This powerful and appalling account of some the consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom hasn’t gotten much attention yet, but the facts it records belong on American news screens. The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn describes the Iraqi city of Fallujah six years after the Marine assault. US forces surrounded Fallujah and pounded it with artillery, much of it apparently uranium enriched explosives. Six years later, the health consequences are dramatic, comparable to Hiroshima, according to an international team of researchers which has compiled and studied the data. A dramatic rise in infant mortality, birth defects and childhood cancers, striking increases in leukemia and lymphoma. Operation Iraqi Freedom will apparently be a gift to the Iraqi people that keeps on giving.

Childhood cancers and birth defects evoke particularly strong emotions. In fact they were one of the “talking points” brought up by those who sold the Iraq war. In 2002, Jeffrey Goldberg, back from his volunteer stint in the Israeli Army, regaled Slate readers and CNN viewers with accounts of Saddam’s “weaponized aflatoxin” whose “only value is to cause liver cancer, primarily in children.” Goldberg was spinning of course—Saddam had developed no weaponized aflatoxin-- but he recognized that childhood cancer was a heart-wrenching way to goad Americans to back an invasion of Iraq. He got the invasion he wanted, and the Iraqis have their childhood cancers. If Goldberg has his way, we can only imagine what will be visited on Iranian children. 

Other Americans will read the reports from Fallujah and, as Jefferson said, tremble for their country when they reflect that God is just.

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The war, when it came, was directed as much against Gaza’s economy as against Hamas militants. Key features of the bombing campaign were designed – as its principal planner, General Gabi Ashkenazi of the Israeli air force, explained to me afterwards – to destroy the ‘critical nodes’ that enabled Gaza to function as a modern society. The air force had dreamed of being able to do this sort of thing since before the 2006 Lebanon War, and Ashkenazi thought the introduction of precision-guided ‘smart bombs’ now made it a practical proposition. Gaza’s electrical power plants, telecommunications centres, sewage plants and other key infrastructure were destroyed or badly damaged. Ashkenazi, I recall, was piqued that bombing in addition to his original scheme had obscured the impact of his surgical assault on the pillars supporting modern Gazan society.

…

Visiting Gaza in that first summer of postwar sanctions I found a population stunned by the disaster that was reducing them to a devastated Third World standard of living. Gaza City auction houses were filled with the heirlooms and furniture of the middle classes, hawked in a desperate effort to stay ahead of inflation. In the upper-middle-class enclave of Tel al-Hawa, I watched as a frantic crowd of housewives rushed to collect food supplies distributed by the American charity Catholic Relief Services. Doctors, most of them trained in Britain, displayed their empty dispensaries. Everywhere, people asked when sanctions would be lifted, assuming that it could only be a matter of months at the most (a belief initially shared by Haniyeh). The notion that they would still be in force several years later was unimaginable.

The crossing authorities’ stated purpose was to review and authorise exceptions to the sanctions, but its actual function was to deny the import of even the most innocuous items on the grounds that they might, conceivably, be used in the production of rockets. An ingenious provision allowed any committee member to put any item for which clearance had been requested on hold. So, while UNRWA and other NGOs, and aid-giving nation states, might wish to speed goods to Gaza, Israel and its ever willing American partner could and did block whatever they chose on the flimsiest of excuses. As a means of reducing a formerly functioning territory to a pre-industrial condition and keeping it there, this system would have aroused the envy of the blockade bureaucrats derided by Keynes. Thus in 2007 Israel blocked, among other items, salt, water pipes, children’s bikes, materials used to make nappies, equipment to process powdered milk and fabric to make clothes. The list would later be expanded to include switches, sockets, window frames, ceramic tiles and paint. In 2009 Israeli representatives forcefully argued against permitting Gaza to import powdered milk on the grounds that it did not fulfill a humanitarian need. Later, the diplomats dutifully argued that an order for child vaccines, deemed ‘suspicious’ by weapons experts in Tel-Aviv, should be denied.

Throughout the period of sanctions, Israel frustrated Gaza’s attempts to import pumps needed in the plants treating water from Wadi Gaza, which had become an open sewer thanks to the destruction of treatment plants. Chlorine, vital for treating a contaminated water supply, was banned on the grounds that it could be used as a chemical weapon. The consequences of all this were visible in pediatric wards. Every year the number of children who died before they reached their first birthday rose, from one in 30 in 2006 to one in eight four years later. Health specialists agreed that contaminated water was responsible: children were especially susceptible to the gastroenteritis and cholera caused by dirty water.

Obviously, not exactly the same as in Iraq. I had to do a bit of re-writing, but not so much; replacing place-names nearly suffices. In Gaza, sanctions have alternated with massacres; summer 2008, winter 2008-2009, while sanctions began in 2005 and continue to this day, predated by the violent repression of the Second Intifada. Sanctions were obviously ineffective in both cases in terms of their objectives: getting rid of the government and replacing a belligerent government with a friendlier one, more amenable to American/Israeli diktat. Another crucial difference? In the case of Gaza the world resisted and resists. Boats went in to try and break the siege insistently, and that insistent pressure perhaps prevented the very worst from taking place in Gaza. Gaza is not Iraq from 1991-2003 and that is very good. But it could have been, and since there will inevitably be more resistance from Gaza, it could yet be.

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This is a lesson I learned in the 1990s, when still at university and researching Iraq under the sanctions. The sanctions were one of the great war crimes of the 1990s, killing at least half a million Iraqi children and creating the situation that would contribute, a decade later, to the mess that was/is Iraq. It was the deliberate de-modernization of a country, and one of the great shames of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton's policies.

Andrew Cockburn has a great piece in the LRB reviewing a new book on the sanctions and their impact:

The first intimation that the blockade would continue even though Iraq had been evicted from Kuwait came in an offhand remark by Bush at a press briefing on 16 April 1991. There would be no normal relations with Iraq, he said, until ‘Saddam Hussein is out of there’: ‘We will continue the economic sanctions.’ Officially, the US was on record as pledging that sanctions would be lifted once Kuwait had been compensated for the damage wrought during six months of occupation and once it was confirmed that Iraq no longer possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or the capacity to make them. A special UN inspection organisation, Unscom, was created, headed by the Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, a veteran of arms control negotiations. But in case anyone had missed the point of Bush’s statement, his deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates (now Obama’s secretary of defence), spelled it out a few weeks later: ‘Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world community. Therefore,’ Gates continued, ‘Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.’

Despite this explicit confirmation that the official justification for sanctions was irrelevant, Saddam’s supposed refusal to turn over his deadly arsenal would be brandished by the sanctioneers whenever the price being paid by Iraqis attracted attention from the outside world. And although Bush and Gates claimed that Saddam, not his weapons, was the real object of the sanctions, I was assured at the time by officials at CIA headquarters in Langley that an overthrow of the dictator by a population rendered desperate by sanctions was ‘the least likely alternative’. The impoverishment of Iraq – not to mention the exclusion of its oil from the global market to the benefit of oil prices – was not a means to an end: it was the end.

Visiting Iraq in that first summer of postwar sanctions I found a population stunned by the disaster that was reducing them to a Third World standard of living. Baghdad auction houses were filled with the heirlooms and furniture of the middle classes, hawked in a desperate effort to stay ahead of inflation. In the upper-middle-class enclave of Mansour, I watched as a frantic crowd of housewives rushed to collect food supplies distributed by the American charity Catholic Relief Services. Doctors, most of them trained in Britain, displayed their empty dispensaries. Everywhere, people asked when sanctions would be lifted, assuming that it could only be a matter of months at the most (a belief initially shared by Saddam). The notion that they would still be in force a decade later was unimaginable.

Do read the whole thing.

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Remember all the folks who denied that there was any meaningful Israel agenda in the push for war with Iraq? Well here are Jim Lobe and Eli Clifton at lobelog covering the rollout of the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel, which has been getting so much mainstream media attention:

Some things are just too good to be true.

It seems that the new Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) is based out of the same office as the old Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), suggesting that, Yes, Virginia, the same people who led the march to war in Iraq are behind the new Emergency Committee, which, in its very brief existence to date, has attracted a lot of mostly critical attention in the blogosphere.

The link, Clifton shows, is to Randy Scheunemann, the man who schooled Sarah Palin in pro-Israel foreign policy as she was being rolled out two years ago. When will this network be exposed by the mainstream media? Before an attack on Iran, I pray.

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More than 60 people have been killed in Baghdad in a wave of bombings targeting Shia Muslim pilgrims over the past three days, security sources say.

Iraqi officials said blasts on Thursday, the latest in a string of bombings in Iraqi capital, killed 12 people, pushing the death toll in the recent attacks to 62.

One bomb struck in central Bab al-Muazam neighbourhood while a second exploded in the southeastern Mashtal district, officials said.

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Norman Finkelstein joins us in the studio to report that one should judge the alleged "peace process" with results, not rhetoric. Obama has certainly given enough lip service to settlement moratoriums, proximity talks, and direct talks, but what are the results?

The Obama administration set up a clash with Arizona over the state's immigration bill, SB 1070, this week when it filed suit in federal court claiming that the law is a breach of federal authority.  The law goes into effect later this month and would allow law enforcement officials to stop anyone on suspicion of being undocumented.

In the wake of SB 1070's passage, states around the country have initiated copycat bills and other legislation aimed at cracking down on immigration. But in addition to the Holder Justice Department's lawsuit, progressive state legislators are fighting back on the state level, and activists are pushing for commonsense immigration bills on both a state and federal level. We are joined by Arizona state legislator Kyrsten Sinema and Suman Raghunathan of the Progressive States Network to discuss the ongoing fight.

Finally, inspired by the film Winter Bone, Laura has some thoughts about the military, the economy, and what happens when we bring home thousands of soliders in need of new jobs.

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Winter Bone features a 17 year old girl, the sole supporter of her catatonic mom, and two younger siblings. Put up as collateral on their disappeared father's bail, the family's about to lose their house. 17 year old Ree looks longingly at the ROTC drills in the high school she had to leave. The best possible scenario for her is military recruitment. Actually, it's the only out on offer, and the $40,000 signing bonus could save her family's house.

Winter Bone made me think of Michael Massing's essay in the New York Review of Books. Who fights and why?   “With its guarantees of housing, employment, health insurance, and educational assistance," he wrote, "the US military today seems the last outpost of the welfare state in America.” Massing's piece appeared in April 2008, before the economic crisis really hit, before unemployment reached 10% officially (and around 16% by more precise calculations -- or 44 percent if you're in Detroit).

The US is currently shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. It's not just in the Ozarks that the recruiters are the only ones with jobs around. The economy shed 125,000 jobs in June. That's about the number of troops we have left in Iraq.

Winter Bone just amped up the volume on a creepy question in my head.  As Massing noted, “In today’s America, the hunger for a college degree is so great that many young men and women are willing to kill—and risk being killed—to get one.”  And what happens to the vets when they have their degree, or when they don't want one or already have one?

We've long heard about fighting people over there so we don't have to do it here. Is the colder truth becoming that we're sending people over there because we sure can't employ 'em over here? And we're scared to death of what unrest might come with a massive return of men and women who've served and endured -- and who expect something better for their families than starvation wages, and no social services when they get back?

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Does this sound familiar? Here's neoconservative Eli Lake, writing in the Washington Times:

The United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that the benefits of bombing Iran's nuclear program outweigh the short-term costs such an attack would impose.

The UAE has denied that its ambassador made such a statement. Does it even matter? Here is Joe Lieberman in Israel, in Jerusalem Post:

The US will address the Iranian threat "through diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions if we can, but through military action if we must," said Lieberman.

Where are Judy Miller and Jeff Goldberg and the New Yorker and Brookings? Bill Keller of the Times? Your country needs you, Keller.

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Esther gives us her thoughts on the ongoing fight to win the hikers' freedom and the role of investigative journalism in the matter.

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Dean Baker is part of a Nation forum on inequality that will be posted Thursday - featuring Robert Reich, Orlando Patterson, Jeff Madrick, Dean Baker, Katherine Newmann and Matt Yglesias. It looks at the widening inequality gap in the recession and under President Obama, and at possible solutions.

Media coverage of this week's G20 summit focused on "violent" protests and police crackdowns, and reporters Brandon Jourdan and Beka Economopoulos certainly found themselves in the middle of the conflict--Jourdan, as well as Jesse Freeston of The Real News network, were attacked outside of the summit.

But amid the chaos, Jourdan and Economopoulos found a renewed bond between labor activists and environmentalists, all struggling for green jobs. They submitted this report for GRITtv.

“Redemption is looking at ourselves, asking what we can do better instead of blaming our leaders,” says Walter Mosley,  author and columnist for the Nation Magazine. “We can’t look to corporate media for our answers,” he continues, “we have to look to ourselves.”

Expressing political redemption through semi-spiritual language, Walter Mosley joins us in the studio to discuss the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd’s varied career, quite possibly one of redemption. Byrd was known for shifting his politics in accordance with his country and his constituency; while he once filibustered the Civil Rights Act, he also vehemently spoke out against the Iraq war and executive power. Should he be credited for his progress and “redemption”, or should his constituents?

Since their arrest last July by Iranian forces near the Iraq border, three Americans — Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd— have been at the center of a diplomatic struggle between Tehran and Washington.  Esther Kaplan is Editor at the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and has worked closely with Shane Bauer in the past.  This week, the Investigative Fund and The Nation broke the story that the detained hikers were most likely arrested in Iraqi territory, not in Iran.

Esther gives us her thoughts on the ongoing fight to win the hikers' freedom and the role of investigative journalism in the matter.

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