A US veteran, and Iraqi activist, and Phil Donahue walk into a building. George Bush runs out the back door.
Two US vets sat down with two Iraqi anti-war activists, several academics, and Phil Donahue on Wednesday to discuss the war in Iraq. This actually happened, and the two-hour discussion was both magical and extremely sad.
This war is causing rare and extreme cancers among American soldiers and the Iraqi population. Kristi Casteel spoke about her son who died of cancer caused, she believes, by his exposure to the omnipresent burn pits on US bases.
What’s a burn pit? It’s how the military disposed of much of its waste - they burn it in a giant pit. It’s common to hear of soldiers living and working near these burn pits spitting up black snot every morning. They call it the Baghdad Crud, among other nicknames. Breathe in enough of this, you’re a likely candidate for cancer at a very young age.
Back to Kristi Casteel. Her son died at the age of 32 from lung cancer. She says the doctors were puzzled - how does a non-smoker develop lung cancer at 30? They were surprised until he told them about the burn pits.
Yanar Muhammad is an Iraqi activist for women’s rights. She began her work after the invasion by opening domestic violence shelters. She believed that championing the rights of women would advance peace inside Iraq.
On a trip to Haweeja, a small town in central Iraq, to promote women’s rights, she met mothers with “three or four children who don’t have limbs that work, who are totally paralyzed, some of them have fingers that are fused into each other. And all of these children have mental disabilities.” On that day her organization counted 335 children with the same disability in that small town. She investigated further and found the number of children with birth defects in Haweeja was around 600.
She found another birth defect was widespread in Falluja. And another kind of birth defect in Basra. They seem to be defects customized to certain regions.
Mozhgan Savabieasfahani is an environmental toxicologist who has been studying the area around Basra, in southern Iraq. She tells the story of one couple who was trying to get pregnant, and instead had nineteen miscarriages. They’ve recently discovered the wife, too, has cancer.
She says the tons of equipment, especially disabled vehicles, that the US military left outside the city is the “perfect reservoir for toxic material to get into the environment, and eventually into the bodies of the people.” The result has been devastating for the population of Basra, which has disproportionately high rates of cancer and birth defects.
So yes, it seems that being near this war will give you cancer. And if you have been to Iraq or Afghanistan as a soldier, I urge you to get check-ups at the Veterans Affairs hospital - it’s free. If you know somebody who was a soldier there, ask them to get check-ups. And if you were there as an Iraqi or Afghani, well, good luck to you.
But it’s the mental and emotional affects of war that are the most obvious in the short term. To put that another way, our nightmares will haunt us until our cancer kills us.
Ramon Mejia talked about his own mental anguish since returning from the war. He joined the Marines because he had no other options to feed his family and deployed to Iraq in April, 2003. “I conducted dozens of resupply missions throughout Iraq. It was on these convoys that I would see the devastation and sadness.” He came back and started drinking heavily. He began having seizures in his sleep.
Mejia talked about his recovery process. “My uncle helped me. He’s a Vietnam veteran and he was able to help me out, pulled me from a downward spiral of attempting to take my life.”
America’s direct military involvement in the Iraq War is over, and the whitewashing of this war has already begun. Of course we still send weapons to our chosen side, and provide military training. Of course we exert considerable political influence on the government. But our soldiers no longer patrol the streets.
While much of our media institution has moved on from the war, focusing instead on news that really don’t matter to our daily lives - things like the Malaysia flight - it is easy for us to move past Iraq. Yet it is worth asking, what part of this are we responsible for?
Thank you to Iraq Veterans Against the War for organizing this event.