Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2003 09:34:15 -0800
Subject: Fwd: Letter from Iraq

FYI from a colleague...

For background info, Thorne Anderson was a journalism professor in the
US, has a graduate degree from the University of Missouri in photojournalism
and has lived and worked in the U.S., Far East and Eastern Europe. He is now
living in Belgrade with Kael Alford, who is also a photojournalist.

Subject: Home in Belgrade

From: Thorne Anderson

February 12, 2003

Sorry to unload just one long letter on all of you. I didn't intend it that
way, but this is what spilled out. I am writing to let friends and family
know that I am home in Belgrade after spending a month in Iraq.

Kael was in Belgrade with me last week. She just returned from 10 days in
Albania with the NY Times. Before that, she was in Bosnia with US News. We
were lucky we could both be home at the same time. She's back in Bosnia
with the NY Times this weekend.

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. It just seems to me that as a photojournalist, Iraq is where I might
best play a role in making a small difference.

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.

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 U.S. ally) from flying into northern Iraq on numerous
occasions to bomb Kurdish communities there.

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.

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 leukemia and lung, kidney, and thyroid
cancers associated with poisoning by heavy metals (such as DU). 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 lets 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.

The greatest killer of young children in Iraq is dehydration from diarrhea
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 Defense 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 diarrhea. Around 4,000 children die every month from starvation and
preventable disease in Iraq -- a six-fold increase since pre-sanctions
measurements.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 aside and realistically expect the U.S. government
to suddenly reverse the momentum it has 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.*

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.

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 imperiled 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.

Love,

Thorne

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