Iraq’s Children: Ever Expendable
by Felicity Arbuthnot / February 7th, 2015
It’s a hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
- Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN, on the “embargo related” deaths of half a million Iraqi children, May 12, 1996
The most traumatized child population on earth.
- Professor Magne Raundalen, Centre for Crisis Studies, Bergen, Norway, February 1992
Tony Blair was, mind-stretchingly, presented with Save the Children’s Global Legacy Award, on November 19, 2014. His acceptance speech included that his: “… sense is that amidst all the challenges, and all the misery and deprivation that we seek to conquer and vanquish, there is something hopeful … something to be thankful for.” Ironically, just two months earlier (August 15, 2014) Save the Children released a report on the trauma amongst Iraq’s children in Northern Iraq alone after eleven years of a Bush-Blair driven illegal invasion and ongoing resultant conflict. Iraq’s children, it was clear, had no hope and nothing “to be thankful for.”
Yet Blair was lauded by an organization that claims: “We envision a future in which no child will die from preventable causes and where every child has nutritious food and clean water.” Without Blair’s claims of fantasy WMDs with which Iraq could wreak annihilation in “45 minutes”, a lie quoted by General Colin Powell at the United Nations exactly twelve years ago, February 5, 2003, for the children of Iraq a genocidal “preventable cause” might have been avoided. “Nutritious food and clean water”, had, of course, been deliberately destroyed on US Central Command’s order to bomb all water facilities in Iraq in 1991. Food was poisoned by the use of Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons, contaminating all fauna and flora. DU’s “half-life” is 4.5 billion years. And it is not “depleted.”
The contamination nightmare was compounded in orders of magnitude by the further use of DU weapons in 2003, used again by the UK under Blair’s government. Daily Hansard – Written Answers, 22 July 2010. Column 459W, Depleted Uranium. Befoulment of air, water and food for infinity condemns future generations of unborn, newborn and developing children in Iraq and the region to a poisoned legacy of cancers and deformities for generations to come. War crimes unequalled in history. Moreover: “The special investigator of the UN Sub-Committee on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has declared DU munitions illegal under existing humanitarian law. DU weapons also produce a toxic metal fume (sic) that violates the Geneva Protocol on the Use of Gas in War, which the US signed in 1975.”
Further, after thirteen years of the US-UK driven embargo resulting in the deaths of an average of six thousand children a month from “embargo-related causes”, according to the UN, Prime Minister Blair was integral in instigating a war against children: In 2003 Iraq’s population was just twenty four million. Over forty percent were aged 0-14. The median age of the country was nineteen. By 2010, seven years into an unending war, over a quarter of Iraqi children suffered from Post Traumatic Stress disorder. (War Child Report, May 2013.) In the five months prior to the Report’s publication, 700 children and young people had been killed, a figure, as all on Iraq, almost certainly a significant underestimate. Between financial constraints, fear of authority and the dangers of travel, numerous deaths are unrecorded.
Read more: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/02/iraqs-children-ever-expendable/
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