NOVANEWS

Reports that the raid organized to kill Osama bin Laden included backup plans for a military confrontation with Pakistani forces underscore the highly reckless character of the entire operation.

According to a front-page story in Tuesday’s New York Times, the special operations force sent into Pakistan to kill Bin Laden on May 1 was substantially beefed up on the orders of President Barack Obama, so as to provide it with the ability to “fight its way out” if confronted by Pakistani forces during or after the attack on the compound in Abbotabad. The city, 35 miles from the capital Islamabad, is a military cantonment and site of the country’s premier military academy.

“No firepower option was off the table,” a US official told the CNN television news network. The CNN report added that the US military had a number of warplanes flying “protective missions” in support of the raid, including “fixed wing fighter jets that would have provided firepower if the team came under opposition fire it could not handle.”

All of this firepower was deemed necessary to carry out the raid without seeking the cooperation of the Pakistani government, military or intelligence. Obama was determined to make the killing of Bin Laden a unilateral operation for which his White House could claim undiluted credit.

US military and CIA officials characterized the mission as one of the most risky their agencies had ever attempted, while Obama himself, during an interview with the CBS News program “60 Minutes” on Sunday, described the intelligence placing Bin Laden inside the compound as only “55/45.” Obama acknowledged that the compound could have been occupied by a “prince from Dubai,” and that if the intelligence had proven faulty, “there would have been significant consequences.”

The scale of these consequences now becomes more clear. The raid posed the threat of a military confrontation between US and Pakistani troops deep inside Pakistani territory and adjacent to Pakistani military facilities. Such a clash would be roughly analogous to throwing a lighted match at a powder keg. Even without a direct engagement between US and Pakistani troops, the raid has sparked widespread popular anger in Pakistan, directed against both the United States and the country’s own government.

The Pakistani government has been compelled to react accordingly, with Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani warning in a speech to the parliament that Pakistan would “retaliate with full force” to any future violation of its sovereignty. The comment was directed not just at Washington, but also at India, where the American raid sparked widespread calls for New Delhi to mount similar cross-border operations. Such attacks could bring the two nuclear-armed regional adversaries to the brink of war.

US Army Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the senior commander of American occupation forces in eastern Afghanistan, revealed on Tuesday that Pakistan’s military had cut off all communications with the US and NATO for at least two days after the US kill operation against Bin Laden, though contact has since been restored. There were mounting concerns within the Pentagon that Pakistan could once again cut off the supply route from the port of Karachi to the Khyber Pass through which three quarters of the food, fuel, bullets and other basic necessities for the 140,000-strong US-led occupation force in Afghanistan must pass.

The cross-border raid to kill Bin Laden represents a qualitative escalation of the US military operations inside Pakistan that have taken place since Obama came to office and launched his “surge.” In 2010, the US administration doubled the number of missile strikes by pilotless drones, which Pakistani human rights groups estimate have killed some 2,500 civilians.

While the Pakistani government and intelligence services had collaborated in these attacks, over the past two months they have demanded both publicly and privately that they cease because of mounting popular anger, which is destabilizing the government in Islamabad. Yet they continue, with two more such attacks having been carried out since the killing of Bin Laden, the latest claiming at least five lives Tuesday in South Waziristan.

The escalation of US militarism against Pakistan threatens to inflame the entire region. Next week, Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani is to visit China, a country which Gilani referred to as an “all-weather friend” and a “source of inspiration” in the same speech in which he blasted the US military raid. Beijing has voiced support for Pakistan in the wake of the Bin Laden killing and no doubt sees the growing friction between Washington and Islamabad as an opportunity to advance its own strategic interests in the region.

According to US media reports, the Pakistani government last month urged the government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan to deny the US a continuing military presence in that country and orient instead toward Pakistan and China.

China brought Pakistan in as an observer in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes Russia and three former Soviet Central Asian republics. Beijing has employed the SCO to advance its interests in the region, which center on control of energy supplies—the same strategic resources that induced the US to go to war for control of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, President Asif Ali Zardari today begins a three-day visit to Moscow, where he is to discuss with the Russian government mutual concerns, including regional security. Russia also opposes the establishment of permanent US military bases in Afghanistan, seeing them as a beachhead for exerting US control over the Caspian Basin and its energy reserves.

This is the tense international context in which the Obama administration carried out its unilateral raid to kill Bin Laden in Pakistan.

One of the many questions posed by this raid is, “Why now?” There have been no terror alerts either preceding or following the killing of Bin Laden. By most accounts, his Al Qaeda organization had become a spent force, largely irrelevant except to serve as the pretext for ongoing US military operations.

The absence even of claims of an imminent security threat from Bin Laden underscores the fact that the raid was ordered by the Obama White House largely because of domestic concerns. The administration was shaken by the events earlier this year in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of workers, inspired in part by the revolutionary events unfolding in Egypt, demonstrated every day for weeks on end to protest anti-worker legislation being pushed through by the governor and the state legislature.

Under conditions of a deepening economic crisis, with no prospect of a significant lessening of unemployment, with fuel and food prices soaring, and the federal government, the states and localities carrying out vicious and massively unpopular cuts in jobs, wages and social programs, the Obama administration could only anticipate a growth of social opposition.

The idea was that a successful operation to “take out” the Al Qaeda leader could be utilized to unleash a flood of militarist and jingoistic propaganda, with the aim of diverting and intimidating growing popular anger.

At the same time, it would allow Obama to recast himself as a “wartime president,” distancing himself from the promises of “change” made in his 2008 campaign and associating his administration ever more closely with the military, the intelligence agencies and with the most reactionary sections of the ruling elite, thereby providing the White House with a new socio-political base for launching attacks on the working class.

Within the framework of the US war in Afghanistan, the raid served another purpose: to ratchet up pressure on the Pakistani government and military to collaborate more directly and fully in the faltering attempt to suppress the growing resistance to American military occupation.

As with all such reckless adventures, often the most important results are the unintended consequences. In this case, they include the stoking up of tensions in a region where five nuclear-armed countries—the US, China, Russia, India and Pakistan—are competing for power and influence.

As the media-generated fog of patriotic triumphalism wears off, this operation may well be seen as one of a number of US actions in the region that are setting the stage for a far bloodier conflagration.

Bill Van Auken

NOVANEWS

by Felicity Arbuthnot

” … war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.” Howard Zinn. (1922-2010.)

It was Kathy Kelly – relentlessly, lovingly, committed to the people of Iraq, constantly risking the draconian wrath, jail terms, and impossible fines of the US., government for her compassion – who alerted me. The ‘phone rang, it was 12th May 1996, and Kathy was calling from Chicago, stunned. Madeleine Albright, then US., Ambassador the the UN., had just appeared on “Sixty Minutes.”

Lesley Stahl, said Kathy, had said, of the US., driven embargo on Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright had responded: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Some things really are indelibly seared in to memory. I remember a feeling of disbelief; somehow even the meticulous Kathy must have some way misconstrued. Was there any way she could fax me a transcript I asked, in those, for most, pre-home computer days. Magically, she obtained one within the hour. Reading it, the images of the children I had watched helplessly, their lives ebbing away, for want of embargoed medicines, treatments, frequently the ability to perform vital surgery, flooded my mind.

I thought of the sudden look of hope, in the eyes of parents sitting by the bed of a child, as one walked in to the ward. One was from outside Iraq, perhaps there was some miracle one could work, then the look died. As did so, so, many of the small, frail little souls, their lives snatched away. Now I knew that they were a “price” that was “worth it.” And with it, the realization that total evil really exists.

Iraq imported seventy percent of virtually everything. On Hiroshima Day 1990, with the implementation of the embargo rational life ended. From school books, to childrens’ toys, lipstick to sanitary items, washing up liquid to shampoo, normality died. But it was the health sector, formerly possibly the finest in the Middle East, free to all, which was uniquely devastated. After the 1991 bombing, it was – literally – largely in ruins.

The viciousness with which the UN., Sanctions Committee acted, made a mockery of the fine founding words of their Charter in general and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in particular. From incubators to paediatric syringes, cancer medications to dialysis machines and equipment, from pain killers to scalpels, anti-biotics to asthma inhalers, all were vetoed.

Six months before Albright’s pronouncement, in December 1995, Sara Zaidi and Mary Smith Fawzi of the Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote to the Lancet, pointing out that by August 1991, just one year in to the embargo: “baseline mortality for the under five population rose from 43.2 to 128.5 per 1,000, reflecting a three fold increase in child mortality.” In their further survey (1995) under the auspices of UN., Food and Agricultural Organization: “the under five mortality rate increased five-fold.” Stunting and wasting had become prevalent in a country where food was formerly cheap and plentiful.

I first went to Iraq after the 1991 bombing, less a year later, and within a couple of hours witnessed the reality behind the statistics. In what had been a flagship teaching hospital, I watched a young nurse, frantically trying to clear the throat of a perfect, new born baby boy, his young parents standing, their faces frozen with terror. A friend, a doctor from Scotland was with me, she looked round and said: “In a situation like this, in near any hospital, you know where the vital items will be, there is nothing here.” We watched helplessly, as the little mite turned, white, grey, near blue, and lost his fledgling fight for life, as the sun streamed through broken, bomb damaged windows. The glass factories had been bombed – and glass too was vetoed. The baby had died for little more than cents worth of basic, plastic suction.

By 1993, mothers too malnourished to breast feed and unable to afford milk powder, fed their babies on sugared water, or sugared black tea. Virtually all became bloated, chronically malnourished and died. Doctors created a new diagnosis. They called them: “the sugar babies.”

For children who survived, experts on children in war zones, warned that this was possibly the most traumatized child population on earth. With the austerity, the ongoing (illegal) bombings by the US., and UK., they had no way to recover from their experiences.

An unforgettable example was a child of about five, in a small grocery store, early one morning. He came in, in the proud mode of children everywhere, entrusted with an important errand. He bought one egg. At the time, a tray of eggs cost a university Professor’s monthly salary. To go to a meal and find minute pieces of egg in it, was to be honoured indeed. The child carried it carefully to the door – and dropped it. He fell to his knees, trying to scrape it up up in his hands, tears streaming down his face. I reached in to my pocket, the shop keeper tapped him on the shoulder and gave him another one.

Two more children that were “worth” the “price”, were suffering from acute myeloid leukaemia, bleeding internally, covered in bruises from their leaking capillaries and in intractable pain. There was no pain relief. The younger one, aged three, was lying rigid, his eyes full of unshed tears. He had taught himself not to cry, since it wracked his agonized little body further. I turned away, unable to take a picture, or take notes, just wanting to comfort him; but to touch would have brought further agony.

Near the door, I bent to stroke the head of the older child, just five. In a gesture which must have cost him the unimaginable, he responded as children everywhere, to affection, and squeezed my hand tightly. I wrote at the time: “I walked from the ward, leant against the wall, and knew that it was actually possible to died of shame.”

Ms Albright would have been no doubt, pleased at the progress of her project in Basra. On one visit to the paediatric and maternity hospital, dear friend, Dr Jenan Hussein came running out to hug me. Then a moment’s silence, and I had a near premonition. She said: “Felicity, you know those children you wrote about in June?” (It was November) “I am sorry, they have all died.” They were seventeen babies in the premature baby unit, without even oxygen. (Vetoed.)

That was the visit when I nearly lost the plot. I walked in to one ward and a group of distraught women, aunts, grandmothers, were standing by a cot, of another perfect new born, who had just died. The mother had rushed from the unit beside herself in grief. I asked if I could hold the tiny still warm being. “Please, of course.” I put him over my shoulder, stroked his head, back, certain I could bring him back to life, he was warm, fluid, total. How long I stroked his small form, willing him back, I do not know. Finally, defeated, I laid him down, wrapped him and we wept together.

Further down the corridor was another new born. He was in an incubator, wrapped in blankets, since the incubator did not work (replacements vetoed) in the looking glass world Iraq had become. He needed an exchange transfusion, premature and yellow with jaundice as he was. I thought I had the blood type needed and offered mine if they checked to be sure, since wrong blood is as lethal as no blood. There were no facilities to check. Vetoed. My premature son had been saved by and exchange transfusion. I looked in to the mother’s eyes and resonated with her agony. We, the doctors, the baby, were all as helpless as each other.

As cancers soared (children in the mid 90′s were sometimes born with cancer – an unheard of phenomenon) cancer treatments were vetoed. The cancer has been linked to the weapons used, especially depleted uranium.

The UK Atomic Energy Authority in a “self initiated” Report, estimated that if fifty tonnes of the residual dust remained after the 1991 hostilities, there would be half a million excess cancer deaths by 2000. In fact the highest estimates of that left is 700 tonnes. In 1998 a John Hopkins University study estimated that if cancers continued on the current curve, 44% of the population would develop it by 2000.

The 2003 blitzkrieg may have left 2,000- 3,000 further tonnes of DU. For years many years couples have feared having children, given the equal epidemic of birth defects, as would be expected if nuclear waste is dropped on populations.

I have written much of Jassim, the child poet, who, hearing I was a writer, glowed with delight, and took a note book from under his pillow in the cancer ward he was lying in. Could he read me his poem? Of course:

“The name is love

The class is mindless

The school is suffering

The government is sadness

The city is sighing

The street is misery

The home number is one thousand sighs. “

“Jassim”, I said, finally finding my voice, if you can write this at thirteen, think what you will do at twenty. I asked if I could use his poem and credit him. He was thrilled. He never saw it in print, in many places and languages. He died before an aid agency could get the medications he needed to him, circumventing the embargo.

Just before the invasion, I asked the father of another terminally ill child, Mohammed, (10) what he would like to ask of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. He responded: “Please ask them, do they want all out children as child sacrifices?”

“Liberating” Iraq has resulted in an estimated five million orphans, one million widows, nearly five million displaced, internally and externally and an infrastructure, social distortion, medical tragedy which makes the embargo years seem mild. Between the embargo and the invasion – 1990 – 2011, higher estimates are three million dead, the unborn, new born and under fives, still paying the highest price. A “price worth it.”

Happy Anniversary, Madam Albright.

NOVANEWS