Another Toxic Gulf War Will Jeopardize American, Iraqi Children Alike

By Delinda C. Hanley

Who can forget Life Magazine’s November 1995 story, “The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm,” with its cover photo of Gulf war veteran Sgt. Paul Hanson and his son, Jayce. As a soldier in the 1991 conflict Hanson breathed heavy oil smoke and other chemicals, and took the drug pyridostigmine bromide, or PB, given to American troops to protect them from the deadly nerve gas soman—but which may have increased the effects of sarin gas.

Hanson’s cherubic blond son was born in 1992 with a hole in his heart, a hemophilia-like blood condition, underdeveloped ear canals, and hands and feet attached to twisted stumps. The bright 3-year-old became the “unofficial poster boy of the Gulf war babies,” after articles on his condition appeared in both People and Life magazines.

Along with 700,000 other U.S. soldiers (as well as troops from the UK and Arab countries), Jayce’s father spent nearly two months fighting in what American nuclear scientist Leonard Dietz called “the most toxic war in the history of mankind.”

Following their return home, Gulf war veterans have fathered children with devastating birth defects. “While there is, as yet, no absolute proof that Gulf vets’ babies are especially prone to congenital problems,” the Life article concluded, “patterns of defects have begun to emerge—patterns unlikely to result from chance alone.”

Three-year-old Omar, for instance, has an unusual type of cancer which first attacked his kidneys and is now destroying his brain and nervous system. The Iraqi child’s head is enlarged to twice its normal size, his face swollen unrecognizably out of shape, and he is blind, according to peace activists who visited Iraq in early January of this year.

In a “Letter from Baghdad,” the international delegation—which included Denis Halliday, former U.N. assistant secretary-general and its humanitarian coordinator in Iraq; Margarita Papandreou, former first lady of Greece; and Omaima Rawas, vice president of the Syrian Arabic League—relayed messages from Iraqi doctors, teachers, scientists and officials expressing their fears of another devastating Gulf war.

With worn-out equipment that, because of U.N. sanctions, cannot be repaired, and a dire shortage of medicine, Dr. Ahmed Fadeh of the Baghdad Children’s Hospital told the eight European, Arab and American activists that there are many cases like Omar’s that he simply cannot treat. Omar’s mother “sits with him like a madonna,” he said, “waiting for her child to die.”

Since the 1991 Gulf war there has been a dramatic surge of cancers and birth defects in both Iraqi children and the offspring of American veterans. Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, told the Washington Report that, according to the Veterans Health Administration, nearly 54 percent of Gulf war veterans have sought medical treatment, and 35 percent have filed disability claims. A decade after the war, the Defense Department finally is admitting that many troops were exposed to chemical and biological weapons, along with vaccines, new drugs, and oil well fires, that may have caused what is now called Gulf War Syndrome.

The Pentagon has admitted that nearly 100,000 American soldiers were exposed to deadly gases when U.S. combat engineers blew up Iraq’s Khamisiyah chemical weapons facility in March 1991. That weapons depot contained hundreds of weapons filled with sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gases, according to a March 4, 2002 Associated Press report.

The National Gulf War Resource Center released a 1998 study which estimated that nearly 400,000 U.S. troops may have had direct exposure to Depleted Uranium (DU). DU, the recycled byproduct of natural uranium after it has been refined for use in nuclear power plants, is used to build inexpensive and lethal artillery shells and bombs. When a DU shell hits its target, some of the metal burns and oxidizes into small particles. This creates airborne dust that can be toxic if inhaled or ingested. The Los Alamos and Lovelace laboratories both have released results of experiments confirming that animals exposed to depleted uranium get cancer.

Gulf war troops may have come into contact with shells fired by U.S. tanks and aircraft, or with salvaged vehicles or bunkers hit by DU projectiles. Others may have been exposed to smoke containing DU while they fought fires.

Depleted uranium, which was first used in the Gulf war and later in Kosovo, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Palestine, has a half life of 136 million years. In fact, it actually becomes more dangerous as the centuries go by, posing an horrendous ecological disaster as well as a proven health risk.

In addition to a startling increase of children born with terrible birth defects, Iraqis are developing cancers from consuming meat and milk from animals grazing in polluted areas. There has been a 12-fold increase in cancer mortality, according to Dr. Al-Ali, a cancer specialist at Basra’s hospital, and a growing number of Iraqi women are being stricken with breast cancer.

In 1991 nearly one million warheads with depleted uranium casings were dropped on southern Iraq, amounting to 250 tons of depleted uranium. According to veterans of the last Gulf war, Americans bombed more than 980 known or suspected chemical warfare stockpiles. For more than 12 years, Iraqis have lived among the lethal debris from that two-month battle. They are expecting another heavy payload as an even more deadly war looms.

In the Feb. 27 New York Review of Books Charles Simic, reviewing German author W.G. Sebald’s recently translated book, On the Natural History of Destruction, described U.S. plans for an attack on Iraq:“The Pentagon’s current battle plan, according to CBS, calls for a launch of 300 to 400 cruise missiles on the first day,” he wrote, “which is more than were launched during the entire 40 days of the Gulf war, with the same number to follow the next day and presumably the day after.”

Simic also quoted Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the “Shock and Awe” strategy: “We want them to quit,” Ullman said. “So you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.”

If the U.S. launches a second, even more toxic high-tech war on Iraq, another generation of Iraqi civilians will die—and another generation of American men and women will be exposed to DU and other chemical agents. If Iraq actually does have “weapons of mass destruction” and they are either blown up by the U.S. in an attack or used in response to the invasion, both Iraqi and American lives will be devastated.

According to a Feb. 16 report on “60 Minutes,” the U.S. is not equipped to protect its soldiers in chemical warfare, and American troops are not properly trained to defend against the use of chemical and biological weapons. Thousands of gallons of water are necessary to decontaminate soldiers who come in contact with chemical weapons. Where is that amount of clean water to be found in the desert? The report also noted that doctors have little training in treating chemical weapons casualties.

The most frightening item in the “60 Minutes” broadcast was a General Accounting Office (GAO) re port, released in November 2001, which found that a shocking number of damaged or defective equipment may have been issued to soldiers at the front. “It’s like playing Russian Roulette,” said retired U.S. Army Colonel David Hackworth. Which soldiers would know if they were one of the lucky ones with equipment that actually worked, he wondered.

“It is just not right for this administration to risk the lives of men and women in uniform knowing that their equipment is defective,” Thomas H. Corey, president of Vietnam Veterans of America, told reporters after the “60 Minutes” program aired. “If the reports by the GAO are even partly accurate, this is unconscionable...I am amazed that the administration, knowing these facts, would continue to prepare for the possibility of a war with Iraq,” Corey said. ”It is indefensible.”

Steve Robinson agrees, and warns that the mistakes of 1991 remain uncorrected. “We are sending people with bad equipment into the battlefield,” Robinson said. “If you know that there are defects in gas masks (62 percent), and that there are defects in the chemical detectors (90 percent give false readings), that 250,000 defective chemical warfare suits got lost among the Army’s inventory, and that the current ‘charcoal suit’ soldiers are set to use is vulnerable to dusty agents, then you should be concerned about your soldiers’ potential health risks.”

“As we again approach the possibility of military engagement with Iraq,” Congressman Nick J. Rahall (D-WV) told the Washington Report, “the lasting effects of exposure to depleted uranium on our service men and women and innocent Iraqi children, during and after the Gulf war, remain a pressing humanitarian concern.

“After my experience in a Baghdad hospital last September,” Rahall continued, “I am deeply concerned by the possibility that left-over shells from high-intensity bullets filled with uranium, a by-product of the nuclear fuel and bomb industry, will wage its own silent war on the most vulnerable of all populations: children.”

Another toxic war in Iraq will harm not only Iraqi civilians, but the health of American soldiers and their future families. This war also may affect more women, who are now poised to fight in the Gulf. Husbands and wives, and both parents of some military families, have been deployed to the Middle East.

By now most Americans know someone in uniform in the Gulf. If they don’t, they may be well acquainted with a young man or woman who someday might marry a veteran of a second Gulf war. What mysterious ailments or birth defects will afflict these American families, and the next generation, as a result of chemical and biological weapons unleashed either by Iraqi or American troops?

American soldiers were exposed to radiation experiments in the 1950s, the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, and Depleted Uranium, toxic fumes and experimental drugs in Desert Storm. “Certainly, soldiers expect to forfeit their health, if necessary, in the line of duty,” veterans told Life reporters in 1995. “But no one expects that of a soldier’s kids.”

Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.