Healing Our World: Weekly Comment

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Wanting Peace Is Not Unpatriotic

I would like you to know
That we were not all like that.
That some of us spent our lives
Working for Peace
Speaking for animals
Tending the Earth.
And that when you find
The mass graves
And the abattoirs
And the laboratories
Please understand
That we were not all like that.
-- Mary de La Valette

Developing a relationship with the natural world can have profound effects on our perceptions of the universe. Opening our minds and hearts to include the idea that a tree has rights and that a dolphin may be our neighbor can forever change our appreciation for life.

For example, consciously choosing not to eat meat because of the deplorable conditions under which animals are kept and slaughtered can develop a connection to the world and the universe that can only come from accepting full responsibility for our actions.

Even flushing the toilet with a mindfulness that the waste is, after minimal treatment, going into the ocean and not magically disappearing can dramatically alter perceptions.

But with an open heart and open mind comes a price – and it is a high price for those living in the U.S. today. That price is the horror, shock, revulsion, and powerlessness that you will feel at the thought of the United States going to war – again – against the people of Iraq.

Make no mistake - it is the people of Iraq, and the ecosystem, and the animals – that we will hurt.

An F-16CJ from the 23rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron patrols the no-fly zone over Northern Iraq (Photo by Staff Sgt. Vincent Parker courtesy U.S. Air Force)

• There are 4,500 children under the age of five dying each month from hunger and disease. In Central/Southern Iraq, 27.5 percent of Iraq's three million children, some 900,000 children, are now at risk of acute malnutrition, according to a UNICEF Report.

• The Ministry of Health estimates that 109,720 persons have died annually as a direct result of the sanctions, according to "The Children are Dying: Reports by UN Food and Agriculture Organization."

• After the sanctions, there was a two-fold increase in infant mortality and a five-fold increase in mortality of children under five years old, according to "The Lancet" Volume 346, Number 8988. Saturday December 2, 1995.

• Due to the hazards of the water supply, government statistical office figures show 1,819 cases of typhoid fever in 1989 and 24,436 cases in 1994. There were no reported cases of cholera in 1989, but 1,345 cases in 1994, according to "The Children are Dying."

  Fifty percent of rural people have no access to potable water. Wastewater treatment facilities have stopped functioning in most urban areas, says the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs.

• In rural areas, only half the people have access to a water supply from a network, public tap, or well, and only 34 percent have a sanitary type of latrine, UNICEF reports.

To hear the rhetoric about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" is maddening. The U.S. is the world leader in the manufacture, sale, and use of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, in the 1980s, a company in Maryland, American Type Culture Collection, sold Iraq the "seed stock" for its chemical warfare program! Visit their website today and see how anyone can buy dangerous bacteria.

The atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima killed 300,000 people. The U.S. imposed sanctions on the people of Iraq - Sadam eats very well, thank you very much - have killed 500,000 children alone. Some say the estimate is closer to one million.

Iraqi schoolchildren (Photo courtesy Veterans for Peace Iraq Water Project)

The countries of the world spend nearly a trillion dollars each year on warfare. Less than 25 percent of that amount could clear up virtually every environmental and social problem we face. The environmental cost of war is high.

In the 12th century, Genghis Khan laid waste to vast areas of Mongolia and China that remain devastated some 700 years later.

In World War I, many countries' ecosystems were destroyed. Belgium lost most of its forested areas. During the two year Boxer Rebellion in China that began in 1900, a species of deer was driven to extinction in the wild.

In Vietnam, the United States dropped 20 million aerial bombs, fired 230 million artillery shells, and use more than 100 million grenades. Over 2.5 million craters were formed by these explosions in Vietnam. Ten percent of these munitions did not explode, leaving two million bombs, 23 million artillery shells, and tens of millions of other devices in the ground as ticking time bombs. Still today, many people are crippled and killed by these devices.

The true extent of the environmental damage caused by war is still unknown and in some cases, is willfully suppressed. In 1995, after a team of U.S. public health experts visited Vietnam to research the impact of Agent Orange on the civilian population, the Vietnamese government confiscated their tissue samples and data.

For the United States to speak with revulsion about Iraq's potential for developing "weapons of mass destruction" is to practice a great hypocrisy. The U.S. used over nine million kilograms of the deadly germ warfare agent 0-chlorobenzolmalononitrile, or CS, over vast areas of Vietnam. Countless human and wildlife deaths resulted. The U.S. also used more than 25 million kilograms of herbicides in that war, killing and hurting all manner of living things. There is evidence that the U.S. used the deadly nerve gas Sarin against its own troops in Vietnam.

Our stock of active nuclear weapons is the largest in the world.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote, "No failure to comply with the U.N. condition can possibly justify the collective punishment of the entire nation and the direct deaths of infants, children, the elder population and the handicapped. You are fully aware that no hidden arms or arms program in Iraq can possibly pose the threat to life anywhere that the sanctions inflict on Iraq every day. These sanctions kill more people each week than Iraq with all its armies and materiel ... could inflict on foreign armies ... when Iraq was under assault" in 1991.

War. That is the only solution our leaders can think of. But how can we blame them. We as a culture have been at war with the natural world for many centuries. We have been trying to tame nature, to "bound her into service" and "make her a slave," as Francis Bacon said at the start of the scientific revolution in the 16th century.

UN weapons inspector examines chemical bombs declared by Iraq. (Photo courtesy Federation of American Scientists)

Our President and his advisors will do anything to make it appear that solutions are simple, that enemies are easy to point to, and that they have the support of the American people.

There can be no excuse to wage a selective war on a county’s people. We must rise to the wisdom in all our hearts.

The effect on the Iraqi environment will be devastating. The landscape of Iraq, its infrastructure, and ecosystems have already been compromised by the U.S. imposed sanctions.

And someone please tell me - how does it make sense to bomb suspected sites of biological warfare agents or of nuclear weapons, only to risk releasing those very substances into the air? Am I missing something? I don’t think so.

We must think. We must insist. We must reclaim our power. Did you know that many believe that it was the Allied imposed poverty and humiliation of Germany following its defeat in World War I that brought Adolph Hitler to power? We cannot and must not repeat this history by fostering even more resentment among Iraqi youth.

Article 48 of the Geneva Convention reads, "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population such as food, livestock, agricultural areas and drinking water installations."

So who is the real war criminal in this battle? We have lost our sense and our senses. How can we get them back?

Take your power. Please examine the resources below. Write your letter to the President right now and e-mail it to him at the address below. Be able to say that if our leaders do wage another obscene war that you did what your heart demanded. Demand that we wage peace.

And by the way, it is NOT unpatriotic to want peace.

RESOURCES

1. Now more than ever is the time to write your Congressional representatives. Tell them the hypocrisy must end. If the U.S. wants other countries to dismantle their arms, then we must as well. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html

2. Visit the World Game Institute's What the World Wants project and learn how what the world spends on armaments could pay for healing our world at: http://www.worldgame.org/wwwproject/index.html

4. Voice in the Wilderness is a group working to end the sanctions against Iraq. Keep in touch with them at: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/

5. Read an amazing account on the animal victims of the Gulf War at: http://fn2.freenet.edmonton.ab.ca/~puppydog/gulfwar.htm

6. Keep track of the real story in Iraq through the Pacifica Network's Watch on Iraq at: http://www.pacifica.org/programs/iraq/

7. Visit American Type Culture Collection at: http://www.atcc.org

8. Jackie's new new book, "Of This Earth, Reflections on Connections," will be available soon. Get a preview at http://www.ofthisearth.org

{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle and the author of "Healing Our World", A Journey from the Darkness Into the Light," available at: http://www.xlibris.com/HealingOurWorld.html or your local bookstore. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at: jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his web site at: http://www.healingourworld.com}