Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Syracuse, NY

Last spring I worked with the Iraq Peace Team in Baghdad. The US was invading then, and its bombardments were killing thousands � some within shouting distance of our hotel.

It seemed too then that, if I weren’t buried under tons of hotel rubble, my demise was most likely to come from the shattered and hurled glass of the hotel windows. I found myself dwelling on a verb that seemed � aptly or not — to capture the process: “eviserate.”

As it turned out, all of our team of about 25 survived. Our hotel, while routinely shaken, was never hit. In early April, however, a US tank shelled the hotel across the street from ours, killing international journalists. I didn’t see the shell hit, but moments later I saw flames consuming a corner of the building. News reports said the shell came from a US tank about a mile up river. It wouldn’t have taken much of a miscalculation for the shell to have hit us.

In August, four months after the invasion, I returned to Baghdad with several former IPT members. Among other things, we were there to keep an eye on the Occupation. After all, if the current US leadership remains in power, the US may be in occupation mode for years to come. US peace and justice activists need to witness and, if possible, monitor US occupations.

Instead of lodging in our old hotel, we stayed in a three-story house we leased in the Karrada district � a congested commercial/residential area also in downtown Baghdad. Some days before I arrived at the house, I learned that a man who had been staying at the house was shot in the head while out in the street. The killings were still hitting close to home.

As I walked the crowded Karrada boulevard, the image of that event frequently shuddered through my mind. But now the word “assassinate” replaced “eviscerate.” Understandably, perhaps, in all the miles and hours I spent walking Baghdad streets during the Occupation, I almost never ran into other westerners.

At least not civilian westerners. US Army convoys � generally two or more tanks at a time � were a frequent presence on Karrada. And always these vehicles bristled with men pointing guns out at those on the street. I found it remarkable, then, while I met much reserve among Iraqis, I virtually never met rudeness or hostility.

Our peace team spent lots of time out and about in Baghdad (and elsewhere in the country). At all times we were unarmed and unarmored. Nor, as is typical for westerners, did we have an armed guard at our house. We believe not only in the righteousness of nonviolence, but also in the practicality of nonviolence. We felt safer � less targeted � being unarmed and unarmored.
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In the persisting assault on Iraq, the fatalities aren’t always a matter of bullets or shells. According to UN studies, the 13 years of sanctions � only lifted since the invasion — led to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. In this country, whose name should be Job, the genocide has more than one source.

One of my teammates made friends with Joana, an Islamic girl stricken with leukemia. One day Cathy and I visited Joana and her mother and aunt in one of Baghdad’s many hospitals. I was taken with the girl’s grace and dignity � by her luminous beauty.

The next day when Cathy returned to visit Joana she learned Joana had died the day before, shortly after our visit. My brief encounter with Joana helped bring home to me the vileness of the depleted uranium used so promiscuously in the armaments of the invaders.

No, no one can prove D.U. � which is both toxic and radioactive and therefore carcinogenic — caused Joann’s leukemia. But in Iraq, especially in those areas where D.U. was dispersed by US shells, the rate of childhood leukemia tripled in the years after the first Gulf War. That first Gulf War was a nuclear war. Since the half-life of D.U. is measured in the hundreds of thousands of years, the capacity of the dispersed D.U. to kill sentient beings may well persist far longer than our species.

We know that the US used an unknown, but vast, amount of D.U. during the recent invasion. However, because D.U. is such an effective weapon (its hardness enhances the ability of shells to penetrate armor), the US government does not encourage research into its health effects. Nor, because of the astronomical expense, does the US take responsibility for cleaning up the civilian areas it has contaminated.

Nor are US soldiers adequately informed of their vulnerability in the modern battlefield. I’ve seen some US military training videos regarding D.U. In them soldiers are advised that, while D.U. is radioactive, there is no immediate risk of harm; slyly, there is no mention of D.U.’s dangerous long-term effects. Leukemia, for example, usually is latent for several years after exposure. Many Gulf War vets have mysterious maladies that seem linked to D.U. exposure.

The compounding tragedy is that many veterans of this recent invasion will also be stricken by D.U. disease. One way or another, our nuclear wars come home to roost.

In Iraq Ed works with Voices in the Wilderness, sponsor of the Iraq Peace Team. Here in Syracuse Ed is on the editorial committee of the Peace Newsletter.