Iraqi newborn in Fallujah (al-Jazeera)

Those of us who pay attention to such things (and our numbers are ludicrously small) felt sick to our stomachs upon hearing last month that at least 100,000 additional Vietnamese citizens have been killed or injured by American landmines and other leftover explosives since 1975. These fresh victims come on top of the two million or more killed in the official war itself and the thousands more affected by Agent Orange. Nor is there any end in sight. For people like me, who were born years after the last helicopter got the hell out of Saigon, it appears as if the sins of the fathers really are punished to the third and fourth generation. Except that today, in our “post-modern” civilization, where nobody can plausibly explain what any of our wars are really about, guilt and punishment are a mere accident of birth.

When it comes to the Iraq War, though, we won’t have to wait forty years to receive the butcher’s bill. Thanks to modern communications technologies, as well as to the unprecedented vileness of the munitions used in that brutal and utterly unnecessary invasion and occupation, we have the answers at our fingertips – if we would only bother to take a look. In a report broadcast on al-Jazeera over the weekend, doctors in Fallujah, a city of 300,000, are reporting a massive increase in birth defects and otherwise rare childhood diseases in that twenty-first century Guernica. (I already reported on the phenomenon in this space back in March of 2010.)

A study from July 2010 already showed a twelve-fold increase in childhood cancer in the city. It also reported that a whopping 14.7 percent of children were born with birth defects, a number more than fourteen times the figure recorded in the vicinity of atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki after 1945.

Since then, the situation has only grown more desperate, according to Dr. Samira Alani, a pediatrician employed at the city’s General Hospital. She has recorded 699 birth defects since October of 2009 alone. “There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we’ve never seen them until now,” she says. She and other physicians tell of babies with eyes in the center of their foreheads and others “who look like fish.” “So when I describe it all I can do is describe the physical defects, but I’m unable to provide a medical term.” She says that most of these babies die within twenty to thirty minutes of birth. The actual number may well be twice as high, she added, since between forty and fifty percent of Iraqi women give birth at home and potential birth defects among this group are not registered.

One bizarre side effect is that today only eighty-five boys have been born in Fallujah for every 100 girls since 2005, less than a year after the assault. This is a clear sign of genetic damage, to which males are more susceptible than females. (Under normal conditions, male births slightly outnumber female births.) The same thing happened after Hiroshima.

Dr. Alani places the blame on depleted uranium (DU) munitions and white phosphorus, both of which the US used in its twin attacks on the city back in 2004 after local resistance fighters killed four American mercenaries operating in the city. The US attacks destroyed or damaged up to sixty percent of the city’s buildings, including 36,000 out of the city’s 50,000 homes, sixty schools, and sixty-five mosques and shrines. Over 6,000 residents were killed and a quarter of a million fled for their lives, many to squatter camps lacking basic services. 50,000 – mostly men and teenage boys, who were prohibited from leaving – remained in the city, where they were hit by depleted uranium munitions, white phosphorus, and cluster bombs, poisoning the local environment for years to come. This group supposedly included only 600 to 6,000 resistance fighters. According to the New York Times, the marines targeted the main hospital first “because the US military believed it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties.”

The US is around eleven times larger than Iraq, so when it comes to understanding the comparable impact of events like this on US society I find it useful to multiply these figures by eleven. So try to imagine a foreign assault on an American city of 3.3 million (e.g. Chicago and its northern suburbs) with 66,000 dead, 2.75 million sent scurrying for their lives, 396,000 homes destroyed, 660 schools destroyed, and 715 churches flattened. Add in a few million extra cases of cancer for good measure, plus upwards of 11 million excess deaths nationwide due to a foreign invasion, and you might start getting an idea of how people in the region feel about all this.

In Babil Province in southern Iraq, cancer rates among all age groups have skyrocketed. The same is true in Fallujah. “There is also a primary school that was built [near a bombed out area],” Dr. Alani says, “and from that school alone three teachers developed breast cancer, and now two of them are dead. We get so many cases from this area, right where the hospital is.”

Picasso's "Guernica" (1937)

How can we even begin to think about such an atrocity against civilians and domestic resistance fighters? Earlier on in this essay, I compared the assault on Fallujah with Guernica, the Basque town that Hitler’s German Condor Legion bombed in 1937. Is this comparison justified? Sometimes I wonder. During the Spanish Civil War, Guernica was a small town of only a few thousand people. While the Luftwaffe destroyed most of it, the saturation bombing probably killed fewer than 500 inhabitants all told. I suspect the world would have forgotten the incident entirely were it not for Picasso’s iconic 1937 painting, the ultimate antiwar image.

It's doubtful that very many people today have ever heard about the bombing and the painting. Still, US Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN ambassador John Negroponte apparently thought the image was still explosive enough to have the tapestry copy that hangs in the UN General Assembly covered over when Powell gave his infamous presentation to the organization in February of 2003, where the former general shilled the US invasion of sovereign Iraq on the basis of its alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” Yet another case of the pot calling the kettle black, except that this time the kettle wasn’t.

America's public response to all these events is downright sociopathic, but I guess we are conditioned to blame the victim from an early age. As John Tirnan, the author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars, pointed out in the Washington Post last week,

Today there is virtually no support helping rebuild Iraq or Afghanistan - no campaigns by large charities, no open doors for Iraqi refugees. Even Iraqis who worked with the American military are having trouble getting political asylum in the United States and face a risk of retribution at home. The US response to so many dead, five million displaced and a devastated country is woefully dismissive.

By the way, Tirnan sets the total number of military and civilian victims of America's wars since 1945 at between six and seven million.  

So is al-Jazeera's Fallujah story just a typical example of Muslim anti-American horror propaganda, as some readers of this article will claim? I wish. Dr. Alani and other scientists involved in researching the extreme surge of birth defects and cancer cases in Fallujah published their findings last year in a report for the London-based, peer-reviewed journal Conflict and Health, which you can read here. The team of scientists, in cooperation with laboratories in Britain and Germany, discovered heightened radiation levels in local soil and in the hair of the surviving residents, which they attributed to DU munitions. According to the report,

it appeared that the cancer and leukemia death rates in the entire all-Iraq 0-4 group were about three or four times the levels found in western populations for this age group. These rates were three times higher in the South where Depleted Uranium (DU) was employed in the major tank battles near the Kuwait border (53 per 100,000 per year) than in the North (18 per 100,000 per year) where there was less fighting and where DU was not employed to such an extent. Furthermore, cancer and leukemia rates were highest in the 0-1 year group, which is unusual; the main peak in childhood cancer is generally found at age 4.

These birth defects are not limited to Iraqis, however. The report also pointed to

significant excess congenital heart defect and hypospadia rates in 11,961 US Gulf war veteran live-born offspring compared with military controls.

What goes around comes around, as more and more US and coalition military personnel can attest. If the assault on Fallujah isn’t a war crime, do you have a better name for it?