Canada must play role to end Iraq occupation
By David Orchard
(The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon), March 11, 2005 )
The following is the viewpoint of the writer, a former candidate for
leadership of the Progressive Conservative party of Canada and a
Borden farmer.
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On Feb. 22 in Brussels, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced that
Canada would be sending forces to Jordan to help train Iraqi police
and, although Canadian troops are not officially in Iraq,
Canadian Maj. Gen. Walter Natynczyk (with the support of Ottawa)
has been the second top-ranking soldier in that country
in his role as deputy commander of the U.S. Army's Third Corps.
What exactly is it that Canada is helping out with? Across much
of the world, and above all in North America, there is a deafening
silence about what is actually happening in Iraq.
The number of American dead is reported daily, growing to about
1,500 to date. Although we hear less about the American wounded,
virtually nothing gets reported about the number of Iraqis killed
and wounded. (In the U.S. war on Vietnam roughly 100 Vietnamese,
Laotians or Cambodians were killed for each American fatality.
Recent estimates in Iraq put the ratio roughly the same.)
Although admitted by the Pentagon, it is barely whispered in the
media that the U.S. is using internationally outlawed napalm and
cluster bombs in Iraq. Some of the other weapons being used are
not mentioned at all.
But we are told that things are getting better -- there has been
an election. Organizing show elections in countries under foreign
occupation has long been recognized as illegitimate.
It's interesting to read the New York Times story of Sept. 4, 1967
(U.S. encouraged by Vietnam vote: officials cite 83 per cent
turnout despite Vietcong terror) with a remarkably similar
tone to the one recently trumpeted around the world as a success
for President George Bush's Iraqi policy.
"According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85
million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday," it says.
"Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong...
A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in
President Johnson's policy ... The purpose of the voting was to
give legitimacy to the Saigon Government."
Eight years later, the toll of dead in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
was six million and the U.S. had dropped 10-million tonnes of
bombs on the three countries -- four times the total dropped
in the Second World War.
Today in Iraq a low-intensity nuclear war is being waged by
the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, largely
against a civilian population in a small Third World country,
a country that endured a previous bombardment in 1991, then
a dozen years of sanctions and now renewed attack and occupation.
For one nation to attack and occupy another is a flagrant
violation of international law as developed over the centuries
and codified in the United Nations Charter, the Geneva
Conventions and in the Nuremberg War Tribunal
rulings. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, head
of the American prosecution staff at Nuremberg, told the
court that "Launching a war of aggression is a crime that
no political or economic situation can justify."
They are crimes, he said, "whether the United States does
them or whether Germany does them."
In its final ruling, the Nuremberg Tribunal declared:
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only
an international crime, it is the supreme international crime."
The UN charter states unequivocally that the only legal
ground upon which lethal force by one nation against another
is justified is if one country is under direct and ongoing
attack itself, or if authorized by the Security
Council. Neither of these justifications exists nor has
existed in Iraq.
Doug Rokke, former head of the Pentagon's
Depleted Uranium Project, points out that the U.S.
military has used roughly 3,000 tons of depleted
uranium munitions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is
continuing to do so. Shells fired by the Abrams tank
contain approximately 10 pounds of solid depleted uranium,
while those fired by the A10 Warthog aircraft and the Bradley
armoured vehicles somewhat less.
Upon impact the munitions become pulverized. This dust goes
wherever the wind blows it and people across Iraq are breathing it.
It seeps into the water and soil. A lethal dose of this
material is minuscule -- some estimates are as low
as two-millionths of a gram inhaled into the lungs.
Depleted uranium was first used by the U.S. in combat in
the 1991 Gulf War and the cancer rates in Iraq have spiked
sharply since. There is no known treatment.
This radioactive contamination will remain lethal, in Dr.
Rokke's words, "for eternity."
Canada stayed out of the war against Vietnam.
Some Canadians, including a courageous nurse named Claire
Culhane, spoke out and some made films helping to
bring the knowledge of that horror to the world's attention.
Canadians made a difference in the Suez crisis of 1956,
in the Cuban missile crisis, and in opposing subsequent
U.S. attacks on, and embargo of, that little country in the
1960s and since. Canadian voices, and those from across
the globe, are needed again today to speak out in order
to put a stop to what is being done to the
citizens of the cradle of civilization.
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