In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran and for eight turbulent years two colossal armies funded by oil struggled against one another. Some of the largest battles seen since the Second World War tore the two nations apart, costing over half a million lives and economically costing over $1.2 trillion in total. The war finished in 1988, the borders unchanged and both countries in stagnation. Throughout the war the United States of America allied with Saddam Hussein as they broke diplomatic relations with Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The USA gave financial support, sold weapons – including chemical weapons – and gave political support to Iraq.
However, the warm American-Iraqi relations were over by 1991, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait – an ally of the USA – and the Arab World believed an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia – USA’s biggest ally in the region – was imminent. Therefore the USA turned on Saddam and hence operation Desert Storm began and the US troops chased Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.
When the Iraqi forces began retreating back to Basra from Kuwait City they squeezed their tanks, armed vehicles, troops and warfare equipment onto Highway 80. Over 1500 armed vehicles and thous
ands of men were retreating and suddenly the USA air force began bombarding the powerless mixture of troops and innocents fleeing. The Highway 80 has since been known as the Highway of Death, scenes of corpses melting on the tarmac and absolute carnage shocked the world.
A ceasefire was announced one day later, on the 28th of February 1991, however on the 2nd of March, the United States forces opened fire on Iraqi troops on Highway 8, not far from Iraq’s border. The scenes of carnage shocked the world again, for because the war was over, the Americans had just participated in a mass murder of soldiers. Shamefully, no one was brought to justice for this massacre. Instead a leading commander of the US armed forces boasted that it was “one of the most astounding scenes of destruction I have ever participated in."
Meanwhile, the USA government and the CIA urged the Shiites and Marsh Arabs in the south of Iraq and the Kurds in the North to start an uprising against the weakened criminal Saddam Hussein. They showered the south and north with leaflets guaranteeing the poor and desperate people that if they revolted the US Army would come to their aid and topple the tyrannical Saddam. Though once the uprisings began, US help was nowhere to be seen, and Saddam responded by killing over 100,000 people, starting an exodus of 2 million people and beginning a civil war against the Kurds that has lasted until today. What a betrayal…
Throughout the rest of the 1990s, the UN under the pressure of the USA imposed severer sanctions on Iraq. The goals of the sanctions were to eliminate “Weapons of Mass Destruction” – which the USA sold to Iraq – and weaken or destroy the Saddam Hussein threat to his neighbors. Everything from education equipment and clothes to vital medicine for Leukemia or traditional household sicknesses were banned as for some reason the USA thought they could be used for “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. As a result of these sanctions, between half a million and a million children under the age of 5 died, according to the UNICEF Executive Director Mrs. Bellamy. The sanctions caused massive malnutrition, lack of medical supplies and diseases like diarrhea and cholera soared due to lack of clean water that was partly caused by the ban on chlorine desperately needed for water desalinization.
The cost of life for such useless sanctions were as high as
1.5 million according to the United States ex-Attorney General Ramsey Clark and
as low as 1 million according to the United Nations. Ironically, the United
States released a radioactive horror against the people of Iraq when in 1991
they used Depleted Uranium on all their bombs, a radioactive substance which
has directly lead to cancer rates increasing in Iraq 3-12 times after 1990, in
order to make matters worse they then banned vital medicine to cure the cancers
they caused.
Then, throughout the Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq that started in 1997 the United States bombed Iraq’s infrastructure damaging its public services even farther, for example the bombing of water plants. Clinton’s slow-motion war led to even more innocent people suffering in Iraq. Millions suffered because of the USA’s sanctions and bombing which were meant to topple Saddam. Well, at that moment in time Saddam was traveling in private jets, buying hundreds of luxury cars and sitting in his palace counting his billions of dollars, while the USA choked his people to death, literally.
Anyway, as always, when the USA and its allies commit
gruesome crimes against humanity it can pass. Of course, the USA believe the
people of Iraq were ‘compensated’ when in 2003 they invaded and finally toppled
Saddam Hussein, in doing so they dropped more depleted uranium than ever,
successfully killed hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed a nation already
destroyed and installed a corrupt and fraudulent so-called democracy in
Saddam’s place.