BY JOHN PILGER
The
dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert’s fingers.
It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and
school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries,
according to Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, “the seeds of our death.” An
internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr Teaching
Hospital in Basra, Dr. Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning
is irrefutable. “Before the Gulf War,” he said, “we had two or three
cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our
studies indicate that 40 to 48 percent of the population in this area
will get cancer: in five years’ time to begin with, then long after.
That’s almost half the population. Most of my own family have it and we
have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic
effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my
garden have mutated and can’t be eaten.”
Along
the corridor, Dr. Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a pediatrician, kept a photo
album of the children she was trying to save. Many had neuroplastoma.
“Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumor in two
years,” she said. “Now we have many cases, mostly with no family
history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase
of such congenital malformations is the same.”
Among
the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium
shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War were the
cause. A U.S. military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf War
battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, “Each round fired by an
A-10 Warhog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium.
Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare.”
Although
the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi
doctors argue that “the epidemic speaks for itself.” The British
oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the cancer program of the World Health
organization (WHO) in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal:
“Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics
are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the
Iraq Sanctions Committee].” He told me, “We were specifically told [by
the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an
organization that likes to get involved in politics.”
Recently,
Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant secretary general of the United
Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: “The
U.S. government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern
Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and
environmental dangers.”
Today,
a WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted jointly with the
Iraqi Ministry of Health, has been “delayed.” Covering 10,800
households, it contains “damning evidence,” says a ministry official
and, according to one of its researchers, remains “top secret.” The
report says that birth defects have risen to a “crisis” right across
Iraqi society where DU and other toxic heavy metals were used by the
U.S. and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr. Jawad
Al-Ali reports “phenomenal” multiple cancers in entire families.
Iraq
is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a
non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet
the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new
movie of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Two of the main
characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, “smashed up things and creatures and
retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other
people clean up the mess.”
The
“mess” left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war,
the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich.
Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse “presidential library and
museum” and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.
Their
“mess” is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to
the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs’ estimate of 4.5 million children
who have lost both parents. “This means a horrific 14 percent of Iraq’s
population are orphans,” he wrote. “An estimated one million families
are headed by women, most of them widows.” Domestic violence and child
abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe
ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of
homes.
In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side,
Gareth Peirce, Britain’s greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule
of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding
cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, “human beings presumed to hold [Islamist]
views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently…in
Blair’s language a ‘virus’ to be ‘eliminated’ and requiring ‘a myriad of
interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.’” The very
concept of war was mutated to “our values versus theirs.” And yet, says
Peirce, “the threads of emails, internal government communiques reveal
no dissent.” For Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British
citizens to Guantanamo was “the best way to meet our counter terrorism
objective.” These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await
prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of
Westminster politics, the faraway violence of “our values” is of no
interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs? 
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