Baghdad's hospitals sees young children with rare cancers too. I visited Al Mansour's pediatric oncology ward in January 2004. Mothers nursed children with leukemias, neuroblastomas, non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and other cancers rarely seen in young children. Iraqi parents were selling their cars, houses, and other possessions to pay for chemotherapy whose medicines the U.S. refused to supply because, it was claimed, they were potential ingredients in the manufacture of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Doctors in Fallujah repeat what I heard from doctors in Baghdad: they are reluctant to draw direct links with war zone chemical pollutants. "We simply don't have the answers yet....We need funds to conduct scientifically accurate studies.
Baghdad's babies were not, of course, victims of the May and November 2004 battles in Falluja. Are they victims of the economic sanctions of the 1990s? Or victims of pollutants from U.S.'s ongoing bombing raids over the no-fly-zones during the same period? Or victims of airborne pollutants from burning oil during Gulf War I? U.S. troops continue to suffer Gulf War Syndrome, so why would the region's children be immune? Will Iraqis have better luck receiving compensation for their enormous health disasters than the Vietnamese have had? Or will their plight be similar to that of the Vietnamese, and unacknowledged in the furor over American troop exposure? What about Kuwait? And Bosnia? And Gaza? And Afghanistan?
For more than eight years the U.S. Government has maintained the fallacy that bombarding Afghanistan is necessary, that that is a "righteous war against terrorism. The lawsuit against KBR includes burn pits in Afghanistan and it is a matter of time before the world is aware of the affects on troops and civilians there. It is likely that the wave of deformities in Afghan newborns will go undetected for a longer period than they took to crest in Iraq since many Afghan babies are born at home and in remote regions. A new study by the U.S.-based independent charity Save the Children says 60 out of every 1,000 Afghan babies die; this is already one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world.
When I began researching the military mindset I held that large institutions are inherently chaotic, that administrating millions of acres of military real estate around the world and the personnel occupying it " and their supply chains " results in inevitable errors, and that those responsible for public coffers would, occasionally, makes egregious mistakes that they'd want to hide. But, we the people, can no longer sustain this mindset and culture. We, the people, have reached the cul de sac of our "westward expansion. We have nowhere else to go. We must turn around and face...ourselves.... We must begin the real work of recognizing our complex mutual humanity and interdependence...and cop to our innate glory...and vainglory, intoxication with self, denial, egotism, and our less-than-perfect traits that cross political boundaries. As we recognize the incontrovertible evidence in the arc of degradation that is war we must accept our responsibility for it...and ensure we no longer contaminate our world or its people.
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