"Quiet Nuclear Bomb" Against Iraq
by Husayn Al-Kurdi
The salient questions and answers are almost always avoided in press and
media accounts of the situation in Iraq, resulting in a misleading and inaccurate
picture of the magnitude of suffering being experienced by the vast majority
in that tortured land. The problems of middle-class farmers and the relatively
minor calamities they are undergoing in their commercial and production
activities are way beside the point. Up to a million people or more have
died since the end of the Desert Storm holocaust. Much of a generation of
babies from the middle and lower classes have been malnourished to the point
of retardation. Fidel Castro correctly referred to this and similar embargoes
as a "quiet nuclear bomb" during his visit to New York.
The suffering and misery cannot be attributed to the Saddam Hussein regime,
repressive and undemocratic as it may be. It can only be chalked up to the
policies of strangulation imposed by the U.S. government-led sanctions regime,
implemented as a continuation of the desert slaughter of 1991. The Saddam
regime is in no way affected or directly hurt by the sanctions. It is the
people of Iraq who continue to be victimized in what can only be a conscious
policy of genocide. None of the western-sponsored "oppositions,"
whether of the Left or Right, Islamic or "secular," poses a credible
alternative, and their puppet status insures non-acceptance by the Arab
people of Iraq, who, like rank-and-file Arabs everywhere, seek to achieve
genuine self-determination without the tutelage of encroaching imperialism
from any quarter. What's good for Afghanistan in terms of ridding itself
of Russian imperialism must also be good for other subjugated peoples, such
as the Arabs and the Kurds.
The Kurds are occasionally cited as an excuse for the sanctions. The justifications
read "Saddam must be punished for what he did to the Kurds," "We
must protect the long-suffering Kurds" and so on. The fact is that
the Safe Haven for Kurds was set up as an irritant to Saddam and ultimately
as a base of operations against Kurdish freedom movements. The criminal
"Iraqi Kurd" parties, primarily the Kurdistan Democratic Party
and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, are collaborating with Turkey, under
the U.S. government's protection and with its active cooperation, to crush
the Kurdish resistance movement led by the Kurdistan Workers Party. These
quislings behave in every way like a lawless Mafia battening off of the
misfortune of the Kurds under their military control, committing atrocities
and outrages against their own people at the bidding of their sponsors.
In Iraq, people die from drinking bad water, die of colds because no aspirin
is available, die of a thousand and one preventable causes. The variations
are endless, but the dying and increasing desolation of the country are
the ever present constants. The sewage system, destroyed during "Desert
Storm," cannot be properly rebuilt because essential elements like
chlorine are banned as being "chemical weapons." As early as August
20th, 1991, it was noted by Marti Ahtisaari in his report to the UN Secretary-General
that "The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results."
And so it has gone on and on, without letup. The situation is reminiscent
of the Vietnam War, in which Vietnam was blown up in order to "save"
it. Principled people from all backgrounds should be outraged into taking
a clear and firm stand against this "quiet nuclear bomb" which
is devastating Iraq now.
