasses. The U.S. even went so far as to deny the very existence of Dr. ash-Shaykhli or that anyone by that name ever worked for Iraq's Ministry of Health. According to the U.S., the false story about the U.S. military's use of chemical and nerve gasses in Fallujah was invented by a web site pretending to be that of the Qatari television network Al Jazeera.

Unfortunately, the U.S. denial of wrongdoing in Fallujah cannot withstand scrutiny.

For example, while the U.S. is correct that a fake Al Jazeera ("aljazeera.com") published a story about U.S. atrocities in Fallujah, the U.S. glosses over the fact that the real Al Jazeera ("aljazeera.net") published a similar story. On March 17, 2005, the real Al Jazeera reported on the wholesale killings of civilians by U.S. forces in Fallujah, including through the use of napalm. In that story, the real Al Jazeera provided eyewitness accounts of U.S. forces killing entire families, including women and children. Likewise, the real Al Jazeera reported that the U.S. raided the only hospital in Fallujah at the beginning of the assault in order to prevent reports of civilian casualties.

The U.S. has yet to attempt to discredit the story published by the real Al Jazeera.

Furthermore, U.S. denials about using prohibited weapons in Fallujah, particularly napalm, lack credibility inasmuch as the U.S. was forced to retract previous denials of similar accusations. On March 22, 2003, following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that U.S. forces had used napalm. Noting that napalm had been banned by a United Nations convention in 1980 (a convention never signed by the U.S.), U.S. military spokesmen denied using napalm in Iraq. On August 5, 2003, however, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that U.S. officials confirmed using "napalm-like" weapons in Iraq between March and April 2003.

In a feat of semantic hair-splitting of which Bill Clinton would have been proud, the U.S. claimed the incendiaries used in Iraq contained less benzene than the internationally-banned napalm and, therefore, were "firebombs" and not napalm. According to U.S. officials, had reporters asked about firebombs in March of 2003, the U.S. would have confirmed their use. Nonetheless, the U.S. was forced to concede that regardless of the technicalities, the napalm-like weapons were functionally equivalent to napalm. In fact, the difference between napalm and firebombs is so minute that U.S. forces still refer to the weapons as napalm.

With that kind of track-record, it is difficult to swallow the recent denials by the U.S. that it used napalm or any other banned weapons in Fallujah.

Such denials are even less convincing when contrasted with eye-witness reports of what happened in Fallujah. There are, first of all, the findings by Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhil of Iraq's Ministry of Health that U.S. forces used napalm and chemical weapons in Fallujah. However, even taking as true the U.S. claim that Dr. ash-Shaykhli never existed, much less worked for Iraq's Ministry of Health, he is not the only individual to claim that the U.S. used banned weapons in Fallujah.

For instance, on November 10, 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Kamal Hadeethi, a physician from a hospital near Fallujah, as saying, "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."

When he spoke from Baghdad on November 29, 2004 with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, American journalist Dahr Jamail recounted stories told to him by refugees from Fallujah. According to Jamail, the refugees described bombs which covered entire areas with fire that could not be extinguished with water and which burned bodies beyond recognition.

Likewise, in a November 26, 2004 story for the Inter Press Service, Jamail reported eye-witness accounts of U.S. forces using chemical weapons and napalm in Fallujah. Later, in a January 18, 2005 report for Electronic Iraq, Jamail reported eye-witness accounts of U.S. forces using bulldozers and dump-trucks to remove tons of soil from various sections of Fallujah. Eye-witnesses also described U.S. forces using water tankers to "power wash" some of the streets in Fallujah. It does not take a conspiracy-theorist to conclude that U.S. forces wanted to "decontaminate" the city and remove evidence of chemical weapons.

On November 29, 2004, Al Jazeera TV (the real Al Jazeera) interviewed Dr. Ibrahim al-Kubaysi in Baghdad after his medical delegation was denied access to Fallujah. In that interview, Dr. al-Kubaysi recounted eye-witness descriptions of blackened corpses and corpses without bullet holes strewn throughout the streets of Fallujah.

On February 26, 2005, the German newspaper Junge Welt published an interview with Dr. Mohammad J. Haded, a member of the medical staff of the Central Hospital of Fallujah, and Mohammad F. Awad, a member of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society who helped gather corpses in Fallujah for identification. In that interview, Dr. Haded described Fallujah as "Dresden in Iraq" and Awad recounted the "remarkable number of dead people [who] were totally charred." Dr. Haded also described how U.S. forces "wiped out" the hospital in Fallujah, attacked rescue vehicles, and destroyed a makeshift field hospital.

American documentary-maker Mark Manning made similar observations while in Fallujah, as reported in the March 17, 2005 edition of the Santa Barbara Independent. Manning visited Fallujah in January 2005 and interviewed Iraqi physicians who told him that the first target of U.S. forces in the November 2004 assault on Fallujah was the hospital and that ambulances were fair-game. Iraqi physicians told Manning they were certain chemical weapons had been used in Fallujah "because they handled many dead bodies bearing no evident sign of trauma." As for the use of napalm by U.S. forces, Manning returned home from Fallujah with photographs of charred corpses "whose clothes had been melted into their skin."

Michele Naar-Obed, of the Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Team, also visited Fallujah in early 2005. Naar-Obed described her trip in the March 13, 2005 edition of the Duluth News Tribune of Minnesota. As with Manning, Naar-Obed described Iraqi physicians who were convinced that chemical weapons and napalm were used by U.S. forces in Fallujah. According to Naar-Obed, U.N. representatives confirmed to her reports of execution-style killings of handcuffed and blindfolded Iraqis, as well as reports of bodies that were burned and horribly disfigured.

Finally, on March 21, 2005, the Commission for the Compensation of Fallujah Citizens, established by the Iraqi transitional government, reported that approximately 100,000 wild and domesticated animals were found dead in Fallujah, killed by chemical or gaseous munitions.

An estimated 600 non-insurgent civilians died in the U.S. assaults upon Fallujah. Over half of them were women and children. According to an April 4, 2005 report by IRIN, a U.N. humanitarian information unit, as many as 70 percent of all structures were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. There is similarly no water, electricity, or sewage treatment in Fallujah. Not surprisingly, a mission that was meant to pacify an insurgent stronghold ended up breeding anti-American hatred among Fallujah's survivors and their sympathizers.

U.S. denials of wrongdoing notwithstanding, there are numerous independent sources making similar reports about U.S. forces employing banned weapons in Fallujah, as well as targeting hospitals and civilians. In the face of such independent and corroborating reports, it is hard to escape the sickening conclusion that the U.S. violated international law and committed war crimes in its assaults upon Fallujah. In doing so, the U.S. became the evil the Bush administration has vowed to eradicate.

Suddenly, the Bush administration's open hostility toward the International Criminal Court in particular, and international law in general, makes a whole lot more sense.

Suffer the Children

Last week, the United States denied the allegations of the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has doubled malnutrition among Iraqi children. The Bush Administration criticized Ziegler for "taking some information that in itself is difficult to validate and juxtaposing his own views which are widely known about the war in Iraq and suggesting the two are linked."

It is, of course, richly ironic that the Bush Administration, with an apparently straight face, leveled such criticisms against Ziegler. After all, as most recently reported by the presidential commission on intelligence leading up to the Iraq invasion, the Bush Administration based its decision to invade Iraq on information that could not be validated, principally because the information was either blatantly false or "dead wrong."

Moreover, it is now widely known that the Bush Administration longed to invade Iraq immediately following the attacks of 9/11, if not earlier. No one with even the most tenuous of grips on reality can sincerely say that the Bush Administration did not juxtapose its own widely-known views about invading Iraq with information that not only could not be validated but was, in fact, proven to be false, and then suggested a link between the two. Take, for instance, Vice President Cheney's block-headed insistence until as late as November 2004 that Iraq was involved in the attacks of 9/11.

Regardless of the Bush Administration's laughably hypocritical criticisms of Ziegler's statements, Ziegler is not alone in blaming the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq for increased rates of mortality and malnutrition among Iraqis, children in particular. In fact, Ziegler's comments were not based upon his own observations. Rather, they were based upon previous reports by and findings of UNICEF, the World Food Program, and Johns Hopkins University.

The organizations upon which Ziegler relied in criticizing the U.S. cannot be dismissed as mere America-bashers, motivated by politics. Indeed, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development, in 2003 nearly a third of Iraqi children suffered from malnutrition. Similarly, in April of 2003, the Congressional Research Service reported in "Iraq: Recent Developments in Humanitarian and Reconstruction Assistance," that the invasion of Iraq worsened the already fragile humanitarian situation in Iraq. The CRS report noted that before it was suspended on the eve of the invasion, the U.N. Oil-For-Food Program provided food and medicine to sixty percent of Iraq's 24 to 27 million citizens. With the abrupt suspension of the OFFP, between 14.4 and 16.2 million Iraqis promptly found themselves without the food or medicine upon which their lives depended.

The CRS report also predicted that the invasion of Iraq would increase malnutrition and the disruption of food supplies, as well as reduce access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

Verily, that prediction came to pass.

In its report to the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq in October of 2004, the Iraqi Ministry of Health reported that approximately twenty percent of urban households and more than fifty percent of rural households had no access to safe drinking water or adequate sanitation. According to the Ministry of Health, one third of all Iraqi children were chronically malnourished. In the first half of 2004 alone there were 8,253 reported cases of measles, compared with 454 reported cases for all of 2003. By the same token, there were nearly 12,000 reported cases of mumps in the first four months of 2004, while there were fewer than 7,000 reported cases for all of 2003. In March of 2003, UNICEF reported that Iraq had one of the highest mortality rates in the world for children under the age of five. One in four Iraqi children under the age of five, totaling nearly one million children, were malnourished. Nearly one quarter of all Iraqi children were born underweight, a situation only partly explained by the fact that sixty percent of Iraqi women were iron deficient. In its 2005 State of the World's Children, UNICEF reported that between 1990 and 2003, Iraq's mortality rate for children under five increased seven percent.

In July of 2003, increasing numbers of Iraqi children were reported to be suffering from malnutrition, as well as chronic diarrhea and vomiting. The increase was directly attributed to the lack of reliable electricity following the U.S. "shock and awe" campaign and subsequent invasion. The lack of electricity in Iraq caused water to be pumped at low pressure which, in turn, allowed sewage to seep into the system. As reported by the New York Times in September 2004, the water and sewage failures contributed to an outbreak of hepatitis E.

In November of 2004, the Washington Post reported that while acute malnutrition in Iraqi children under the age of five declined to four percent in 2002, it nearly doubled in 2004, spiking to 7.7 percent. The sharp increase translated to approximately 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and extreme protein deficiency.

According to a study led by the Johns Hopkins Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies, published by The Lancet in October 2004, a conservative estimate of 100,000 excess deaths occurred since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Likewise, the risk of death increased more than two-fold, and risk of death from violence increased fifty-eight percent. Following the invasion, the estimated infant mortality rate in Iraq was fifty-seven deaths for every one thousand live births. Forty-six percent of all Iraqis killed by coalition forces were under fifteen. More than half of all Iraqis killed by the U.S.-led coalition of the willing were women and children.

The U.S., not surprisingly, dismisses the Lancet study as inaccurate and unverifiable. Then again, as General Tommy Franks so eloquently summarized U.S. policy toward Iraqi civilian casualties, "we don't do body counts." Inasmuch as the U.S. isn't interested in how many Iraqi civilians are killed or injured, its summary dismissal of the Lancet study lacks credibility. At any rate, in November 2004, The Economist scrutinized the Lancet study and deemed its statistical analyses and data-gathering techniques to be sound.

Bush and his cronies tend to rhapsodize about liberating the Iraqi people and freeing them from the wanton cruelty of a tyrannical despot. However, as evidenced by its callous disregard for the health and well-being of the Iraqi people, particularly Iraqi children, the U.S. government's intentions in Iraq are not and never were altruistic. By way of example, since the April 2003 CRS report mentioned above, all subsequent reports bear the title, "Iraq: Recent Developments in Reconstruction Assistance." The word "humanitarian" is nowhere to be found.

How fitting.

The Starving of the Five (Hundred) Thousand

Ah, the hollow piety of the sanctimonious and self-righteous. They who shout and weep, curse and pray, toot horns and even juggle outside a Florida hospice where one very famous woman has died, and several other less-known and therefore unimportant people, gradually, slowly, and even painfully die. Sadly, none of them can die peacefully so long as the circus from on high is in town.

Genuflecting before poorly-made signs bearing poorly-conceived slogans, hands raised in order to be that much closer to Heaven, these self-declared men and women of faith clutch their personalized Bibles and bemoan the "black-robed tyrants" who sanctioned the "murder" of Terri Schiavo. In the same breath, many of these same God-fearing opponents of the Constitution and its separation of powers, praise their President Bush and other "saved" elected officials like Representative Tom DeLay and Senator Bill Frist for being honorable men by legislating increased activism in the federal judiciary for the sake of poor Terri. Of what use is the Constitution, after all, when it cannot save the chosen or, at least, increase one's political capital?

Honorable men, indeed.

Yes, Terri Schiavo starved to death. Starvation, however, is something with which she was entirely familiar. After all, it was her self-imposed starvation which ultimately placed her in her final state of persistent vegetation. Tragic though her plight may be, it was Terri's own actions that set the stage for her tragedy. Likewise, as determined by courts of law (activist and tyrannical though they might be), upon review of evidence to which the general public has not been privy, Terri preferred death over a persistent state of mere existence. According to those courts, bodies for which our fair President and his disciples have little need and less respect, the evidence of Terri's wishes was clear and convincing.

In short, Terri had choices.

Those condemned to death by St. George the Pious and St. Thomas the Just, and the "honorable men" who preceded them, didn't and don't have such choices. By way of example, the ordinary citizens of Iraq were long subjected to sanctions imposed by the honorable men of the United States through the United Nations, before the U.S. relegated U.N. to the dustbin of irrelevance. After ten years, those sanctions were responsible for the deaths of nearly a quarter-million Iraqi children. Many starved to death.

Increasing the number of dead Iraqi children were the 90,000 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq's civilian infrastructure during the U.S.-led Gulf War air campaign. Ninety percent of Iraq's electricity-generating facilities were destroyed, as well as water-pumping and sanitation systems. Raw sewage flowed through Iraqi streets and contaminated the drinking water, resulting in an explosion of infectious disease.

By 2000, thirteen percent of all Iraqi children died before they could turn five, more than double the child-mortality rate before the imposition of sanctions. By 2000, twenty-five percent of Iraqi children suffered from chronic and frequently irreversible malnutrition. Nine percent suffered from acute malnutrition.

In 1995, then-U.N. Ambassador Madeline Albright, when asked about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, remorselessly said, "[W]e think the price is worth it."

Apologists for U.S. policy argue that Saddam Hussein did far more to harm his people than sanctions ever did. Granted, Saddam Hussein must bear a significant portion of the blame for such deaths, particularly for his regime's obstruction of the Oil-for-Food program. Be that as it may, for years the U.S. deliberately turned a blind eye to the prohibited trade of Iraqi oil, trade which undermined the Oil-for-Food program and enriched only Saddam and his corporate partners in crime. Regardless, justifying U.S. behavior by comparing it to that of Saddam Hussein is, quite simply, asinine.

Moreover, the honorable men of the United States intended to deprive ordinary Iraqis of food and drinkable water through sanctions and massive bombing. During the Gulf War, Iraq's electrical grid was deliberately targeted by U.S. "smart" bombs in order to degrade the civilian infrastructure and accelerate the impact of the sanctions regime. In January of 1991, just before the start of the Gulf War and six months into the sanctions regime, the U.S. predicted that Iraq's ability to provide clean drinking water could not last more than six months. As a result, the U.S., with gruesome accuracy, predicted epidemics of cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid.

Having achieved their desired end of killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, the U.S. then repeatedly blocked U.N. humanitarian projects aimed at alleviating the suffering it had created. The U.S. blocked international efforts to permit foreign companies to mill flour for Iraq to curb the unconscionable rate of civilian deaths from malnutrition. The U.S. also blocked efforts to provide Iraq with water tankers, arguing they could be used to haul Iraq's much-celebrated but never-located chemical weapons. The U.S. thus denied Iraqis access to potable water despite the insistence of UNMOVIC that tankers designed to carry water could not also carry chemicals.

In today's parlance, the U.S. blocked every effort to have Iraq's feeding tube reinserted.

The pious and the holy did not protest the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children at the hands of the U.S. through its deliberate and calculated denial of food and water. Our sanctimonious elected officials did not pass ill-conceived and illegal legislation to end the suffering of Iraqi children. The falsely-pious pundits and politicians did not deem the starvation and thirst of the Iraqis sufficient bases to primp and preen before the cameras and congratulate themselves for being sufficiently familiar with the commands of the good book and the fundamentals of morality.

Instead, Saint George and his disciples, under false pretenses but with overwhelming popular support, decided to invade Iraq. The result? Sure, Saddam is gone. Good riddance. But unnoticed and unreported is that the already staggering rates of child malnutrition and child mortality have doubled and tripled, respectively, since the invasion. No demonstrations. No illegal legislation. No televised prayer vigils. Nothing.

What if Terri Schiavo were not white and Christian? What if she were, instead, a Muslim Arab? Would the self-righteous still have gathered outside her hospice and decried her court-sanctioned murder? Would they have given her a second thought? Would they have given her any thought at all?