The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Posted on | July 29, 2007
Not content with waging a war that kills a half-million or more Iraqis, we had to do it with depleted-uranium munitions. The result, according to Iraq’s environment minister, has been an increase in new cases of cancer.
As a result of “at least 350 sites in Iraq being contaminated during bombing” with depleted uranium (DU) weapons, Nermin Othman said, the nation is facing about 140,000 cases of cancer, with 7,000 to 8,000 new ones registered each year.
Speaking at a ministerial meeting of the Arab League, she also complained that many chemical plants and oil facilities had been destroyed during the two military campaigns since the 1990s, but the ecological consequences remain unclear.
“Our ministry is fledgling, and we need international support; notably, we need laboratories to better monitor air and water contamination,” she said.
The first major UN research on the consequences of the use of DU on the battlefield was conducted in 2003 in the wake of NATO operations in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Montenegro. The UN Environment Program (UNEP) said in its report after the research that DU poses little threat if spent munitions are cleared from the ground.
Why they hate us, part eleventy-jillion. The damage we’ve done won’t be fully appreciated for decades, and may last centuries.
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