Nada Adman, 13, has an open gash on her right cranium with underlying fracture and a large, deep shrapnel gauged cut into her upper left thigh.
A saying in America: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
Shock and awful out of Washington
OUR OPINION 3/24/03
Saturday and Sunday had plenty of shock and awe.
Shock that President
Bush failed to find diplomatic answers to head
off bombing Iraq. Awe that the United States is at war and people are
dying.
Shock that the
Bush administration failed to convince the United
Nations to support war efforts. Awe that the future might mean the
United States will have to continue flexing its muscle and buying off
nations to get support.
A new world order, indeed.
Mr. Bush has assembled
a team that is woefully lacking in diplomatic
skills. Americans are witnessing the result in their living rooms as
television networks cover breaking events as a kind of theater.
Footage and computer graphics come complete with background music to
resemble video games.
There's no time
for diplomacy -- but the Pentagon had lots of time to
prepare for this TV war. "This will be a campaign unlike any other in
history," General Tommy Franks said this week.
The general said
it from a $250,000 television set that a show-biz
producer designed.
Noted a New York
Times dispatch from Qatar, "Watching approvingly
were three young White House aides sent to Qatar to help package the
war for a global audience." There's no time for diplomacy -- but the Bush
administration had lots of time to come up with catchy phrases. Everything gets
a name. Jingoism abounds.
Regime change.
Axis of evil. Decapitation strategy. Embedded journalists. Let's roll.
For the moment, until a better name surfaces, the Bush team is calling the war
"Operation Iraqi Freedom."Hollywood and Madison Avenue have packed
up and moved to offices on the Potomac.
But doesn't this
effort to market the war do a disservice to the
American and British soldiers who are fighting for our countries?
Their sacrifices shouldn't be minimized.
Americans must
continue to call for peace and support the troops.
It's more important than ever because Congress, again, has abdicated
its responsibility to serve as a forum for national debate.
The House on Friday
passed a resolution backing the troops. No can
argue with that sentiment. But congressional leaders were unsatisfied
with a resolution that purely honored our soldiers. They had to add
passages expressing "unequivocal support" for Mr. Bush and praising
his "firm leadership and decisive action." Only 11 representatives
--
five from California -- stood up to this scheme to paper over dissent.
Lois Capps, the Santa Barbara Democrat who's made much of her vote
against
unilateral action, wasn't one of the them.
Noted Rep. Diane
Watson of Los Angeles in media reports: "I support
the troops. But I will not be coerced into endorsing the president's
failure to resolve the Iraq dispute peacefully. We are not at war
because it is necessary. We are at war because the president failed
to find a diplomatic solution." She's right.
Other members
worried about being called unpatriotic.
With each passing day, speaking up for peace and diplomacy becomes
harder in this sound-bite nation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(c) Copyright 2003 Santa Barbara News-Press
By Sarah Ferguson,
AlterNet.org
March 23, 2003
The idea, activists say, is to make the political and economic costs of war untenable. But they're facing a stiff crackdown by police, who have been using a city ordinance to declare the street assemblies illegal, penning people in on sidewalks and then arresting them en masse, and sometimes with force. Others in the movement say civil disobedience actions risk turning the attention from fighting the war to scrapping with police. Rev. Bob Edgar, head of the National Council of Churches and co-chair of the Win Without War Coalition – a group that has sought to build mainstream opposition to war – says his folks are ready to turn up the heat, but plan to use more traditional forms of civil disobedience. "We're looking hard at the lessons of Gandhi and Dr. King," he says. Beyond tactics, there's the question of targets. Some groups say they want to go after Congress and get them to rescind their approval of the use of force, or even withhold appropriations for the war. But considering that on Friday both the House and Senate passed resolutions to support the troops with near unanimity, it's hard to see such ideas gaining traction. There's also an online campaign afoot to demand that the General Assembly of the UN condemn the invasion as a violation of international law, and even talk of bringing Bush to trial as a war criminal. Others say it's time to take a step back and refocus. "I think what the peace movement has to do now is look at the real human costs of war," says Jason Mark of the Bay Area-based human rights group Global Exchange. "It's obvious we're not going to stop the war and bring the troops home. But if buildings are ablaze, it means thousands are probably dying. So our goal is to focus on the damage we've caused and how we are going to heal those wounds. The current budget for rebuilding Iraq is like two cents on the dollar compared to the $90 billion we're supposed to be spending on this war. And how are we going to afford it? We need to get back to the roots of why we hate war. Because the price in human life is just too high."
Sarah Ferguson is a freelance writer in New York who writes frequently about activism.
Charlie Clements
is a co-founder of the International Medical Relief
Fund and was its president for fifteen years. He is a former President
of Physicians for Human Rights and served on their board for fifteen
years. He is currently CEO and President of WaterWorks, a not-for-profit
organization that assists U.S. communities that are without running
water and sewer. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Air Force
Academy and a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Washington
School of Public Health. He also teaches at the Bartos Institute for the
Constructive Engagement of Conflict at the United World College in
Montezuma, NM. He has recently returned from an emergency mission to
Iraq sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social rights.
From a letter of his written recently, before the invasion:
I am a public
health physician and a human rights advocate. I have just
returned from a 10-day emergency mission to Iraq with other public
health experts to assess the vulnerability of the civilian population to
another war. I'm also a distinguished graduate of the USAF Academy and a
Vietnam veteran, so I have some sense of the potential consequences of
the air war we are about to unleash on Iraq as a prelude to the
introduction of American troops.
The population
of Iraq has been reduced to the status of refugees.
Nearly 60 percent of Iraqis, or almost 14 million people, depend
entirely on a government-provided food ration that, by international
standards, represents the minimum for human sustenance. Unemployment is
greater than 50 percent, and the majority of those who are employed make
between $4 and $8 a month. (The latter figure is the salary of a
physician that works in a primary health center.) Most families are
without economic resources, having sold off their possessions over the
last decade to get by.
Hospital wards
are filled with severely malnourished children, and much
of the population has a marginal nutritional status. While visiting a
children's hospital, we were told about newly emerging diseases that had
previously been controlled when pesticides were available. (Current
sanctions prohibit their importation.) Later I saw a mother who had
traveled 200 km with her young daughter, who suffered from leschmaniais,
or kala azar as it is known there. She came to the hospital because she
heard it had a supply of Pentostam, the medicine needed to treat the
disease. The pediatrician told her there was none. Then he turned to me
and, in English, said, It would be kinder to shoot her here
rather than let her go home and die the lingering death that awaits her.
Our interpreter, by instinct, translated the doctor's comments into
Arabic for the mother, whose eyes instantly overflowed with tears.
The food distribution
program funded by the U.N., Oil-for-Food, is the
world's largest and is heavily dependent upon the transportation system,
which will be one of the first targets of the war, as the U.S. will
attempt to sever transport routes to prevent Iraqi troop movements and
interrupt military supplies. Yet even before the transportation system
is hit, U.S. aircraft will spread millions of graphite filaments in
wind-dispersed munitions that will cause a complete paralysis of the
nation's electrical grids. Already literally held together with bailing
wire because the country has been unable to obtain spare parts due to
sanctions, the poorly functioning electrical system is essential to the
public health infrastructure.
The water treatment
system, too, has been a victim of sanctions. Unable
to import chlorine and aluminum sulfate (alum) to purify water, Iraq has
already seen a 1000% increase in the incidence of some waterborne
diseases. Typhoid cases, for instance, have increased from 2,200 in 1990
to more than 27,000 in 1999. In the aftermath of an air assault, Iraqis
will not have potable water in their homes, and they will not have
water to flush their toilets.
The sanitation
system, which frequently backs up sewage ankle deep in
Baghdad neighborhoods when the ailing pumps fail, will stop working
entirely in the aftermath of the air attack. There will be epidemics as
water treatment and water pumping will come to a halt. Even though it is
against the Geneva Conventions to target infrastructure elements that
primarily serve civilians, this prohibition did not give us pause in
Gulf War I and, based on current Bush administration threats, will not
this time. Pregnant women, malnourished children, and the elderly will
be the first to succumb. UNICEF estimates that 500,000 more children
died in Iraq in the decade following the Gulf War than died in the
previous decade. These children are part of the "collateral damage"
from
the last war.
How many civilians
will die in the next war? That is hard to say. One
estimate for the last Gulf War was that 10,000 perished, mostly during
the bombing campaign that led up to the invasion. That figure will
surely climb because our government has promised that a cruise missile
will strike Iraq every five minutes for the first 48 hours the war.
These missiles will seek out military, intelligence, and security-force
targets around highly populated areas like Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul,
Iraq's largest cities, where collateral damage is unavoidable. Unable to
meet the acute medical needs of the country's population now, the health
care system of Iraq will be overwhelmed by such an assault.
This scenario
is conservative. I have not taken into account any use of
weapons of mass destruction, or the possibility that the war will set
loose massive civil disorder and bloodshed, as various groups within the
country battle for power or revenge. I have also ignored what would
happen if we became bogged down in house-to-house fighting in Baghdad,
which could easily become another Mogidishu or Jenin.
There was a lot
that made me angry on that trip. I have worked in war
zones before and I have been with civilians as they were bombed by
U.S.-supplied aircraft, but I don't think I've experienced anything on
the magnitude of the catastrophe that awaits our attack in Iraq. Still,
as deeply troubling as this looming human disaster is, another issue
troubles me far more. If the U.S. pursues this war without the backing
of the U.N. Security Council, it will undermine a half-century of
efforts by the world community to establish a foundation of humanitarian
and human rights law. Such an act on our part would also violate the
U.N. Charter and make a mockery of the very institution we have helped
to fashion in the hopes it would help prevent crimes against humanity.
Many might define the consequences of such an attack on the population
of Iraq as just that.
Saddam is a monster,
there is no doubt about that. He needs to be
contained. Yet many former U.N. weapons inspectors feel he has been
defanged. His neighbors do not fear him any longer. There are many
Iraqis who want him removed but not by a war. Against the short-term
gain of removing Saddam, we must take into account that idea that we
may well unleash forces of hatred and resentment that will haunt us for
decades to come in every corner of the world. I can just hear Osama Bin
Laden saying now, "Please President Bush, attack Iraq. There's nothing
better you could do to help the cause of Al Qaeda!"
--Charlie Clements