I wonder if you can remember the Gulf War of 1990-91? What are the most enduring images you have? I suspect that for most of us it’s the “smart” bombs. Do you remember them? Night after night our TV’s showed us images of laser guided missiles, bombs we could direct with an amazing amount of precision. Do you want to take out a factory making weapons? No need to bomb the entire area. Now we can send down a bomb, guide it through the air vents on the factory roof, and destroy the factory while leaving the surrounding area intact. As we stood in awe of this amazing technological triumph we took comfort in the fact that this war was one which would be fought with surgical precision, that would see only essential targets taken out, which would minimise human casualty.
Sadly, the reality was as far removed from this as possible. You see sometimes we targeted the wrong buildings. Of course, at the time we denied it, but 6 months after the war the Columbia Journalism Review got its hands on video footage that had been heavily censored during the war. It showed aid workers removing bodies from a shelter the Allies had wrongly identified as a weapons factory and taken out with one of the “smart” bombs. This is what the reporter who viewed the unedited video tape wrote: “They showed scenes of incredible carnage. Nearly all the bodies were charred into blackness; in some cases the heat had been so great that entire limbs were burned off, Among the corpses were those of at least six babies and ten children, most of them so severely burned that their gender could not be determined. Rescue workers collapsed in grief, dropping corpses; some rescuers vomited from the stench of the still smouldering bodies”.
Horrifying as that is, it’s only the beginning of the story. You see, smart bombs amounted to less than 10% of the bombs dropped on Irag. The “weapon of choice” in the Gulf War was the cluster bomb. A cluster bomb is a container that holds a number of smaller bombs about the size of a cricket ball. You drop it from a plane and after it falls a certain distance it releases its bomblets. The idea is that the bomblets spread out across a wide area and saturate it with bombs. 62,000 of these were launched from planes during the Gulf war, along with 110,000 by artillery, with their millions of bomblets wreaking havoc across Iraq and Kuwait. But in addition to the initial damage cluster bombs created another deadly problem. You see not all the bomblets went off when they hit the ground. Between 5% and 25% remained unexploded, lying on the ground until someone walked on them. So bad was the problem that at one point during the war the US had to halt its troop advances, because more of their soldiers were getting killed by unexploded bomblets than by the Iraqi army. But of course the armies didn’t take the unexploded cluster bomblets home when the war ended. They remained there in the fields of Kuwait and Iraq, fields that the children returned to play in. More than 1600 civilians were killed in the first two years after the war by these unexploded bombs.
But the story continues to worsen. You see it’s not just weapons that kill people, but the disease and famine brought on by war. When we bombed Iraq we took out power grids, water supplies and the roads. This not only stops the enemy army it also stops the transport of medical supplies, the availability of fresh water, the operation of hospital equipment. It is believed that 250,000 Iraqi men, women and children died during the war, and that in the years after the war hundreds of thousands more have died as a direct result of it.
Source: Information reported in John Pilger, Hidden Agendas and Human Rights Watch web site.