Our Bombs Turned Iraq Into A Toxic Wasteland

By James Donahue

What was our military thinking when it lobbed bombs and shells tipped with depleted uranium into the heart of Iraq?

This once beautiful country, the “Golden Crescent” and place where the human race was said to have had its origins, has been turned into a toxic wasteland unfit for human habitation. Yet the Iraqi people still live there and the tribes are now involved in old conflicts among one another now that the mass contingent of American troops have pulled out.

Odds are that we have been plastering Afghanistan and possibly even the Balkans with these bombs filled with depleted uranium. The effects of what we have done there have yet to be revealed.

A recent story in a web publication IslamOnline.net, said cancer and birth defects have been spreading like influenza across Iraq ever since the first bombing of that country in 1991.

An estimated 120,000 to 140,000 Iraqis have been affected according to estimates released by the Iraqi health ministry.

The Al-Quds Press news agency noted that the number of birth defects and cancer cases has been rising daily since Iraq was turned into a radioactive nightmare. Dr. Abdul Kaximi, director of a hospital in Baghdad that specializes in nuclear medicine, said 7,500 Iraqis are being diagnosed with cancer every year.

Abdul Hamid Khalifa, an Iraqi specialist on carcinogens, said most of the cases are affecting people in the southern portion of Iraq that took the brunt of the bombing attacks during the 1991 Gulf War. He said women and infantry troops are identified as receiving the highest exposures to DU radiation.

Khalifa said contaminated water, expired imported foods, and a devastated health infrastructure caused by the crippling 13-year-old US sanctions against Iraq following the 1991 action created an “out-of-control” disaster in that nation even before the Bush invasion of 2003.

The jury is still out on the effects of the latest bombing attacks. Most of the bombs and shells lobbed into Iraq also contained depleted uranium.

Marion Falk, a retired chemical physicist involved in building nuclear bombs at Lawrence Livermore Lab, told a writer for Global Research that the DU weapons used in Iraq “fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way.”

Falk said much of the ordinance from U.S. cannons and bombs is reduced to radioactive particles so small they are quickly dispersed into the atmosphere as dust. Everyone in the area then breathes these particles. That included not only the Iraqi civilians but the troops on the ground as well.

Because conditions remained so chaotic during and even after the latest fighting, the medical infrastructure has remained compromised. Thus the full impact of the impact these bombs have had on the people there is only beginning to be learned.

What is frightening is that US troops on the ground received as much, or more, exposure to the radioactive toxic smoke and dust as the people who live there.

Rather than returning home with Gulf War Syndrome this time around, America may be welcoming home veterans soon to be stricken with a wide variety of cancers.

Surely the corporations that manufactured these bombs, shells and bullets laced with radioactive waste knew what would happen. They sent weapons designed to kill a lot of people, including our own soldiers, into that conflict. Was this done by design? Or does insanity run all through our military industrial complex?