If it happens, I really wish that cartels capture every single yankee soldier

  • @StugStig
    link
    101 year ago

    Well it’s blitzkrieg speed only if besieging Iraq for 13 years doesn’t count. That’s not even considering the fact that Iraq only had 3 years to rebuild after the Iran-Iraq war before it was destroyed yet again in the first Gulf war.

    JOY GORDON: I think it’s 660,000 and 880,000 children under five who died as a consequence of the sanctions.

    The US used as its criterion dual use, but then, if you look literally at that term “dual use” and you say, “Well, what are all the things that a civilian economy uses that a military also uses?” the answer is everything.

    At one point, someone from the Pentagon came before the 661 Committee with a vial of cat litter, and he said, “This can be used to stabilize anthrax,” suggesting on that grounds that the 661 Committee should be blocking everything up to and including cat litter. So, there was, at one point, someone within the US — this process of deciding what items to block or not, he was overruled. But he argued that Iraq should not be permitted to import eggs on the grounds that the yolks of the eggs could be used as a medium in which to grow viruses, which in turn could be used to produce biological weapons. So that was the — that was very typical of the reasoning on the US side.

    But the real damage was the infrastructure. The US, for example, finally allowed Iraq to import a sewage treatment plant, which was desperately needed. Three hundred thousand tons a day of untreated sewage were going into Iraq’s rivers, causing epidemics, again, of waterborne diseases, triggering increases in child mortality from dysentery. So, the US finally agreed that Iraq could import a sewage treatment plant, but then blocked the electrical generator needed to run it, on the grounds that an electrical generator was something that the military might be able to use, and therefore, to be in some sense on the safe side, it was prohibited, as well. And if you do that, if you cripple the infrastructure of a country, that’s a death sentence on a massive scale. And that’s exactly why you would have half-a-million, three-quarters of a million young children dead as a result, along with a general public health catastrophe. Seventy percent of Iraqi women were anemic. Thirty percent of Iraqi children were malnourished. And on and on and on.