U.S. Using Chemical Weapons in Iraq?

[Note: See update below]

And burning babies????

See article on the BBC website
Then read more about the effects of white phosphorus
Then read this brilliant blog entry

Impossible? It wouldn't be the first time children have been caught in the chemical crossfire by the U.S. military ...

Sorry if this blog entry sounds shrill - there's something about child abuse that raises my ire.

Eclecta

UPDATE 11/14/05 7:01 AM - I’ve been thinking about this post overnight (yes, I actually woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this), and I would like to make one thing clear: I do not blame the rank and file of the U.S. military if Iraqi children have indeed been burned or killed by the use of white phosphorus. I blame their leaders who got them into such an untenable, indefensible situation in the first place by ordering an invasion of choice into an urban society.

When I was teaching English in South Korea, my fellow expatriate teachers and I would often go to the cities of Osan or Kunsan. There were U.S. military bases (or “stations” or some other term I forget now for the Air Force camps) near these cities, and so enterprising Koreans set up many businesses outside the bases appealing to Westerners (bars, tailors, restaurants, craft shops with amazing pirated cross-stitch patterns for sale). So we would go shopping and/or dancing, and meet up with quite a few American servicemen (and a few servicewomen). Some of us were single, but these poor U.S. soldiers were so lonely for female company that they were thrilled just to have some conversation, mild flirtation, and maybe a dance or two. I expected them to be jerks (cultural bias, I guess), and was quite surprised at how decent and polite the large majority of them were. Some were even gallant. They joked, they teased each other, they spoke of missing their families back home. Most of them seemed very young to my 27-year-old self.

Now I think of those faces, those people. I know many of them got out of the Air Force long before the Iraqi War. But maybe there were a few who thought they’d make a career out of it, and ended up in Iraq. Or, more likely, their replacements are very much like them. And I think of them in this urban war, ordered into places they’re not sure from which they’ll get out alive. I think of the “mental conditioning” that must take place to ensure that they will do the job they’ve been sent to do. And I think of veterans of other wars, who years after their service become broken men as, in a time of peace, they were able to consider the horrors they committed in a time when they felt vulnerable and targeted by the enemy.

And I feel grief for so many lives ruined by a war of choice built on lies.