War against Iraqi Children: Ghali Hassan

[teryang]

Wednesday 4th August 2004 :
Unmasked: The War Against Iraqi Children
"Why do' they' hate us?" George W. Bush, September 2001.

By Ghali Hassan

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=2422

<A humanitarian crisis has been looming in Iraq since the 1991 U.S. war due to shortage of drinking water and increase in waterborne diseases that kill children. Despite abundant supplies of water from the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Shatt-Al-Arab waterway formed by the confluence of the two rivers, because of the destruction to Iraq's infrastructure and the genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq by the U.S-UN.><snip>

<Furthermore, Professor Nagy noted: "As these documents illustrate, the United States knew sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq". Indeed Professor Nagy wrote: "The U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. And it was more concerned about the public relations nightmare for Washington than the actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent Iraqis". ><snip>

<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."

"This is precisely what the United States government did, with malice aforethought", Professor Nagy noted: "It destroyed, removed, or rendered useless Iraq's drinking water installations and supplies. The sanctions, imposed for a decade largely at the insistence of the United States, constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention. They amount to a systematic effort to, in the DIA's own words, "fully degrade" Iraq's water sources"(2). ><snip>

[JohnOneillsMemory]

1. Important still to realize the Pentagon practices intentional war crimes.

I sent this article to my African American Republican ex-military co-worker who still believes in the propaganda image of the US military as Superman Jesus.

Man, the distance between reality and perception...