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This letter was recently written by Thorne
Anderson, a journalism professor and outstanding
photojournalist who has spent much time in
Iraq. Please read it and share it with as many
people as you can. - 12th Feb 03 |
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| Dear Friends |
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| Some of you have written to me with concerns for
my safety in Iraq, but this was easily one of the safest
assignments I have taken. In all my time in Iraq, in
spite of an intense awareness of the threat of an impending
attack by the United States, I never met a single Iraqi
who had a harsh word for me. Iraqis are very good at
distinguishing between the U.S. government and a U.S.
citizen. Some friends and family are also already wondering
why I would want to go back to Iraq, as I am committed
and already anxious to do. It just seems to me that
as a photojournalist, Iraq is where I might best play
a role in making a small difference. |
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| I did some work for Newsweek and Time magazines while
in Iraq, but that kind of work has really become secondary
for me. I do what I can to influence (in admittedly
small ways) what kinds of stories those big magazines
do, but ultimately their stories are nearly worthless
at confronting the inhumanity of American foreign policy
in the Middle East. I will continue to work with Time
and Newsweek (and with other corporate media) on stories
that I don't find offensive, but the bulk of my efforts
are now going into reaching alternative media and in
supporting anti-war groups in the states. I hope I
can find some time soon to come to the states for a
speaking tour of sorts. |
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| There's a lot of talk about whether or not the U.S.
will go to war with Iraq. What many people don't realize
is that the U.S. is already at war in Iraq. I made
two trips last month into the "no-fly zone" created
by the U.S. with Britain and France in southern Iraq.
Actually it would be better named the "only we
fly" zone or the "we bomb" zone. "We" refers
to the United States who does almost all of the flying
and bombing (France pulled out years ago, and Britain
is largely a nominal participant).There is another
no-fly zone in the north, which the U.S. says it maintains
To protect the Kurds, but while the U.S. prevents Iraqi
aircraft from entering the region, it does nothing
to prevent or even to criticize Turkey (a US ally)
from flying into northern Iraq on numerous occasions
to bomb Kurdish communities there. |
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| Turkey's bombing in Iraq is dwarfed by that of the
U.S. The U.S. has been bombing Iraq on a weekly and
sometimes daily basis for the past 12 years. There
were seven civilians killed in these bombings about
two weeks ago, and I'm told of more civilians last
week, but I'm sure that didn't get much or perhaps
any press in the U.S. It is estimated that U.S. bombing
has killed 500 Iraqis just since 1999. Actually I believe
that number to be higher if you take into account the
effects of the massive use of depleted uranium (DU)
in the bombing. The U.S. has dropped well in excess
of 300 tons of this radioactive material in Iraq (30
times the amount dropped in Kosovo) since 1991. Some
of the DU is further contaminated with other radioactive
particles including Neptunium and Plutonium 239, perhaps
the most carcinogenic of all radioactive materials,
and these particles are now beginning to show up in
ground water samples. |
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| I spent a lot of time in overcrowded cancer wards
in Iraqi hospitals. Since U.S. bombing began in Iraq,
cancer rates have increased nearly six-fold in the
south, where U.S. bombing and consequent levels of
DU are most severe. The most pronounced increases are
in leukaemia and lung, kidney, and thyroid cancers
associated with poisoning by heavy metals (such as
DU). |
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| But the most lethal weapon in Iraq is the intense
sanctions regime. The toll of the sanctions is one
of the most under-reported stories of the past decade
in the U.S. press. I have seen a few references to
the sanctions recently in the U.S. press, but invariably
they will subtly discredit humanitarian concerns by
relying on Iraqi government statements rather than
on the statistics of international agencies. My careless
colleague at Time magazine, for example, recently reported
that "the Iraqi government blames the sanctions
for the deaths of thousands of children under the age
of five." That's simply not true. The Iraqi government,
in fact, blames the sanctions for the deaths of *more
than a million* children under the age of five. But
let's put that figure aside, for there's no need to
rely solely on the Iraqi government, and let's refer
instead to UNICEF and WHO reports which blame the sanctions
directly for the excess deaths of approximately 500,000
children under the age of five, and nearly a million
Iraqis of all ages. We all have an idea of the grief
borne by the United States after the September 11 attacks.
Employing the crude Mathematics of casualty figures,
multiply that grief by 300 and place it on the hearts
of a country with one tenth the population of the United
States and perhaps we can get a crude idea of what
kind of suffering has already been inflicted on the
Iraqi people in the past decade. |
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| The greatest killer of young children in Iraq is
dehydration from diarrhoea caused by water-borne illnesses
which are amplified by the intentional destruction
of water treatment and sanitation facilities by the
United States. The U.S. plan for destroying water treatment
facilities and suppressing their rehabilitation was
outlined just before the American entry into the 1991
Gulf War. The January, 1991, Dept. of Defence document, "Iraq
Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," goes into great
detail about how the destruction of water treatment
facilities and their subsequent impairment by the sanctions
regime will lead to "increased incidences, if not
epidemics, of disease." I can report from my time
in Iraq that all is going to plan. Cholera, hepatitis,
and typhoid (previously almost unheard of in Iraq)
are now quite common. Malaria and, of course, dysentery
are rampant, and immunities to all types of disease
are extremely low. Even those lucky children who manage
to get a sufficient daily caloric intake risk losing
it all to diarrhoea. Around 4,000 children die every
month from starvation and preventable disease in Iraq
— a six-fold increase since pre-sanctions measurements. |
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| Treatment of illnesses in Iraq is complicated by
the inability of hospitals to get the drugs they need
through the wall of sanctions. In a hospital in Baghdad
I encountered a mother with a very sick one-year-old
child. After the boy's circumcision ceremony, the child
was found to have a congenital disease which inhibits
his blood's ability to clot, which results in excessive
bleeding. The child encountered further complications
when he took a fall and sustained a head injury which
was slowly drowning his brain in his own blood. In
any other country the boy would simply take regular
doses of a drug called Factor 8, and he could then
lead a relatively normal life. But an order for Factor
8 was put "on hold" by the United States (prohibited
for import), so the doctor, the mother, and I could
only watch the child die. |
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| Much is made of Iraq's alleged possession of weapons
of mass destruction, but it is the sanctions, the use
of depleted uranium, and the destruction of Iraq's
health and sanitation infrastructure that are the weapons
of greatest mass destruction in Iraq. |
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| The situation is so bad that Dennis Halliday, the
former Humanitarian Coordinator for the UN in Iraq,
took the dramatic step of resigning his position in
protest at the sanctions. "We are in the process
of destroying an entire society," Halliday wrote. "It
is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal
and immoral." And Halliday isn't alone. His successor,
Hans Von Sponeck, also resigned in protest and went
so far as to describe the sanctions as genocide. These
are not left-wing radicals. These are career bureaucrats
who chose to throw away their careers at the UN rather
than give tacit support to unethical policies driven
by the United States. |
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| Being in Iraq showed me the utter devastation U.S.
policy (war and sanctions) has wrought there and has
given me a vision of what horror a new war would bring.
And, of course, an attack on Iraq would be just the
beginning of a terrifying chain of reactions throughout
the Middle East and the rest of the world. Having worked
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Palestine in the
past year, I am intensely aware of how the fragile
politics and powers outside Iraq can be dramatically
unsettled by a U.S. invasion within Iraq. |
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| It's easy to imagine an impending tragedy of enormous
proportion before us, and I ask myself who must step
up and take responsibility for stopping it. Clearly
the U.S. government is the most powerful actor, but
it is equally clear that we cannot turn side and realistically
expect the U.S. government to suddenly reverse the
momentum it as created for war. So I feel the weight
of responsibility on me, on U.S. citizens, to do whatever
we can with our individually small but collectively
powerful means to change the course of our government's
policy. I try to picture myself 10 or 20 years in the
future, and I don't want to be in the position where
I reflect on the enormous tragedies of the beginning
of the 21st century and admit that I did nothing at
all to recognize or prevent them. |
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| I don't know how this letter will sound to my friends
and family who are living in the U.S., in a media environment
which does very little to effectively question U.S.
policy and almost nothing to encourage ordinary people
to participate in making a change. I imagine this letter
may sound like the political rant of some kind of extremist
or anti-American dissident. But that's not how it feels
to me. This doesn't feel like a political issue to
me so much as it feels like a personal issue. I am
appalled on a very human level at the suffering which
U.S. policy is already inflicting and I am terrified
by the prospects for an even more chaotic and violent
future. |
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| And let's be honest about U.S. policy aims. Those
in the U.S. government pushing for war say they are
doing so to promote democracy, to protect the rights
of minorities, and to rid the region of weapons of
mass destruction. But is the U.S. threatening to attack
Saudi Arabia or a host of other U.S. allies which have
similarly un-democratic regimes? How many of us would
advocate going to war with Turkey over the brutal repression
of its Kurdish minority and of the Kurds in Iraq? And
do we expect the U.S. to bomb Israel or Pakistan which
each have hundreds of nuclear weapons? Let's remember
that leaders in the previous weapons inspection team
in Iraq had declared that 95% of Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction capabilities were destroyed. |
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| And let's not forget that in the 1980s, when Iraq
was actually using chemical weapons against the Kurds
and the Iranian army, the U.S. had nothing to say about
it. On the contrary, at that time President Reagan
sent a U.S. envoy to Iraq to normalize diplomatic relations,
to support its war with Iran, and to offer subsidies
for preferential trade with Iraq. That envoy arrived
in Baghdad on the very day that the UN confirmed Iraq's
use of chemical weapons, and he said absolutely nothing
about it. That envoy, by the way, was Donald Rumsfeld. |
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| While Iraq probably has very little weaponry to actually
threaten the United States, they do have oil. According
to a recent survey of the West Qurna and Majnoon oil
fields in southern Iraq, they may even have the world's
largest oil reserves, surpassing those of Saudi Arabia.
Let's be honest about U.S. policy aims and ask ourselves
if we can, in good conscience, support continued destruction
of Iraq in order to control its oil. |
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| I believe that most Americans - Republicans, Democrats,
Greens, Purples or whatever - would be similarly horrified
by the effects of sanctions on the civilian population
of Iraq if they could simply see the place, as I have,
up close in its human dimensions; if they could see
Iraq as a nation of 22 million mothers, sons, daughters,
teachers, doctors, mechanics, and window washers, and
not simply as a single cartoonish villain. I genuinely
believe that my view of Iraq is a view that would sit
comfortably in mainstream America if most Americans
could see Iraq with their own eyes and not simply through
the eyes of a media establishment which has simply
gotten used to ignoring the death and destruction which
perpetuates American foreign policy aims. While the
American media fixates on the evils of the "repressive
regime of Saddam Hussein," both real and wildly
exaggerated, how often are we reminded of the horrors
of the last Gulf War, when more than 150,000 were killed
(former U.S. Navy Secretary, John Lehman, estimated
200,000). I simply don't believe that most Americans
could come face-to-face with the Iraqi people and say
from their hearts that they deserve another war. |
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| I believe in the fundamental values of democracy
- the protection of the most powerless among us from
the whims of the most powerful. I believe in the ideals
of the United Nations as a forum for solving international
conflicts non-violently. These are mainstream values,
and they are exactly the values that are most imperilled
by present U.S. policy. That's why, as a citizen of
the United States and as a member of humanity, I can't
rest easily so long as I think there is something,
anything, that I can do to make a difference. |
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| Love, Thorne |
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| [Please call your congressmen about
a non-violent solution to the Iraq situation! Look
in the blue pages of your phone book for a local district
office.] |
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