Reporter from Iraq

(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. They have both been published widely in
publications ranging from charity newsletters to Newsweek to the New
York Times. I give
you this background mainly to show that he is not someone who doesn't
know
what he is talking about and/or is easily led by Iraqi propaganda.)

Subject: Home in Belgrade
From: Thorne Anderson

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. Iraqis are very good at distinguishing between
the U.S. government and a U.S. citizen. Some friends and family are also
already wondering why I would want to go back to Iraq , as I am
committed and already anxious to do.
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 over-crowded 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