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April 16, 2005

Idiocy of Bush Iraq Policy

How can Iraq be considered even in the realm of a success by an administration that allows children to be poisoned by their ground water in favor of more guns for security?

Even those most loyal to the US war, the Kurds, are questioning the sanity of US policy. In a town where Saddam killed 5000 people with chemical weapons, they are appalled that the US has cancelled a promised $10 million water system:

For years Nuradeen Ghreeb has dreamed of bringing clean drinking water to his hometown...Ordinarily a quiet and reserved civil engineer, he sat on one of his beloved water pipes on hearing the news and wept, his tears glistening in the afternoon sun.

"If the Americans think that training the Iraqi Army comes before clean drinking water for the people of Halabja," he said quietly, "then we can't expect anything from them."

No more than 50 percent of Halabja's population has regular running water, and even that may be contaminated by bat feces from the mountain cave where much of the water originates.

In November a delegation from the Environment Ministry visited the town and found that contamination of its water supply could be connected with abnormalities found in residents' white and red blood cell counts and the relatively high levels of kidney disease, miscarriages and other maladies that have been reported here.

This shift in Halabja is part of the $3.4 billion that the US has shifted from water, electricity and oil projects to pay for training and equipping the Iraqi Army and police forces.

So children must die so that the US can continue to keep political control of the country? It's typical of this administration to favor guns over children's health -- whether overseas or domestically -- but it's also idiotic foreign policy as we no breed more support for the opposition insurgency.

Posted by Nathan at April 16, 2005 09:34 AM