Operation Desert Slaughter
[Operation Desert Storm - 1991]
by Felicity Arbuthnot
Global Research, January 28, 2008
It is seventeen years since America and
Britain embarked on their 'Final Solution' for the population
of Iraq. The forty two day carpet bombing, enjoined by thirty
two other countries, against a country of just twenty five million
souls, with a youthful, conscript army, with broadly half the
population under sixteen, and no air force, was just the beginning
of a United Nations led, global siege of near mediaeval ferocity.
Having, as James Baker boasted they would, reduced 'Iraq to a
pre-industrial age', the country was denied all normality : trade,
aid, telecommunications, power, sanitation, water repairs, seeds,
foods, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment.
As I write, seventeen years ago, Iraq
would be entering the second week of a barbaric, near twenty four
hour a day, carpet bombing, which, then, as now (lest we forget
- yet again) scrupulously ignored Protocol 1, Additional to the
Geneva Convention of 1977: 'It is prohibited to attack, destroy,
remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival
of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas
for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water
installations and supplies such as irrigation works (denying them)
to the civilian population or to the adverse Party ... for any
motive.' __The blitzkrieg on Iraq deliberately targeted all 'indispensable
to survival'.
Within twenty four hours, most was destroyed.
The electricity went off within two hours, leaving patients on
life support machines and vital equipment, babies in incubators,
or those on oxygen to die. Refrigerators defrosted, all medicine
needing refrigeration, blood banks and vital saline solutions
for the injured were destroyed. Food rotted and between the bombing
and the bank closures (latter for fear of looting) replacements
were scarce to unbuyable.
In Najav, seventy dialysis patients, 'old
friends', said the senior nurse in charge of the unit, died for
want of electricity. The water supply was deliberately destroyed,
parts denied subsequently by the pathetic, US-UK dominated Sanctions
Committee - a Committee without a backbone between them - and
remains lethal to this day. __This was the plan by US Central
Command, it seems, all along. The destruction of Iraq's water
system has been described by Professor Nagy and Stephanie Miller
as: 'a slow motion holocaust'. Few could have put it better. __(See:
How the US deliberately destroyed Iraq's water. by Thomas J Nagy
: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NAG108A.html )
The telecommunications tower was also
one of the earliest casualties, an elegant, soaring, structure
on the edge of Baghdad's Mansur district. It lay, broken and crumpled,
as did the remains of those who worked inside it. Iraq was thus
cut off from the world, the extent of the bombing and atrocities
largely unknown for considerable time. Iraqis throughout the world
had no way of knowing if their families, friends, loves, were
dead or alive. Radio and television stations across Iraq were
blitzed so no warnings to populus could be given (journalists
too have special protection in wars, but decision makers, seemingly
are not only illiterate, but ignore legalities.)
Hospitals, health clinics, schools and
kindergartens were bombed, education eradicated so totally that
the stores for educational materials, in buildings separate from
the schools (usually in a central distribution point some miles
away) were also bombed. Agriculture in all forms was deliberately
targeted. Chicken farms bombed, flocks of sheep and goats, broadly
half of all buffalo were killed, dairy farms obliterated. Crops,
food processing factories reduced to rubble. A war crime stupendous
in its immensity, for which not one murderous, genocidal, infanticidal,
decision maker or pilot has stood trial.
Pharmaceutical factories were bombed,
the medical syringe factory was destroyed. And in an especially
psychotic policy, the countries who were Iraq's trading partners
and had built factories and installations for the country, bombed
those which they had built. America's gung-ho goons whooped over
bombing the Pepsi and Coca Cola factories. 'Bravery' doesn't come
more deviant, sub-normal and retarded than that. __Due to the
use of defoliants and napalm, half of all Iraq's trees, including
the great, ancient palms, died. Remaining palms did not bear their
succulent fruit for about five years. In the tranquil, family
farming settlements, amongst the palms, women and livestock alike
aborted and often died. Survivors consistently described a 'vapor'
coming from the 'planes, then the horrific aftermath, affecting
those living in the shelter of the palm groves or copses of trees,
where dwellers settled for relative cool from Iraq's searing summers.
And, of course, in this decimation from above, which dropped more
ordinance daily than was dropped daily in the second world war,
five times more explosive power was dropped than on Hiroshima.
The weapons used were depleted uranium,
which continues to irradiate Iraq and the region, the people,
flora and fauna -and will continue to do so for four and a half
billion years. '..protection of the natural environment against
widespread, long term and severe damage', is another absolute
dictate under the Geneva Convention. It proscribes absolutely
'... damage to the natural environment (prejucing) the health
and survival of the population.' Contraventions don't come bigger
than condemning inestimable generations yet unborn, to death and
deformity. The Nuremberg Principles are exercised by the treatment
of both civilians and prisoners and the: '... murder or ill treatment
...of prisoners of war ... further, extermination ... and other
inhuman acts against any civilian population'.
The 'inhuman acts', committed against
the Iraqi people in 1991 constitute war crimes which, since no
one was brought to justice, one can only hope haunt those responsible
for all time. __The slaughter on the Basra Road, after the ceasefire,
the fleeing civilians and retreating troops, ripped to pieces,
or incinerated in General Norman Schwartzkop's 'turkey shoot'.
The whole war, of course, was nothing else. Saddam Hussein had
offered, indeed, started to retreat from Kuwait before the carnage
began, but as ever, for the United States, conciliation was 'too
late'. Buses, lorries, cars were also targeted throughout the
forty two day massacre. Lorries carrying medicines, meat, essentials
were burned, with their drivers. Western troops took their repulsive
'trophy photos', with the pathetic remains of the incinerated
and dismembered.
When the (UK) Observer, to its credit,
printed the picture which became the symbol of the 1991 atrocities,
the Iraqi soldier, with his near melted face welded to the windscreen
of his vehicle, there was an outcry. The sensitivities of readers
should not be exposed to such horrors. Maggie O'Kane, writing
in the Guardian Weekly (16th December 1995) describes searingly,
reality. Relatives, praying, hope against hope, that those they
loved, had somehow miraculously survived the hadean inferno that
was the Basra Road massacre. "On the day the war ended, at
a bus station south of Baghdad, dusk was falling and the road
was covered with weeping women.
The Iraqi survivors of the `turkey shoot'
on the Basra Road were crawling home with fresh running wounds.
Their women were throwing themselves at the battered minibuses
and trucks, pulling, pleading, begging. `Where is he, have you
seen him ? Is he not with you ?' Some fell to their knees on the
road when they heard the news. __Others kept running from bus,
to truck, to car, looking for their husbands, their sons or their
lovers - the 37,000 Iraqi soldiers who would not come back. It
went on all night and it was the most desperate and moving scene
I have ever witnessed." There was worse. Think of the excesses
of horrors the Western media has deluged its readers with over
the years, those perpetrated by people of other cultures, with
other features: Stalin, Pol Pot, indeed Saddam Hussein and consider
this in Maggie O'Kane's article: ' __When Sergeant Joe Queen returned
to his home town of Bryson City North California, after the Gulf
war, the first thing he saw was a huge banner draped outside Hardees
Burger Restaurant, which read: `Welcome Home Joe Queen.' Joe Queen,
who'd been awarded a bronze star, wanted to chill out after the
war, but Bryson City wouldn't let him Joe, 19-years old, had gone
straight from Desert Storm to become one of the first American
troops to cross the Saudi border in an armored bulldozer. His
job was to bury the Iraqis alive in their trenches and then cover
over the trenches real smooth so the rest of the Big Red One,
as The First Armored Mechanized Brigade is called, could come
nice and easy behind him. 'Joe Queen doesn't know how many Iraqi
troops he buried alive on the front line.
But five years later, in his military
base in Georgia, he remembers well how it worked: __`The sand
was so soft that once the blade hits the sand it just caves in
right on the sides, so we never did go back and forth. So you
are traveling at five, six, seven miles an hour just moving along
the trench... You don't see him. You're up there in the half hatch
and you know what you got to do. You did it so much you could
close your eyes and do it... I don't think they had any idea because
the look on their faces as we came through the berm was just a
look of shock. `While I was retreating, I saw some of the soldiers
trying to surrender, but they were buried. There were two kinds
of bulldozers, real ones, actual ones, and also they had tanks
and they put something like a bulldozer blade in front of them.
Some of the soldiers were walking towards the troops holding their
arms up to surrender and the tanks moved in and killed them. They
dug a hole in the ground and then they buried the soldiers and
leveled it.' One survivor described the friends buried alive,
who he had laughed with, eaten with ...'I really don't know how
to describe it. We were friends. I ate with some of them. I talked
to some of them. I cannot express how I felt at that moment.....
I saw one soldier and his body was just torn apart by a bulldozer.
The upper part was on one side and the lower on the other side.'
I hope your nightmares and those of your
colleagues haunt for all time Joe Queen. May the specter of those
for whose live burial you and your murderous colleagues were responsible,
follow in all your footsteps, for all time. __These mass graves
also carry the names of the leaders who ordered the decimation
of Iraq in 1991,their military Commanders and soldiers, on every
one of them. Ironically, the mass graves of Saddam Hussein have
seemingly not materialized, just war graves and those from the
uprising encouraged by the US and UK at the end of the 1991 decimation.
The war, of course, never ended. The thirteen year subsequent
embargo cost maybe one and a quarter million lives...
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