The

Chishti Nizami Habibi Soofie 

International Sufi Order

Pietermaritzburg

South Africa

786/92

The Myths of War  

By Imtiaz Wookay

 The drumbeats of war reverberate ever more loudly in the Middle East. And, as with every war, the first casualty is more often than not, that seemingly expendable tenet we refer to as the ‘Truth’. From beneath all the rubble of blatant lies, half-truths, fabrications and political rhetoric a single body of truth stretches out feebly to be recognised.

 If we are ever to rescue the truth, the very first obstruction that needs to be removed is this fallacy that the war against Iraq had ended in the first place. Unless we confront the fact that the US has been bombarding Iraq on almost a daily basis for the past twelve years. And unless we admit the culpability of the United States in the deaths of 1,5 million Iraqi men, women and children since 1991 (due to its application of sanctions as a strategy of war). We may as well consign the truth, along with all delusions of peace and democracy to their respective body bags.

 In fact, if early indications are anything to go by, we may as well start digging their graves. Because every time an American president has gone up on the podium and proclaimed ever so convincingly that: “Our quarrel is not with the Iraqi people”, Iraqi people have died. And every time that it has been pointed out by organisations such as Human Rights Watch, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation that 4,500 innocent children under the age of five die every month because of sanctions, US officials such as former US Defence Secretary William Cohen have pointed the finger at Saddam saying: "Saddam Hussein is responsible for the deaths of the children. All he has to do and has had to do [is] stop impeding the U.N. inspectors and he would not be in the situation he is in today."

 In one stroke of spin doctoring, many truths were sacrificed. In truth, the U.S were the greatest impediment to the UN arms inspectors. Not content with merely throwing bureaucratic hurdles in the path of the inspectors, the US also continued to pooh-pooh their findings (as they do to this day). The official line for the four-year absence of the UN inspectors was that Iraq had kicked them out. And this is the fabrication that has been recycled and laundered over and again until it has come to be accepted as the truth. The truth however is that it was the US that had ordered the inspectors out of Iraq in December 1998 - 48 hours before Operation Desert Fox.

 Furthermore, and with apologies to Mr Cohen, Sir, if my comments imply that Saddam was not tutored well by his old friends, the CIA,  (who gave him a hand up to power). But, the primary cause of the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children is due to two instruments, namely:

‘Smart Bombs’ and ‘Smart Sanctions’. Firstly, the ‘Smart Bombs’ were used to systematically and deliberately destroy civilian targets such as water treatment facilities, reservoirs, power stations and food production facilities etc. leaving Iraq in a preindustrial condition.  As a direct, intentional and foreseeable result of this destruction, tens of thousands of people have died from dehydration, dysentery and outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera, typhoid, malaria, polio, and hepatitis (caused by impure water).

 Shocking documents unearthed by Thomas Nagy of Georgetown University prove beyond a doubt that, in violation of the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government had intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War and that by deliberately creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment the US has in effect waged biological warfare against the people of Iraq. One such Defense Intelligence Agency document entitled "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," provides a cold analysis of the weaknesses of the Iraqi water treatment system, the effects of sanctions on a damaged system and the health effects of untreated water on the Iraqi populace.

 US officials are not apologetic about the fact that the deliberate targeting of the Iraqi water supply was part of a military strategy intended to provide the US with “postwar leverage”.

Then again, the US has always displayed an amazing sense of rectitude in its various war efforts. When the US cavalry rode in to ‘save’ Kuwait and indeed - the world from that menace to peace, Saddam Hussein twelve years ago, we were told that it was to uphold international law. But those very UN resolutions whose dignity the US claimed to uphold were the same one’s that the US had flouted in its unprovoked invasion of Panama just months before the Gulf War!

Today, we are told that a war on Iraq is a necessary evil because of the dire threats that Saddam’s elusive biological weapons present. The absurdity of that claim lies neither in whether these weapons exist nor in the willingness of Saddam to use them. He has demonstrated the latter quite proficiently in the past, the most notable case being that of Halabja in March 1988 where thousands of Kurds were massacred.   The absurdity of the claim is however evidenced by the damning revelations to come out of the Scott inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq affair. Not only were the weapons used in Halabja produced with German-supplied chemicals, but so impressed were the suppliers with Saddam’s expert handling of their products at Halabja that the British decided to secretly supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment.         

 The greatest myth of the ongoing war against Iraq has however been the illusion of safe, bloodless playing fields portrayed by the green fuzzy television images of the aerial blitzkrieg. We have not seen the devastation, the blood, and the gore that 88,000 tons of bombs from 110, 000 sorties have wrought. We have not seen the deformed babies or the children suffering from leukaemia as a result of the illegal use of depleted uranium in US warheads. We have not been allowed to empathise with the suffering of the Iraqi people. To show the people these images would be to undermine the legitimacy of an already unpopular war.