Iraq Struggles With Cholera Outbreak
BAGHDAD - Majida Hamid Ibrahim seemed no different from any other victim in Iraq - her body was put in a plastic bag and sent to the morgue for relatives to collect. But authorities were already bemoaning her death.
Just days before, the 40-year-old woman from Baghdad’s southern outskirts became the first confirmed cholera case in the Iraqi capital from an outbreak spreading around the country. The World Health Organization has confirmed more than 3,300 cholera cases in Iraq and at least 14 deaths from the acute and rapid dehydration it causes.
The troubles, however, also point beyond the immediate struggle to control the deadly advance.
They highlight the creeping fractures throughout the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the country’s deepening sectarian gulf and a gangland-style lawlessness in which even medical supplies are fair game for bandits.
The health minister, Ali al-Shemari, fled the country after U.S. forces raided offices in February and arrested his deputy, accused of diverting millions of dollars to the biggest Shiite militia and of allowing death squads’ use of ambulances and hospitals to carry out kidnappings and killings.
The government official overseeing Iraqis living abroad was brought in as acting health minister in al-Maliki’s shaky Cabinet - which was further jolted by the walkout of six Sunni ministers in August.
Hospitals also are divided along Iraq’s sectarian split, with Shiites and Sunnis often too scared to venture into any facility controlled by the other. For health workers, this leaves worrying gaps with cholera cases now reaching half of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
The main hospital in Baqouba - the city al-Qaida in Iraq earlier this year claimed as its base in the Diyala province - was twice overrun by Sunni gunmen who kidnapped some of the Shiite patients, said a provincial health official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears for his safety.
Fourteen Baqouba physicians and five ambulance drivers have been killed and 12 doctors kidnapped since Diyala fighting escalated earlier this year. Gunmen often steal medical equipment and medicine from health centers and force pharmacists to give up their supplies, the official said.
Saeed al-Shimary recounted how four months ago, as he lay sick in the Baqouba hospital, gunmen fatally shot a hospital guard and took several patients away, including his relative.
“I was horrified,” said al-Shimary, a teacher. The relative’s body was found days later, dumped by a road.
The “bad security situation … is preventing medical teams from reaching the residents,” said Hom Suhail al-Khishali, head of the Diyala health department.
WHO has confirmed at least 3,315 cholera cases and registered more than 30,000 cases of acute watery diarrhea - which could also prove to be cholera in its more common, milder form. The group has also warned that - as the weather cools and temperatures become more favorable for transmission - the bacteria could spread further.
Dr. Naeema al-Gasseer, the WHO representative in Iraq, says the grim numbers fuel the panic, when in fact the death rate has been “very much less than 1 percent of the total outbreak.”
“Let’s not focus on numbers, that’s not the way to deal with cholera,” she said. “We must look at ways to contain it.”
Cholera, usually spread by drinking contaminated water, typically causes severe diarrhea that in extreme cases can lead to fatal dehydration and kidney failure. There are normally about 30 cases registered each year in Iraq. The last major outbreak was in 1999, when 20 cases were discovered in one day.
Cholera can be controlled by treating drinking water with chlorine. But authorities want to keep tight controls on chlorine supplies after extremists earlier this year placed chlorine tanks on suicide truck bombs, killing some two dozen people in several attacks and sending noxious clouds that left hundreds of panicked people gasping for breath.
A shipment of 100,000 tons of chlorine was held up for a week at the Jordanian border last month, amid fears for its safe passage through Iraq.
Naeem al-Qabi, from Baghdad’s municipal council, said the city now has a two month’s supply of chlorine and “more shipments are expected.”
A July report by the relief agency Oxfam and the NGO Coordination Committee network in Iraq said that about 70 percent of Iraqis are without adequate water supplies, up from 50 percent in 2003.
That includes more than 2 million people who have been displaced inside Iraq by the fighting, which has forced many to live in unsanitary conditions where sewage can infest food and water and easily spread cholera.
Tom Timberman, leader of a reconstruction team with the 4th Brigade, 25th infantry Division, said water purification and canal clearing systems have broken down due to a lack of maintenance and replacement parts.
Many purification plant workers have been killed or fled the violence, leaving the area with a lack of expertise, Timberman said. Tests at one of the water purification facilities near Iskandariyah, a town 30 miles south of Baghdad, found the filtration system wasn’t working, so dirty water was just passing through the pipes.
In Mosul, about 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, officials complain that Baghdad sent them 20 tons of chlorine, while the city needs about 60 tons.
“Now we fear cholera more than the violence,” said Shawan Karim, 33, a resident in the northern city of Kirkuk, which has accounted for more than two-thirds of the confirmed cholera cases.
Associated Press writers Sameer N. Yacoub, Kim Gamel, Saad Abdul-Kadir and Yahya Barzanji contributed to this story.
© 2007 Associated Press
That’s “freedom” for ya.
You don’t suppose the administration is using the old “smallpox blanket” trick, do you?
(In order to eradicate Native-American indigenous peoples in the late 1800’s, the government made gifts of blankets previously used by smallpox victims.)
Welcome to Act Two of the horrible, lingering travesty that is George W. Bush’s contribution to human suffering. Is there a Nobel Prize for Anti-Peace? Hitler, Stalin, Amin, Pinochet, and now Bush. I am so ashamed, as an American, as a man, as a human being. George W. Bush is the worst of the worst, in all three categories. I have only said this about two other individuals in my lifetime: I Hate George W. Bush. Pardon my strong language, but catharsis is my only non-murderous recourse at this moment….
….and the only crystal clear thought in my mind is that the murder must stop.
Biological warfare? Hey, wasn’t that one of the things that Sadaam was accused of on Chimpy’s road to war?
We have brought disaster to Iraq and they would without question be better off today under Saddam Hussein. We have destroyed their country and are planning to steal their resources and the so called opposition party led by Hillary Clinton will continue the policies of George W. Bush. When I hear her blame the Iraqis for not responding to our brutal invasion more positively she makes me sick.
Not a medical person, but cholera isn’t contagious, is it? I was under the impression that you had to drink dirty water to get it. So nothing will be done about this until our guys start catching it. But wait-wasn’t one of Halliburton’s subsidiaries giving our troops unpurified water not all that long ago? It could be sooner than we think…
Cholera outbreak in Iraq proudly sponsored by the BUSH/CHENEY TEAM. Hey…………it’s the cost of doing business!
I do agree that this has become a case of biological warfare — planned or unplanned. What`s important here is that it all adds up to genocide.
To thewonderingyou:
Ditto. I’m ashamed, embarrassed and afraid to travel now. Is Divine Justice our only hope? The media and politicians are corporate whores and American people too naive and/or lazy to educate themselves and act. So, what?
Curmudgeon99 October 5th, 2007 12:23 pm:
You don’t suppose the administration is using the old “smallpox blanket” trick, do you?
Yes, it is the same idea as the old blanket routine.
When you destroy a country’s sanitation system and water supply, cholera is an expected result–no ifs, ands, or maybes, and any invading army that destroys the infrastructure of a country and, six years later, has not done diddley to replace it is guilty of these deaths. Cholera is extremely infectious and deadly. Looks like it’s “Mission Accomplished” just a dubya said. Destroy their country, steal their oil. I’ll repeat what he said to Brown when similar events were unfolding in New Orleans: Helluva job, brownie, helluva job–as human bodies floated by in the canals and waterways. There is no telling how many people are sick with hepatitis and other infections which are all due to a lack of cleanliness–i.e., inadequate sanitation and lack of clean water. I’m like Andrew Greeley on another article today–when in the hell will the war crimes trials begin?
Oh yeah, and to quote Colin Powell who is a daddy of all of this carnage, too, for all of his running and hiding: these poor souls are just “collateral damage” Mr. Powell, you helped break it–now you help fix it! I hope there is a prison cell waiting for him, too!!!
Hey holymoly I was just about to launch into a diatribe of eloquent historical reflective parallels. Only to discover another enlightened soul had gone and done it for me… Anyway, you covered it pretty damn well. Bu$hCo can sure be proud of there handiwork of Genocidal Holocaust in Iraq… approx 1.2 million dead…They have thoroughly covered nearly every technique of racial segregation, vilification and extermination…
http://diatribune.com/iraqi-holocaust
I never thought in my lifetime that I would see my country be so blatantly evil and then experience a Congress that would just “let it happen.” I feel so sad every day. These Iraqi people have suffered so much. How much more can they endure? By the time this is all over, there won’t be much left of Iraq. We have raped and pillaged this country. All the death and suffering and for what? Oil? Help us all.
It is beyond shameful. But, hey, “we don’t torture”. Bush and co. are evil. Tell me the Iraqi people aren’t being tortured every day.
I’m with Lynne. I am so sad every day, too. It is horrifying to think of all that this man has brought down on the heads of the Iraqis and the citizens of this country.
I am not even allowed to say what I think should happen to him and his henchmen. I would probably be sent to a black prison somewhere.
Great democracy.
the old “smallpox blanket” trick . . .
That’s why bombing of civilian infastructure, power, water, sewage etc., is against the Geneva Convention. But what does our gang of war criminals care? Just wait for our boys and girls to bring this bug home with them. Why did you think Satan’s Little Helper vetoed the expanded Childrens Healthcare bill? We have expanded War on Poverty into War on the Poor. This Holoween we may well have our government’s own version of the old “smallpox blanket” trick or treat.
The genocidal maniacs in Washington are enemies of mankind!
—————————-
“Peace will be the result of understanding and sharing…”
Djwahl Khul
You have all said it very well. Congress is just as culpable as the Bush/Cheney Crime family. Any congress that would not impreach the bastards for violations of our constitution and High Crimes, let alone misdemeanors is the congress that needs to be replaced, every one of them.
Re: Cholora outbreak in Iraq (Let’s not call it an epidemic, ‘yet’ OK?)
Interesting, no cholora problems inside the Green Zone where there is always clean water and sanitation.
But, US soldiers ‘waving’ bottles of purified water at the natives in downtwon Baghdad as they roll by in their tanks and humbee’s sure hasn’t made Amwerica any new friends.
Hey Mohhammed, pull out a Russian IED, let’s give them dudes something to be sad about.
TheAZCowBoy
Tombstone, AZ.
and Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh are beating the war drums for toppling the Iran regime… GREAT!
at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they dropped THE bomb on them.
sigh
Ah, Bush’s “Paradise,” Iraq. According to BushCo, things are getting better; they don’t live in Iraq, so it’s easy for them to make such a preposterous claim. Bet the Iraqis are all wishing Saddam were back in control of things.
Since the Iraqis are not Christians are not blonde and blue-eyed, and have a valuable resource that the imperialists covet, their deaths are not counted by the racist scum that brought death and destruction to them — the Bush-Cheney Crime Syndicate.
This cholera issue came up on CD a few weeks ago - at that time it was pretty much confined to the Kurds, and if our troops had acted then to cure and contain it, it wouldn’t have spread all over Iraq. We could have done that with some chlorine and proper medical care, but - well, why didn’t we? We’re always saying that we’re there to help them. Sure. Like it says on a mug I have, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you.”
Right.
The on-going Iraqi Holocaust is almost totally ignored by the mainstream media, the Congressional Democrats, and the leading candidates, not to mention the Republicans who are perfoming this abomination against the Iraqi people.
1,200,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, according to the best epidemiological survey we have, and the Democrats keep funding the war so we can “finish the job.”
The “job” we’re really doing in Iraq is genocide, and it won’t be finished until the last Iraqi is dead.
Cholera in Iraq is funded by U.S. taxpayers.
Shame on the USA!
=======================
Q. If the US and other forces were to ask for advice from Hierarchy, what advice and solutions to the terrible mess of Afghanistan and Iraq would they receive?
A. To admit the wrong committed by the invasions and to pour the necessary monies and all other resources to restore these countries to peace and calm. To hold an international UN-led inquiry into the best way to begin and complete this restoration and to avow no further incursions of a like kind anywhere in the world.
Excerpted from: Questions and answers
http://share-international.org/magazine/SI_current.htm#qa
Moonshadow, because the fecal-to-oral route of transmission is so well paired with the most common method of passing a contagion (simple touch) any germ intestinal germ can easily be considered contagious.
Of course, in the US, people wash food. They wash clothes. They wash cooking utensils. Sometimes they even wash their hands, and sometimes they even do all of these things properly. But all of that depends on a clean water supply, or the time and fuel to sterilize water by boiling.
Cholera can actually kill you in several hours. You normally process about ten liters of water each day in your large intestine. One and a half of that comes from what you eat, and the rest is from digestive juices. Most of that is re-absorbed. With Cholera, not only is your body’s ability to reabsorb that water damaged, but the bacterium fools your body into releasing even more water into the intestines. Now you stand (not literally, of course) to lose 36 liters of water in a day.
It’s deadly, it’s preventable, it’s predictable. And this is all inexcusable.
Jacob, I agree. It appears the war criminals in the White House, Pentagon, and Congress won’t be satisfied until the “job is finished,” code for Iraqi genocide.
It IS genocide. It’s a horror. It’s not just the Republicans, though. The Democrats are allowing it and pushing it, too, through their legislation. And it’s not just the Americans. The British and to a smaller extent, the Danes are responsible, too. I don’t get how Saddam was better. He was a genocidal nightmare, as well.
While it is understandable that the infrastructure will suffer with any invasion, the funds provided to private contractors (with no-bid contracts) should have remedied the situation long ago. Where has the money gone? You would think the MSM would have a story here.
Dinosaur technology, dinosaur ideologies, Dinosaurs battle it out while little humans are trampled underneath.
The faster the primal operant Bush Cult follows the program and gets the Iraqis out of the way, the faster oil fields are taken. The genocide trick repeats that of Leland Stanford when Native Americans got in the way of the railroad ‘enterprise’. The Stanford-supported Bush Cult is doing the same to Americans now with corporate McHealthcare beyond affordability, so logically also to ‘foreigners’. To those of you elsewhere, please know that American citizens who oppose Bush Cult policies are treated much the same as Germans who opposed the Hitler Cult policies. This is High Time for the American Churches, who are somewhat immune from political suppression and heckling, to intervene and show the world that Americans still have a Soul… show some of that love and compassion for human suffering, in your Jesus’ name. Perhaps that would calm the hostilities of the Islamic religious fanatics driven by their own religious rhetoric…. a chance to make Peace in a situation created and dominated by dinosaurs following dinosaur ideologies.
Bu$h the inferior will claim that no one could have foreseen this turn of events or will blame it on the sovereign Iraq government.
You know the sovereign government that can’t cancel the operating license of foreign mercenaries.
Agree with “RestoreDemocracy”.
But really, the Church has for a long time now followed the “status quo” and before that, would have actually been leading the charge against Islam. However, anyone with a soul should be able to see that this has gone so wrong.
Unfortunately, Jesus is only a word now that the hypocrites use in the defense of their crimes.
ye gods kilgore trout is not dead!!
“yeah he said don’t believe such nonesense”
i walk with a very staunch baptist
mostly we talk not about such things
as politics–except maybe local..
when the subject of iraq does come up
her response is always
nuke-em..
i do not hold my breath waiting for any church
to stand in the way of killing..
the dude did die on the X!!
ken
Courtesy of the United States of America
War
Famine
Pestilence
Disease
How far the fall
“To those of you elsewhere, please know that American citizens who oppose Bush Cult policies are treated much the same as Germans who opposed the Hitler Cult policies.”
-restoredemocracy
FYI
I believe there is on record 16 or 17 documented attempts by German resistance groups to forcibly remove Prescott Bush’s buddy Adolph from office. I haven’t heard of any like activity in USA fatherland. Except in the case of JKF, but that was a completely different story.
Bush is out of touch with reality, as usual.
Bush, Sept 3, 2007: “normal life is returning” to Iraq
“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”
Kurt knew because he was there; not like these posers.
Cholera spreads like wildfire. How soon will it go across the borders? How long before the Middle East has an epidemic? At least this possibility is real and immediate, not like the fake Chicken Flu. Fuck George’s responsibility, we’ve got to find a way to contain the disease. Eventually, a US soldier will come down with it and then…a different kind of surge?
Cholera is spread through contaminated water and food. I doubt that the soldiers are at risk. Hey, what about the Iraqis? I guess it’s okay for them to get it? American politicians gift to the Iraqis….
In April 2003, a smirking President Bush crowed to a cheering crowd of soldiers at CENTCOM in Florida that the model for Iraq would be ‘our new democratic Afghanistan.’
During the first months of the US occupation, secular, nationalistic Iraqis in the streets of Baghdad often told themselves, “At least we are not ‘Afghanistan’”. Now they know better.
The deliberate dismemberment of the entire modern structure that made up the secular Republic of Iraq was systematically accomplished by the gang of Paul Bremer (a war criminal and fascist as guilty as Eichmann),with Israeli advisers, in order the break up the country into ethnically cleansed, manageable tribal client states, dependent on the Empire and its mercenaries for the safety of their collaborator elite and never again capable of opposing Israel’s regional hegemonic ambitions.
This is deliberate, genocide, ethnocide, destruction of a society and culture, the systematic dragging of the most educated and cosmopolitan population in the Arab world back to a stage resembling pre-Taliban, warlord Afghanistan. Don’t forget the CIA trained the heroic ‘Afghan Arabs’ and warlords to target women school teachers working in the countryside for ’special treatment’ for the communist crime of teaching peasant girls to read.
Is there any wonder the Iraqis are willing to blow themselves up for the chance to kill an occupier?
This lesson in American and Israeli style colonialism is not lost on the Iranians, who have even more to lose than the starvation sanctioned Iraqis did at the time of the US invasion. They are preparing to sacrifice all to prevent their world from being transformed into another cholera-coated nightmare in the Middle East through a US-Israeli invasion or bombing campaign.
Widespread cholera in Iraq is the result of the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and the firing and killing of its technical specialists and bombing of its water treatment facilities. George W. Bush is the King of Cholera and the Emperor of Dysentery. The hollow eyes of his victims stare back at all of us in rage.
FUBAR
They keep repeating mistakes over mistakes. Any idiot knows that Anthrax is much more effective than cholera to get rid of the insurgents.
Anyone who doubts that US soldiers are exposed to water-borne diseases like cholera in Iraq may want to watch this video, where a former employee of Halliburton describes the insane negligence of Halliburton’s water-treatment facilities for US Marines.
Our guys are bathing in raw sewage, and even drinking it sometimes, and the US Senate is too busy condemning an ad by MoveOn.org to notice Halliburton’s depraved indifference to the health of our brave soldiers.
Iraq had 100,000 engineers, which was comparable per capita to a first world country like the UK. Iraq also had a large and growing industrial base financed by the income from oil. The country was a going to be a serious threat to Israel one of these days, so of course it had to be smashed. And now the destruction is nearly complete.
Why do you think nearly all the neocons were Jewish? They really helped to sucker us into Iraq, didn’t they? The cost to America: enormous, astronomical; incalculable, really, when you factor in the severe damage to our reputation and therefore our moral clout in the world. The cost to Israel for its vastly improved strategic position: zero. Such a deal.
The biggest irony is that we are funding our own destruction. We give Israel $billions every year, which translates to thousands of dollars per annum to every Jewish man, woman, and child in Israel. No wonder they are able to live such a comfortable lifestyle. And I have little doubt that some of that money comes right back as political contributions (i.e. bribes) offered by Jewish organizations like AIPAC, which hugely influences Congress to keep the free money and the free wars coming. Jews around the world must be laughing themselves sick at the success of this incredible swindle.
Merek,
You are absolutely correct. What is more, this dismemberment of Iraq and the systematic erasure (to use the Isreali term) of its national institutions - down to the firing of its sanitation engineers and deliberate burning of its census and property records in the looting of Baghdad was planned years before the actual invasion. It was not only Rumsfeld who joked that ‘freedom is messy, sometimes it means being free to do bad things’, Michael Ledeen praise the ‘instructional’ value of ‘taking a shitty little country and throwing it against a wall’. So here we must learn our lessons well. Iran and the rest of the resource-rich independent world should be prepared to resist with all their talents and wealth - not give in without a fight like the corrupt Iraqi generals who cut a deal with the US and opened the gates of their cities. In the end the US will lose, like they did in Viet Nam but not without unleashing a hell of suffering and degradation unlike anything ever experienced in the Middle East - such is the American arrogance and racism. The US Zionist elite configuration currently running decision making and policy in the Middle East are willing to destroy thousands of American lives as mere tools to their will to Israeli hegemony. For these Isreali agents, we are either ‘tools or fools’. This is for the US Military officers to ponder as they head off to their officer clubs.
Saila, You don’t know anything about the disease caused by anthrax or else you are joking. Anthrax is a condition spread easily among horses, goats and cows - difficult to infect humans and never spread from person to person. In order to infect a human, a large amount must be inhaled in an infectious form into a susceptible person, preferable with underlying lung problems. Early treatment with conventional antibiotics like penicillin and tetracycline is effective. It took a large volume of the ’so-called weaponized’ stuff contaminating the postal sorting machines to be sprayed up the nostrils of Washington DC area postal workers for two of them to become sick and die after being misdiagnosed for their classic symptems by area physicians. This all occurred while the Congressional sniffer dogs were receiving prophylactic antibiotics. I like to call this a modern version of the Tuskeegee medical experiment - since virtually all of the postal workers in the Washington DC area are African-American. Anyway - a little rain or heavy humidity will make the aerosolized ‘weaponized’ anthrax stick together and fall into useless clumps. In other words - its a bust as a weapon. Cholera is much better at eliminating populations.
It’s about money from oil. So I suggest we use oil to our advantage: if you have a car run out of gas, on the road, at rush hour. Bring a friend. Have a momentary “vapor lock”. Turn off the engine, roll to a stop, put on the flasher, etc. Be safe, non-confrontational. 20 people in any large city could stop most traffic for hours.
Well, just an idea . . . hard to know the consequences of any action (nonlinear dynamic systems, ie chaos theory).
Besides all the killings and mayhem a sudden oil scarcity would bring, it would be cool to get around on horses and bicycles I think. Heck we could even use our legs before evolution takes them away and turns us into a pillow with one finger to push buttons with.
Ah! the good old days under Saddam Hussein. He was no angel, but look at the shit the US is creating and all in the name of “democracy” and “fighting terrorism”. What a heap of stinking, smelly BS!
Progressive101, I don’t think the Chimp is THAT out-of-touch with reality. He knows what’s happening to the Iraqis, but he doesn’t care — and he will repeat any lie since he has no conscience. Fascists aren’t interested in reality. This makes it easy for him to make absurd statements about how things are improving for Iraqis.
43 fatalities from cholera have been reported in neighboring areas of Iran.
yay
Now that the disease is spreading, I belive Iran has the legal footing to seek a Crimes against Humanity charge against the entire US administration.
By now the Iraqis must have figured out that American -style democracy for Iraqis is nothing but full of shit.
Vera Gottlieb October 6th, 2007 12:20 pm
“Ah! the good old days under Saddam Hussein.”
Well actually, by comparison Saddam Hussein was the ‘Mother Teresa of the Middle East”; as compared to the current reign of Evil under Bu$hCo’s henchmen, Murkywasters, torturers, sycophants and suck-holes…
“George W. Bush is the King of Cholera and the Emperor of Dysentery. The hollow eyes of his victims stare back at all of us in rage.”
George W. Bu$h is guilty of GENOCIDE and a holocaust; a modern day Hitler of our time. Now on a scale far more devastating than Pol Pot in Cambodia. The ‘neo-con-artists’ and the ‘evilgelicals’ can be truly proud of their loving support for this War Criminal’s handiwork.
Around the time of the first Bush war, the neocon planners said that the first thing to do was knock out the water, power, and sewage treatment facilities. They said that would cause over a million deaths from Typhus, Cholera and other similar diseases and would effectively destroy the infrastructure of Iraq. The theory was that it would then be easy to take over the country as the survivors would be too sick to fight back.
Don’t we work for the nicest people?
I am so glad to see that all the billions of American tax dollars (and debt) are doing so much to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq. The Iraqis must be cheering their liberation from Saddam. Perhaps Cholera and disease are the Bush Administration’s “ULTIMATE SOLUTION”.
i have believed from the very beginning of this current debaucle….that the real war is over fresh clean water….fuk that oil,you do not need it to live and you cant drink it.one of the very first things the u.s. military took out with their bombs during shock and awe,was the water mains and they have yet to be repaired…because ultimately,in the end,water is how they will control……the masses…….i am sure the people of iraq(except the kurds)long for the good ole’days under saddam..when shiite and sunni,intermarried and lived side by side..a country where women wore secular clothing,drove cars and were ceo’s….a country that was all about educating the people(both genders)and paid for under the saddam regime thru post-graduate school….yes,i am sure the people of iraq,long to have their prior freedoms,back.halliburton and the whole bush crime syndicate are truly behemoth monsters of the highest degree…the problem is they hi-jacked the pentagon and all the massive weapons of death,americans have not owned since the world shifted on nov.22,1963.after kennedy refused to militarily back up geobushsr.,cia and the bay of pigs gang..the bush syndicate made it their mission to gain control of the military…the bush crime syndicate has had possession nearly 40 years.if there were any true justice in this world……halliburton and the whole bush crime syndicate should not be allowed to keep any profits made from the war they created and they should be made to pay all the victims of iraq and all the restorations…OUT OF THEIR OWN UNIMAGINABLY UNBELIEVABLY DEEP DEEP DEEP DIRTY POCKETS !!(and then hang them)
Disease notably cholera has been the scourge of all wars since the beginning of history.
you Americans elected a drug addict (cocaine) and alcoholic who served his time in Vietnam defending Houston from Viet cong attacks.(When he showed up for duty!)
The generals who had the worst experiences of WW11 left the most moving pleas for peace (Gen Omar Bradley and gen Dwight D Eisenhower).
In those days you elected men of stature with experience.
Now you elect ignorant men such as Bush whose only knowledge of war is a video game.
If he goes to the tribunal you should also send all the people who voted him in, all your representatives too afraid to tell the truth and stop the war because their reelection depends on funding from the military-indudtrial complex.
As I see it , the only difference between Burma and USA is that burmese really want democracy , USAers talk about democracy but have lost it.
As for genocide Jacob
duchaspa…frank zappa said”freedom is an illusion that will only continue,as long as it is profitable,when it is no longer profitable,they will clear the stage and open the curtains..then you will see the brick wall.” dont be too hard on us americans,i have always doubted that we’elected’them……….i know i never did !
When Bu$h said he wanted to liberate everyone in Iraq he meant KILL THEM FIRST so they can be free. I guess this is just one way of liberating them-
mr.freeze,it is probably very deliberate,they(the bushmaster) wants to phase out the military,so that we have no recourse but to accept mercenaries such as blackwater as being essential.iraq has been their(the bushmaster)personal playground of population-contol.i am sure they have even more horrors they are cooking up on the backburner for us and the rest of the world…if we cannot gain control of our arsenal(and the chances are remote)and wrest it away from the bush factions,we are all iraq and iraq is us……….
furthermore mr.duchspa,it was the sunni,the kurds and the baathists that desired democracy and definitely NOT the shiite(who hold fast to theocracy)and the first thing the maniac bush did,was to dismantle the baathists,kill the sunni and put the fanatical shiite ‘in charge’please dont ever call that tyrannt bush,my president he is a stonecold killing machine and a psycotic sociopath..i just live here,and will not leave my extended family behind,here….where they are=so is my heart.for god’s sake,wont they give those poor embattled people fresh water and all the benefits of our high-priced healthcare !!??yes, lillulu “until the job is done”,IS code for genocide.robinea,i like your posts,they have clarity and level-headed thinking….these dark days,we really cant get enough of that………
Anyone who thinks the Kurds in ‘liberated democratic Kurdistan’, America’s ethnically cleansed showpiece in the Middle East, are immune from the cholera outbreak, consider this: The current cholera epidemic, unheard of before the US invasion, started in Northern Iraq, I mean ‘Democratic Kurdistan’ and most of the fatalities are among the Kurdish masses. Well, blame that one on Saddam! Actually, this proves that the billions of dollars looted from the Iraqi state and taken to ‘Democratic Kurdistan’ by the Peshmerga warlords (Freedom fighters)and their CIA and Mossad handlers certainly didn’t get ‘wasted’ on providing clean water to their mass base. Well, at least the Kurds are ‘free’ even if their children are free to perish from cholera and dehydration.
Well, here is my prediction (and I predicted the US-Israel plans to split up and ethnically cleanse Iraq years before the invasion): the ‘freedom-loving’ Kurds will have outlived their usefulness to empire-building in Iraq and those who haven’t followed the fat warlords, like the Barzanis and Talabanis and their loot to London or Washington DC will perish, discarded by the US and Israel like so many used-up condoms! Yesterday’s ‘Freedom Fighters for Empire’ are tomorrow’s hollow-eyed refuge on the dung heap of colonial collaboration. They once had a country: it was called the Republic of Iraq. Now, let them eat cholera, a poetic end for their collaboration!
Quote from George Bush the Liar: “I’ve been to war (haha). I’ve raised twins. If I had a choice, I’d rather go to war.”
This fool’s hobby is to see how many outrageous lies he can tell during his lifetime and get away with it.
Of course, in the US, people wash food.
Food like letuice and spinach and dead cows…
Jacob Freeze October 5th, 2007 8:01 pm
“The on-going Iraqi Holocaust is almost totally ignored by the mainstream media, the Congressional Democrats, and the leading candidates, not to mention the Republicans who are perfoming this abomination against the Iraqi people.
1,200,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, according to the best epidemiological survey we have, and the Democrats keep funding the war so we can “finish the job.”
The “job” we’re really doing in Iraq is genocide, and it won’t be finished until the last Iraqi is dead”
The *Iraqi Holocaust® and Genocide* sponsored in part by the state of Israel, AIPAC, and the US Government, spreading democracy and freedom to the “uncivilized” world.
duchaspa– I think some people who are posting here find your comments harsh. I don’t. Bush, Cheney, and most of the Congress should be tried as war criminals and hanged. While I don’t think the penalty for voting for Bush should be hanging, I do feel that everyone who voted for him–especially the second time around, when his agenda was clear–should be called to account in some way, though it is perhaps impractical to do so, because the secret ballot is a rather important democratic institution that should be preserved.
However, it would certainly NOT be impractical to call to account the church leadership who have supported Bush and this war–and who have bullied or manipulated their congregations into supporting it.
The support of the church leadership is certainly not protected by democratic institutions. Wherever church leadership has publicly and officially supported Bush and the war, they too should face a war crimes tribunal–and they too should face capital punishment for this support of a criminal regime.
This support of war crimes by the churches is one of the most appalling developments I’ve seen in the US. The churches have made themselves functionaries of a criminal regime and, as such, their leadership should be prosecuted and hanged.
Just some more American social experiments ? The whole thing reeks of bankers games. Let them who cause the wars fight them. Brilliant US of I - You insult the President of a Sovereign Nation and a prestigious Catholic University denies an Icon of our age to speak. I’m glad I gave up religion for its hypocrasy a long time ago. God bless(help) America.
These outbreaks have been known to exist in prison camps
Or course American (and Israeli) revisionist history won’t say a word about the genocide — the Iraqi Holocaust — in history books. They’ll probably blame the deaths of the Iraqis on the Iraqis themselves.
Christians, along with Zionists, support this and their evil war criminal hero, George Bush. That doesn’t say much for Christianity.
The poor woman in the picture, just hours from death, was 40 years old and looked 60. What did she ever do to the American people for them to attack her country and to lose her life?? I believe Bush and his supporters are evil, heartless, and totally without a conscience.
The Israelis are all for this; I’m wondering why they aren’t “serving” in Iraq.
Yeah, Bushco is evil. But they didn’t invent it in the USA or Iraq. Sand Creek Massacre where babies heads were bashed in with rifle butts to save bullets. Striking miners and their families gunned down by government goons (read the biography of Mother Jones).Out of work veterans gunned down and run out of Washington, D.C. during the depression. And, of course, that all time favorite, the small-pox
blankets. Evil is the business of the United States Government and they are damn good at it. But, then, look at the latest. 822,000
pounds of ground beef recalled by Cargill. 21.7 million recalled by Topp Meat, their down fall. Are you any safer from your own government than the Iraqi people? This is bad karma and Mother Nature is just waiting to drop the Big One.
FAULT, criminal, hell-BOUND fault of Bush-Cheney or Cheney-Bush administration, and U.S. and Western govt(s) puppeteers, manipulators, rulers, DECIDERS!!
Saddam Hussein was a comparitively friendly ruler, only getting a little to nasty now and then; but still not as bad, evil. Did a LOT more for people who did not oppose his governance, than Bush, Cheney, Kissinger, etc., etc,. etc., ever did and ever will do, for they have NO CARE at all. Saddam Hussein did, only that he got a bit too nasty about trying to enforce good rule. NO good rule at all with Bushes, Cheneys, Kissingers, etc., etc.; NONE, no good intentions whatsoever.
But that’s ALL of Western history for the past five or six centuries, EH! Yeah, and you’d think we’d learn this by NOW, but we don’t; we just keep repeating “all over the place”, i.e., Earth.
What’s so tragic is that cholera is easily treated, since it’s a bacterial infection. So it isn’t just the contaminated water that’s killing Iraqis, it’s the lack of medical care:
=====
Cholera is a serious bacterial disease that often causes severe diarrhea. Cholera usually spreads through contaminated water. Left untreated, cholera can cause death in a matter of hours.
Modern sewage- and water-treatment facilities have virtually eliminated cholera in industrialized countries. The last major cholera outbreak in the United States occurred in 1911. But cholera is still present in other parts of the world, such as Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and particularly India and sub-Saharan Africa. The risk of cholera epidemic is highest when poverty, war or natural disasters force people to live in crowded conditions without adequate sanitation, a common cause of cholera outbreaks.
Unlike many infectious diseases, cholera is easily treated. Death results from severe dehydration that can be prevented with a simple and inexpensive rehydration solution.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cholera/DS00579
=====
More Iraqi deaths that Bush has wrought. Will it never end?
The Iraqis never deserved an invasion, torture, occupation, and the destruction of their country for George Bush’s war-lust.
Anney,
While I agree with the gist of your comment about diseases of poverty, cholera may be ‘easily treatable’ in the hallowed halls of the mayoclinic - but having seen a cholera victim in shock and multi-organ failure with renal shut-down, believe me, offering the patient a ’sippy cup’ of oral rehydration fluid is not good medicine on the real front lines of the world. it is a serious and rapidly fatal disorder which requires immediate supportive care and attention to replacing fluid loss (which can come from both ends). There is a point of irreversible shock from organ damage.
Still we should marvel at the rapidity with which Iraq, once the most socially and medically advanced country in the Arab world, has been driven back centuries into the clutches of once eradicated bacterial scourges and degrading filth. Hats off to the evil genius of our Idiot Prince from Texan, the Cholera King of the New American Century…what Ghengis Khan could not do to Baghdad and its brave people after years of seige, George W. Bush has easily accomplished to the appreciative grunts of his Congressional marionettes and the yapping of his shiny legions of propagandists!
There is an American genius after all - Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti - all examples to instruct the recalcitrant in the perils of resisting the dictates of Empire.
robinea
I take your point, but you also made the point that was important, and that is the destruction of Iraq’s medical care system. Before the invasion, Iraq had the medical facilities that made cholera deaths from dehydration (the reason given for this woman’s death) relatively simple to prevent. They were as fully advanced as the hallowed halls of the Mayo Clinic. Not sippy cups but intravenous hydration and antibacteriological treatments.
I know cholera is terrible if untreated. What other scourges has Bush enabled in Iraq? Shall we hear of the bubonic plague next?
In the name of God, the All Merciful, the Mercy-giving
Most of you guys nailed it on the head. It used to be guns, germs and steel…Now its guns, germs and bombs.
Social Darwinism. What can I say.
Just so people know:
=====
The World Health Organization (WHO) has established guidelines for treating cholera. The goal is to replace fluids and electrolytes lost through diarrhea using a simple rehydration solution that contains specific proportions of water, salts and sugar. The solution, called Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS), is available as a powder that can be reconstituted in boiled or bottled water.
During a cholera epidemic, most people can be helped by oral rehydration alone, but severely dehydrated people may also need intravenous fluids. No matter which method is used, immediate treatment is critical because death from cholera can occur within hours. Without rehydration, approximately half the people with cholera die. With treatment, the number of fatalities drops to less than 1 percent.
In addition to rehydration, people who are severely ill with cholera may benefit from antibiotics, which can cut the length of the illness in half. Recent studies show that a single dose of azithromycin (Zithromax, Zmax) in adults or children with severe cholera helps shorten diarrhea duration and decreases vomiting.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cholera/DS00579/DSECTION=8
One of the reasons Cholera is such a quick killer is that the massive dehydration causes the electrolytic balance to go off the scale, which can cause heart failure. Just plain water won’t restore that imbalance.
Someone made the snide statement that we “wash our vegetables here.” If all you have is contaminated water, and no fuel to boil it, you haven’t accomplished a thing, have you?
As I mentioned in another post, the neocon battle plan for Iraq was to knock out their water, power and sewage treatment facilities. That would quickly bring about a million or so deaths due to Cholera, Typhus and other diseases, and weaken the survivors so they would be less able to fight.
It happened one war too late as far as they were concerned, but we are right back on target.
War crimes tribunals are greatly needed at this time.
Your tax $ at work. Thank your Congressperson, unless she’s Barbara Lee or some such radical.
libertas fugit
“As I mentioned in another post, the neocon battle plan for Iraq was to knock out their water, power and sewage treatment facilities.”
But, of course, not the Oil Ministry…
Anney,
The lady in the photo reportedly died from shock with kidney shut down - a consequence of severe, untreated dehydration following several days of fluid and electrolyte loss from diarrhea and, probably vomiting - all the oral rehydration in the world would have been useless - besides these people often have intractable vomiting. The treatment at her stage might have included dialysis. My point - and your point, it seems, is that treatment of cholera is complex: At an early stage, one might treat with oral rehydration carefully catching up with the loss of both fluid and electrolyte, but if untreated, it may lead to shock and organ failure - for which high-level supportive care, including dialysis, may be necessary. Z-Max is extremely expensive and may merely shorten the infection, but it will not reverse fluid and electrolyte loss. So again, the simple availibility packets of oral rehydration, is not enough in a cholera outbreak. And children, infants and the elderly are much more susceptible to developing shock from large fluid losses in the first place.
I don’t intend to insult your intelligence but I am pointing this out because over the years I have run across plenty of NGOers who simply think dumping packs of oral-rehydration salts is a quick remedy for the deliberate break down of a complex and delicate social system - including public health, medical facilities and water and sewage treatment - which has been so successfully implemented in Iraq by the Empire. This is no ‘mistake’, it was entirely predictable: the recent ‘epidemic’ of cholera in South Africa, the first in over 60 years, happened because the World Bank mandated dismantling the South African public health system and the privatization to a French multinational of the once publicly-owned water system, pricing the poor out of even access to clean drinking and washing water, and forcing the poor to drink and wash in filth. The South African government eventually had to ‘call out the army’ because they had already sacrificed their once effective public health system to the ‘market’. An intact public health system is essential. I also mention this because the during the Nazi starvation blockade of Leningrad in WWII (one of the greatest war crimes in history) there were no outbreaks of infectious epidemic although hundreds of thousands starved to death or were shot by the Nazis trying to produce food on the outskirts of the city. This was because there was an intact, highly disciplined Soviet public health system, which operated throughout the blockade of Leningrad.
The fact that the current cholera outbreak started in the ‘liberated’ Iraqi Kurdistan shows just how profoundly corrupt the General Petreaus’ closest allies in Iraq, the bloated Kurdish warlords, are and how the CIA’s favorite puppets have been sending out the looted national assets to the bankers of New York, London and the Gulf States rather than maintaining even a simple sanitation system. I imagine the Kurdish masses are getting fed up with their corrupt puppet warlords and their puppet-masters.
robinea
No, I didn’t think you were insulting my intelligence. My only point, and I think one of yours, was that *if there is a good medical care system*, and that would mean widespread and local care, cholera can be treated if identified immediately with a good prognosis.
I have also seen some of the reports about the World Bank and other entities being used to foment various kinds of health care/water supply crises that would result in lower populations in parts of the world. The US principle of “no-condoms but abstinence” in 3rd world countries is a perfect upfront example. AIDs is rampant among married individuals there, and how the hell can anybody be expected to be abstinent with a spouse?
Anyway, it’s ghastly to think that the Bush administration may have put Iraq on the list of countries to be decimated by disease as well as war. I am no longer innocent about the evil hand of governmental forces in the world. Neither are my fantasies about justice…
Anney,
No, this is the logic of empire. The condom business in Africa is an ideological fluff for Bush’s evangelical base. Bush doesn’t care whether poor black women in Africa use condoms or not. He is only interested in whether a given African country is open for Americans to loot. He serves the interests of his fellow empire-builders and here it has the overtones of evangelical morality to provide the sweet background music - while Africa is being pillaged by his associates.
One aspect of the American crimes in Iraq is, for me, the systematic slaughter and uprooting of its professional and competent patriotic citizens - who would have been expected to oppose the dismemberment and ethnicly cleansing of the country into primitive tribal client states engineered by the racist policy makers in Washington. Bush and his Zion-con advisers cynically advised the destruction of the functioning Iraqi state institutions at all level and an entire class of people, essential to the rebuilding of Iraq as a secular republic, calling them Baathists, dead-enders, holdovers from the old days of Sadam. This included doctors, nurses, sanitation engineers and public health specialists. Paul Bremer, with the cold calculus of an Eichmann, waged war on the medical system of Iraq.
The repulsively corrupt Iraqi Kurdish warlords, in whose territory the cholera epidemic started, are prime examples of the kind of bloated monsters the Empire choses for its early junior partners in pillage - they will be dumped eventually under pressure from the Turks , especially if cholera spreads over into Turkish Kurdistan together with the PKK fighters. The Kurdish Peshmerga remind me of the loathsome opium lord Montanyards of Indochina used by the French and then the US to commit the worst atrocities against Vietnamese nationalists (remember the bags of human ears and the heads of ‘Communists’ on sticks which formed part of the CIA psywar against Vietnamese patriots). The Kurdish war lords are precisely the kind of corrupt and brutal thugs the US wants to foist on the rest of Iraqis - a sophisticated and proud people - not to be ‘messed with’.
It is not ‘ghastly’. It is the clear-headed logic of empire. The US will lose though because its policymakers and Zionist advisers were blinded by their racism to underestimate Iraqi courage and genius. The Iraqi resistance has shown an enormous capacity to adjust and sacrifice and to use the colonial apparatus against itself. Young American soldiers are more hated in Iraq than they ever were in Viet Nam despite the monumental US brutality in Indochina. The Vietnamese had been under colonial rule for too long to muster up the kind of cold, savage rage that could spawn suicide bombers. In Iraq, even the children and old grannies want to kill Americans and their collaborators. They have lost so much - from the pillage of their immense cultural treasures to the erradication of their schools and institutions and they know precisely who to blame.
The US will also lose because it has trained the civilians of Iraq, especially the children, to be far braver than they are. The US has the weapons to kill them all, but US troops lack the bravery required to subjugate them otherwise.