Iraq.

[skippy]

Watching Gendra Jackson on Dateline ABC Australia.
We have not been seeing much from Britian ( England ) here in Australia. I have been wonder how Tony Blair is going in his own party.
There are 44 backbenches against. The Opossition party are with him. The people are against him.
Here in Australia no government member has spoken out against their party.
We will most likely have to wait for 50 years for the release of government papers to know who in the government is against.
I read a bit of history about the middle east some time ago.
The real problem there is that Britain and France drew up the boundarys. Now these lands are tribal so the boundary lines are wrong just like they are in some other places in the world.
The Kurds in Iraq and Turkey should be different countries.
Have a good day.

[lenire]

Skippy,
On face value it would appear the Blair has got it wrong on Iraq. But, he has been a good leader for Britain and one of the best on the world scene. He is head and shoulders above his US partner. In recent months he has shown great courage which is very unusual and rare in a politician. In his current stance he has committed poitical suicide. He will go in the next election and it will be a sad lose to the world.

About Iraq and the middle-east. It is very easy to see the mistakes of Britain/France under League of Nations and UN mandates in the way the borders turned out. But hind sight is always that way. At the time, with the terror being raged by Ibn Saud and the empire he was building by force, and the actions against Turkey during the 1914/18 fiasco, and the influence of the emirs etc that were helping, at the time the borders made some sense. Now of course we all know how badly it has turned out. Glad you have read some about the region. I've studied it on and off for the past thirty years and it still does not make sense. No doubt because of the numerous sects and tribal influences.
Your generation has inherited a situation where there is so much hate there seems to be not solution.

Len

[yoda]

Radioactive War
At the close of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields, clotting the air with poisonous clouds of black smoke and saturating the ground with swamps of crude. It was justly called an environmental war crime.

But months of bombing of Iraq by US and British planes and cruise missiles has left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the US hit Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.

More than 10 years later, the health consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. And they are dire, indeed. Iraqi physicians call it "the white death"-leukemia. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent. The situation is compounded by Iraq's forced isolations and the sadistic sanctions regime, recently described by UN secretary general Kofi Annan as "a humanitarian crisis", that makes detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.

"We have proof of traces of DU in samples taken for analysis and that is really bad for those who assert that cancer cases have grown for other reasons," says Dr. Umid Mubarak, Iraq's health minister.

Mubarak contends that the US's fear of facing the health and environmental consequences of its DU bombing campaign is partly behind its failure to follow through on its commitments under a deal allowing Iraq to sell some of its vast oil reserves in return for food and medical supplies.

"The desert dust carries death," said Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, an oncologist and member England's Royal Society of Physicians. "Our studies indicate that more than forty percent of the population around Basra will get cancer. We are living through another Hiroshima."

Most of the leukemia and cancer victims aren't soldiers. They are civilians. And many of them are children. The US-dominated Iraqi Sanctions Committee in New York has denied Iraq's repeated requests for cancer treatment equipment and drugs, even painkillers such as morphine. As a result, the overflowing hospitals in towns such as Basra are left to treat the cancer-stricken with aspirin.

This is part of a larger horror inflicted on Iraq that sees as many as 180 children dying every day, according to mortality figures compiled by UNICEF, from a catalogue of diseases from the 19th century: cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, e. coli, mumps, measles, influenza.

Iraqis and Kuwaitis aren't the only ones showing signs of uranium contamination and sickness. Gulf War veterans, plagued by a variety of illnesses, have been found to have traces of uranium in their blood, feces, urine and semen.

Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding name for uranium-238, the trace elements left behind when the fissionable material is extracted from uranium-235 for use in nuclear reactors and weapons. For decades, this waste was a radioactive nuisance, piling up at plutonium processing plants across the country. By the late 1980s there was nearly a billion tons of the material.

Then weapons designers at the Pentagon came up with a use for the tailings: they could be molded into bullets and bombs. The material was free and there was plenty at hand. Also uranium is a heavy metal, denser than lead. This makes it perfect for use in armor-penetrating weapons, designed to destroy tanks, armored-personnel carriers and bunkers.

When the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into microscopic fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic dust, carried on the desert winds for decades. The lethal dust is inhaled, sticks to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually begins to wreck havoc on the body: tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems, leukemias.

In 1943, the doomsday men associated with the Manhattan Project speculated that uranium and other radioactive materials could be spread across wide swaths of land to contain opposing armies. Gen. Leslie Grove, head of the project, asserted that uranium weapons could be expected to cause "permanent lung damage." In the late, 1950s Al Gore's father, the senator from Tennessee, proposed dousing the demilitarized zone in Korea with uranium as a cheap failsafe against an attack from the North Koreans.

After the Gulf War, Pentagon war planners were so delighted with the performance of their radioactive weapons that ordered a new arsenal and under Bill Clinton's orders fired them at Serb positions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia. More than a 100 of the DU bombs have been used in the Balkans over the last six years.

Already medical teams in the region have detected cancer clusters near the bomb sites. The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, has tripled in the last five years. But it's not just the Serbs who are ill and dying. NATO and UN peacekeepers in the region are also coming down with cancer. As of January 23, eight Italian soldiers who served in the region have died of leukemia.

The Pentagon has shuffled through a variety of rationales and excuses. First, the Defense Department shrugged off concerns about Depleted Uranium as wild conspiracy theories by peace activists, environmentalists and Iraqi propagandists. When the US's NATO allies demanded that the US disclose the chemical and metallic properties of its munitions, the Pentagon refused. It has also refused to order testing of US soldiers stationed in the Gulf and the Balkans.

If the US has been keeping silent, the Brits haven't been. A 1991 study by the UK Atomic Energy Authority predicted that if less than 10 percent of the particles released by depleted uranium weapons used in Iraq and Kuwait were inhaled it could result in as many as "300,000 probable deaths."

The British estimate assumed that the only radioactive ingredient in the bombs dropped on Iraq was depleted uranium. It wasn't. A new study of the materials inside these weapons describes them as a "nuclear cocktail," containing a mix of radioactive elements, including plutonium and the highly radioactive isotope uranium-236. These elements are 100,000 times more dangerous than depleted uranium.

Typically, the Pentagon has tried to dump the blame on the Department of Energy's sloppy handling of its weapons production plants. This is how Pentagon spokesman Craig Quigley described the situation in chop-logic worthy of the pen of Joseph Heller.: "The source of the contamination as best we can understand it now was the plants themselves that produced the Depleted uranium during the 20 some year time frame when the DU was produced."

Indeed, the problems at DoE nuclear sites and the contamination of its workers and contractors have been well-known since the 1980s. A 1991 Energy Department memo reports: "during the process of making fuel for nuclear reactors and elements for nuclear weapons, the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant... created depleted uranium potentially containing neptunium and plutonium"

But such excuses in the absence of any action to address the situation are growing very thin indeed. Doug Rokke, the health physicist for the US Army who oversaw the partial clean up of depleted uranium bomb fragments in Kuwait, is now sick. His body registers 5,000 times the level of radiation considered "safe". He knows where to place the blame. "There can be no reasonable doubt about this," Rokke recently told British journalist John Pilger. "As a result of heavy metal and radiological poison of DU, people in southern Iraq are experiencing respiratory problems, kidney problems, cancers. Members of my own team have died or are dying from cancer."

Depleted uranium has a half-life of more than 4 billion years, approximately the age of the Earth. Thousand of acres of land in the Balkans, Kuwait and southern Iraq have been contaminated forever. If George Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Bill Clinton are still casting about for a legacy, there's grim one that will stay around for an eternity. CP

[lenire]

Yoda.....Wonderful post, where did you get the info.

Len

[happy_gunner]

I thought I'd come back to put my pedant's hat on
The Mespotamian borders were drawn up by the British, but specifically by British Petroleum who pressured (OK ordered) the politicians to alter their plans for the region.
Lenire you have got very out of touch with Britain, Blair is held in contempt by almost everyone for incompetence, dishonesty and extreme cowardice. These flaws are permanent and obvious.
He took the "attack Iraq" option for the above reasons - a cheap PR stunt - he did the same in 1998 and it worked, it saves him having to summon up the courage to answer questions on all the domestic balls-ups.
(Like Thatcher, Blair has read "The Prince")
The "people are against him" this time because Blair and his cronies have been caught telling really dumb-as-f**k lies about Iraq, and even worse - whining like a pansy 'cos no-one believes them.
The "public opposition" is mostly an anti-bull**** movement, more than anti-war.
If someone with credibility supported the attack on Iraq then public opinion would swing, but no politician wants to give the impression they believe Blair's BS.
The opinion polls are pretty constant - the majority are pro-war ONLY IF the UN Security Council agrees - in other words the public trust the leaders of Pakistan, Ecuatorial Guinea, Colombia etc but not our own government.
The only (and IMHO valid) defence of Blair is that the opposition arouse similar feelings of disgust. The last election was the worst turnout in living memory for the above reason.

Blair should still win the election assuming Saddam is got rid of and the TV screens are full of "liberated" Iraqis thanking Bush and Blair.

[lenire]

HG.
Welcome back.

You are right in that I do not follow issues at home as much as I follow world issues and the crap that Bush et al pumps out. But neither have I lost touch with reality.
I understand your anti Blair stance and of course the anti war sentiment expressed at home. I share it. However it must be said that the internal issues and politics in the UK must be separated from anything that involves the stability of the world at large, and it is within this domain that I make my Blair comments. As for the Iron Lady, I wish we had more like her.

Len.

[happy_gunner]

Lenire, quote: "I understand your anti Blair stance and of course the anti war sentiment expressed at home."
Respectfully, no you don't.
Blair is the biggest obstacle to removing Saddam (something the US has finally wised up to) as it was Blair who firstly talked Bush into delaying the attack until he got the UN on board, and then wrecked his own plan by giving Colin Powell the infamous "fake intelligence" which poor old Colin proudly held aloft to the world and called a "fine document"
When it emerged the "intelligence" had been faked by Blair's lackeys in Labour headquarters there is no way the Germans, French & Russians could pretend to believe it, hence the self-dug hole our leaders are in. The "utterly frivolous" (so says Brzezinsky) six-point (now five-point) plan for the UN shows they are still digging

EVERYONE is "anti-Blair" - apart from maybe Saddam. The "keep-Blair" people (ie the people in the Labour Party who don't want him out right now, but later) agree he is a cowardly, incompetent liar but tolerate him because "he wins elections".
This is politician-speak for "Blair is up Rupert Murdoch's arse and keeps the newspapers on our (Labour) side".
No Murdoch = No election win.
There is NO significant "anti-war" sentiment, apart from the usual suspects, the public overwhelmingly backs British troops attacking Saddam on condition it is for legitimate reasons, and not solely to keep Blair in a job.