A "thank you" card from one of the saved.

But I object that she implies that our troops are killing and raping the citizens of that nation.

If Layla wanted to really make some changes, she should have gotten involved in her nation's political, economical, educational, or medical fields long ago . . . .Oh wait! . . . She was not allowed to! . . . Poor girl.

July 25 - US Ambassador April Galaspie told Iraq that their dispute with Kuwait is not a US matter

Health

Before 1990 and the imposition of sanctions, Iraq had one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East. Now Unicef reports that at least 200 children are dying every day. They are dying from malnutrition, a lack of clean water and a lack of medical equipment and drugs to cure easily treatable diseases.


The current food ration, while nearly sufficient in calories, does not include enough vitamins, minerals and protein for health or growth. Malnutrition is now endemic amongst children. Diseases like kwashiorkor or marasmus are common in paediatric wards. Before 1990 the most important problem faced by Iraqi paediatricians was childhood obesity.

Many sewage treatment plants were targets of the air strikes during the war. Others have since disintegrated without equipment and spare parts from abroad. Chlorine and other water purification chemicals are now banned under 'dual use' considerations. As a result children are dying of what should be treatable diseases: simple diarrhoea, typhoid, dysentery and other water-borne illnesses.

The health system has disintegrated under sanctions. Hospitals are short staffed with doctors' and nurses' salaries insufficient to support them. Medical equipment like incubators, X-ray machines, and heart and lung machines are banned. The Security Council consistently blocks vaccines, analgesics and chemotherapy drugs, claiming they could be converted into chemical or biological weapons. Problems with transportation and refrigeration mean that even drugs that are allowed - like antibiotics - arrive only intermittently. Children with leukaemia, who can be saved with a full course of antibiotics, die, because one dose is missing.

Morphine, the most effective painkiller has been banned by the Security Council. At the same time the number of cases of cancer has risen sharply especially in southern Iraq.

After the Gulf war Iraq was not allowed the equipment to clean up its battlefields. More than 1 million rounds of weapons coated in depleted uranium (basically nuclear waste) were used by the allies during the war. As much as 300 tonnes of expended DU ammunition now lies scattered throughout Kuwait and Iraq.

Depleted uranium dust gets into the food chain via water and the soil. It can be ingested and inhaled. Prolonged internal exposure leads to respiratory diseases, breakdown of the immune system, leukaemia, lung cancer and bone cancer.

Cases of cancers in Iraq have risen tenfold since 1990. If cancers continue on the present upward curve, 44 per cent of the population could develop cancer within ten years.

Education

In 1990 Iraq had one of the highest rates of literacy in the world. The Iraqi government maintained its commitment to high quality education even during the Iran/Iraq war.

The government built schools, trained teachers, and distributed free textbooks and other school supplies.


Graduates from high school were accepted in universities throughout the world. Primary school children received milk, cod liver oil, hummus, fresh fruit and vitamin supplements on daily basis.

This system has been gradually destroyed over the last ten years. Iraqi teacher salaries have fallen from $400 to $3 per month. Teachers have to work a second job in order to earn enough to survive.

Delegations from Unicef, AFSC and other humanitarian organisations paint the same picture. In classrooms all over the country children sit on the floor during lessons. There are no desks or chairs even for teachers. There are no school supplies: books, pencils and paper are all banned under 'dual use' considerations. Each class shares a single dilapidated textbook

"We are told that pencils are forbidden because carbon could be extracted from them that might be used to coat aeroplanes and make them invisible to radar. I am not a military expert, but I find it very disturbing that because of this objection, we cannot give pencils to Iraqi school children." (Farid Zarif, deputy director of the UN humanitarian program in Baghdad. New York Times, 3 January 1999)

Schools have no heating or cooling systems where previously each classroom had a stove and a fan. Sanitation facilities are minimal. Children with gastroenteritis have to be sent home because toilets are broken. Many of the children in the classrooms appear visibly malnourished or stunted. It is common for children to faint with hunger.

Agriculture

In 1999 74% of Iraq's arable land had salinity problems. This figure is increasing steadily with several thousand hectares of land going out of cultivation annually. This coupled with a lack of functioning agricultural equipment, fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and seeds has resulted in a massive decline in food production.

Livestock poultry and fish industries have suffered through severe shortages in spare parts for equipment and veterinary drugs. Bombing raids during and since the Gulf War killed many livestock. The bombardment affected conditions of surface soil, destroying plants and causing soil erosion.

Foot and mouth disease is now present throughout Iraq and is threatening to spread to neighbouring countries. The factory that was used to produce food and mouth disease vaccines was put out of commission by Unscom's biological weapons monitoring programme. Lack of refrigeration and transport facilities make it hard to distribute the vaccines that can be imported from abroad.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=115

Hey, I don't condone war and had hoped that this whole thing could have been solved differently. But it wasn't.

I guess I'm one of the few that feels Saddam had the opportunity to stop it at the beginning. And Bush didn't have to go in so fast. But there we are and we will have a "presence" there for many years.

So much is said about how many troops are coming home, but not much is said about those going over to replace them. 3,000 men from Michigan from the National Guard will leave over the next 3 months. 6,000 total from Michigan in the next 3 years. Plus private contractors are being hired to take over some of the military duties.

She refers to "Shiite shits."

Read what she wrote again. Feel the tone of it.

could we just agree that there's no good guys here at all and the death, destruction and chaos is sad and wasteful?

A "Crtl F" finds no such phrase, Arjuna.

If all you want is a war of words, ignore me.

Your message is logically inconsistent and factually in error. Your anger has the potential to be meaningful. There's a way that it can be.

Yes, her anger is understandable. So is yours. If you don't try to understand what you're calling the USA, you're making the same mistake the Bush administration made when it invaded Iraq. To understand, you have to put your anger on the shelf long enough to see the truth.

Don't worry, your anger will still be there when you get back. But you'll be in a better position to use it productively. See what I mean?

Are you so naive as to think THAT is the reason we have a military presence in the middle east?

People have always suffered in wartime. My heart goes out to the OP - sounds like this is very personal.

My point is that NOW she is free to say and write her feelings. In her own country's newspapers.

. . and you are free to state yours here at home.

But do NOT imply that our troops over there are murderers and rapists.

Saddam can never be allowed a fair trial

by Eric S. Margolis, Toronto Sun

July 31, 2003

If put on public trial, Saddam Hussein would have a field day revealing the embarrassing alliance between his brutal regime and Washington:

• CIA's role in bringing the Ba'ath Party to power in a 1958 coup, opening the way for Saddam to take control.

• US, Israeli, Iranian destabilization of Iraq during the 1970's by fueling Kurdish rebellion. Washington's egging on the aggressive Shah of Iran in the Shatt al-Arab waterway dispute, a primary cause of the Iran-Iraq War.

• US secretly urging Iraq to invade Iran in 1980 to overthrow that nation's revolutionary Islamic government.

• Covert supply of Saddam's war machine by the US and Britain during the eight-year Iran-Iraq conflict: biological warfare programs and germ feeder stocks, poison gas manufacturing plants and raw materials. Billions in aid, routed through the US Department of Agriculture, Italy's Banco del Lavoro, and the shady bank, BCCI. Heavy artillery, munitions, spare parts, trucks, field hospitals, and electronics.

Equally important, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operated offices in Baghdad that provided Iraq with satellite intelligence data on Iranian troop deployments that provided decisive in the war's titanic battles at Basra, Majnoon, and Faw.

• The murky role played by Washington just before Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The US Ambassador told Saddam 'the US takes no position in Arab border disputes.' Was this a trap to lure Saddam to invade Kuwait, then crush his army, or simple diplomatic bungling? Saddam could supply the awkward answers.

In short, Saddam was one of America's closet Mideast allies during the 1980's, a major recipient of US military and financial aid. Saddam's killing of large numbers of Kurds and Shia rebels occurred while he was a key US ally. Washington remained mute at the time. When Bush I called on Kurds and Shia to revolt in 1991, the US watched impassively as Saddam slaughtered the poorly-armed rebels.

Better a bullet-riddled Saddam, or one executed by a military kangaroo court in Guantanamo, or hanged by the new, American- installed 'Vichy' Iraqi regime in Baghdad.

Saddam should be handed over by the US to the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague that is currently trying Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and other accused Balkan war criminals. After all, it was Washington that engineered Milosevic's delivery to the Hague, an act for which the US deserves high praise. What applies to Milosevic applies equally to Saddam Hussein.

In fact, it would be better for the Iraqi leader to stand trial at the newly constituted International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. But the Bush Administration, in one of its most shameful acts, has refused to join this tribunal or cooperate with it.

And you've divined all this how?

I'm all ears, Arjuna.

I used my noggin'

Quote:

I used my noggin'

That doesn't tell me how you've figured out that my message is logically inconsistent and factually in error. Only the right wingers who can't face the truth have denied the things I've posted, and even they won't discuss them for fear that they'll discover things that they definitely do not want to face.

You keep working on your end, Arjuna, and I wish you all the best in your endeavor and I'll keep workin' on mine.

I think that getting a CA is pretty unlikely. Putting a few ex-prezes behind bars is the best way to ensure that they act in the future with a caution that rational human beings ought to use.

So both of you will be spitting on troops that come back ?

Lovely.