War Against The Children of Fallujah

Dear Mr. President,

The more I think on it the angrier I get: The American war machine and your betrayal of America and humanity, your pretense of peace and your acts of war. War is the ultimate obscenity and those who promote war—the politicians, the arms merchants, the generals—are especially despicable. War, in the end, is always waged against the children; ultimately they suffer the most, if not in death or physical injury, then in trauma, in poverty and hardship, in displacement, in the loss of parents, family, protection. But there is a special class of obscenity resulting from our use of depleted uranium (DU) in the Iraq war that is never talked about here: birth deformities. In Fallujah where depleted uranium was used extensively, birth defects are 14 times the rates in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the Bomb. There are some types of birth deformities never seen before, some so horrific they have no name. Fallujah women are afraid to bear children and there is no help from either the Iraqi or U.S. government. On April 14, 2003, the BBC reported that the Pentagon had no intention of cleaning up depleted uranium from battlefields: “There are no long-term effects,” a spokesman stated, but high levels of lead, mercury and DU remain in the air, ground and water around Fallujah and cancers and neurological problems have increased to levels 8 times higher than those in the U.S. The use of DU in bullets, bombs, artillery shells and rockets is a violation of the Geneva Conventions; the use of phosphorous is a war crime as well; so is the use of cluster bombs. We used all of them in Iraq and there is no doubt we used them all in Afghanistan as well. Iraq was Bush’s war (and Cheney’s and the other neocons) but you are complicit in their crimes against humanity by refusing to hold anyone accountable. The heavy wall of silence, denial and secrecy that surrounds our War of Terror makes you as guilty as any of them. Not to mention your expansion of the obscenity that is the War in Afghanistan or the Drone Wars or the Kill Lists or the Targeted Assassinations. Who gave you the right to wreak violence and destruction on humanity and the planet like some latter-day Attila the Hun? Who gave you the right to decide who lives and who dies? I found images of deformed babies born to the women of Fallujah that you need to see, Mr. President. Your web site doesn’t accept images so I’m printing them out and mailing them. Take a good long look at the horror of war. Think on it.

Photo Source Dr. Samira Alani / Al Jazeera

Photo Source: sunni-news.net