By Caleb Atemi - 14th October, 2001

http://www.eastandard.net/EAHome/story14102001004.htm

As you read this article, the United States will be busy punishing the Talibans for keeping bad company. And if the Vietnam and Gulf wars are anything to go by, carpet bombing the ragged terrain of Afghanistan will only decimate thousands of civilian populations.

Yet as Americans sow destruction and despair in the name of fighting terrorism, it will also be harvesting millions of dollars.

Economics is one tag the world and the media always miss each time the US goes to war. After the 1991 Gulf war, in which the US killed close to a million people, America made billions of dollars in arms sales to countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They needed to arm themselves against Saddam Hussein. They created an opportunity to test some of their military hardware. Patriot missiles, born 10 years earlier could counter Iraqi scuds.

The September 11 events in Washington and New York presented George W. Bush with another opportunity to make money.

During the 1991 Gulf war the US did not wage war to uproot or destroy Saddam Hussein; neither was it protecting the rights of the Kurds and Kuwaitis. US was simply protecting and safeguarding its economic and political interests.

It was protecting Saudi oil by keeping in check the cheaper and competitive Iraqi oil. As US commentator Phyllis Bennis wrote: “Washington is determined to defend the Kingdom’s (Saudi Arabia) economy, largely to safeguard the West’s unfettered access to the Saudi’s 25 per cent of known oil reserves.”

In his book Hidden Agendas, journalist and filmmaker John Pilger says that Iraq presented the US with an opportunity to test munitions made from Depleted Uranium (DU). DU, say military experts, has radioactive half-life of 125,000 years and its effects on the populations and future Iraqi generations will be insidious and devastating.

Pilger’s book gives frightening accounts and details the Western media censored from the public eye during and after the Gulf war. Seventy per cent of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait - the equivalent of more than seven Hiroshima’s - completely missed their targets, falling on civilian populations.

A freelance journalist, Paul Roberts, who testified before the Clark Commission which investigated the Gulf war, described the killings of the Bedouins: “I experienced bombing in Cambodia but this was nothing like that.” After twenty minutes of this carpet bombing there would be a silence and you would hear a screaming of children and people, and then the wounded would be dragged out. I found myself with everyone else trying to treat injuries, but the state of people generally was one of pure shock.

They were walking around like zombies”. The Commission, chaired by a former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, heard how US pilots massacred thousands of Palestinians, Bangladeshis, Sudanese, Egyptians and other nationals towards the end of the war.

They slaughtered demoralised Iraqi soldiers mostly Kurds and Shia’s whom they had vowed “to save from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny”.

Says Pilger: “Unknown to journalists, in the last two days before the cease-fire, American armoured bulldozers were ruthlessly deployed, mostly at night, burying Iraqis alive in their trenches, including the wounded. Six months later New York Newsday disclosed that three brigades of the 1st Mechanised Infantry Division - ’The Big Red One’ - used snow plows mounted on tanks and combat earth movers to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some alive - in more than 70 miles of trenches” The US General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the Operation Desert Storm, estimated that 100,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed. He never mentioned civilian casualties.

Nevertheless, in a comprehensive study of the Gulf War casualties, the London-based Medical Educational Trust said that up to 250,000 children, women and men were killed or died as a direct result of American led attacks on Iraq. Other estimates by the American and French intelligence had placed civilian deaths at over 200,000.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that the: “Military devastation of Iraq combined with the effects of sanctions imposed by the Security Council - had been responsible for the deaths of more than 560,000 Iraqi children.”

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