And the Agony Continues

"The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable, affecting in one way or another, directly or indirectly, all Iraqis"
International Committee of the Red Cross Report, 11 April 2007

Last year’s John Hopkins University estimate of 650,000 ‘excess’ deaths in Iraq since 2003 has now been accepted even by those who trashed the authors. More recent estimates have put that figure closer to one million.

Two million Iraqis are now displaced within their own country, while two more millions are refugees abroad. The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that in the year to March 2007, more than 100,000 families have been displaced with more than half of Iraq’s doctors having fled the country.

Over the past six months, American troops have died in Iraq at the highest rate since the war began. From October 2006 to March 2007, 532 US soldiers were killed, the most during any six-month period of the war. April has been a particularly bloody month for British forces, with 10 soldiers killed so far.

Bodies are found across the country from Mosul to Kirkuk to Basra. They are handcuffed, blindfolded and bullet-ridden, bearing signs of torture. They are dumped at roadsides or found floating in the Tigris or Euphrates. A friend of mine who found her brother's body in a hospital's fridge told me how she checked his body and was relieved. ‘He was not tortured’, she said. ‘He was just shot in the head.
Haifa Zangana, Guardian 12/04/07

Following the John Hopkins report, Dr Gideon Polya (until recently senior biochemist at La Trobe University) estimates that this figure may be as high as one million.

"Using the most comprehensive and authoritative literature and UN demographic data yields an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq."
Dr Gideon Polya

At the same time as Dr Polya was alerting the world to the genocidal one million deaths our Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, was pronouncing that there had been ‘a massive amount of change in Iraq’. Yes indeed there has.

On Wednesday 18 April, to take just one day and by no means the worst in recent weeks, more Iraqis died than all British troops killed in that country so far.

We often see photos of children standing beside pools of blood and corpses, looking distressed and traumatised. According to a survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, about 70% of primary school students in a Baghdad neighborhood suffer symptoms of trauma-related stress such as bed-wetting or stuttering

Many Iraqi children have to pass dead bodies on the street as they walk to school in the morning, according to a separate report issued this month by the ICRC. Others have seen relatives killed or have been injured in mortar or bomb attacks.

" Some of these children are suffering one trauma after another, and it's severely damaging their development," said Said Al-Hashimi, a psychiatrist at Mustansiriya Medical School. "We're not certain what will become of the next generation, even if there is peace one day," Al-Hashimi said. But these children are the lucky ones. UNICEF has estimated that the under-five infant mortality in occupied Iraq and occupied Afghanistan totals 400,000 per year.

Incidentally none of this take account of the future human costs of the war and occupation. Just as in Hiroshima and Nagaski where deaths in the years after the bombs were dropped doubled those on the day, so that will be the case in Iraq as a consequence of the depleted uranium which is scattered across the country.

These outcomes add up to gross violations on the part of the US
‘ Coalition’ of the Geneva Convention Relating to the Protection of
Civilians in Time of War (Articles 38,55,56), the UN Genocide Convention (Article 2) as well as the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Rights of the Child Convention.

“ This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as it does Tony Blair," wrote Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet, "is party to a war crime of monstrous proportions."

All this human suffering does not come cheap. It is estimated that the US has spent $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or $6.5 million for each US soldier killed. The US military has lost over 3,300 soldiers in Iraq with 50,000 wounded and the UK has lost 144 in Iraq with more than 800 wounded. To this should be added the 50 UK troops killed to date in Afghanistan.

Talking of Afghanistan, six years after the US attacked that country, thousands of Afghanis are dead (being ‘unpeople’ in the words of writer Mark Curtis they are as uncountable as the Iraqi dead), 370 US soldiers and 170 other ‘Coalition troops have been killed. President Karzai is living in his own ‘Green Zone’ protected by foreign mercenaries because he dare not trust his compatriots whilst the rest of the country is either back under the control of the Taliban or given over to the Northern Alliance (notorious war lords and poppy growers) who preside over that crop’s harvest that increases exponentially as each year passes.

The cost of all this to NATO is $188 per annum whilst next to nothing is spent on reconstruction – ostensibly the reason our troops are in the country.

The obscenity of these wars and occupations continues and in this country it is not only Tony Blair with blood on his hands.