OpEdNews - Page 4 of Article: The Killing Fields

The Killing Fields of Iraq do not discriminate and they do not stop at the border. They do not bother with uniform colors or the crossing of oceans. They are the deadly consequence of criminality and indifference, of greed and emphasis on the bottom line. Sadly, the nuclear silence now deafening in Iraq will alter the course of Iraqi history, not to mention the lives of thousands of Americans veterans who, after a year or perhaps five of living normal lives, will begin feeling the damage DU is doing to their body.

The Depleted Uranium Holocaust is but the next stage in America 's indifference to the Arab world, an indifference that has lasted decades, with the US concerned only for the Middle East 's vast yet dwindling oil wealth, not its human capital nor its interest in freedom, democracy or human rights. In a twisted form of karma, DU has returned the favor to thousands of American soldiers, returning its deadly poison back to the same nation that created it, penetrating the porous skin and bodies of soldiers once occupying Iraq, now a land devastated with the invisible radiation of American DU ordnance. It has attached itself to our soldiers, in time to haunt their health and their families, possibly becoming manifest in the deformities of American babies.

Only the future knows who and how many Iraqis and Americans will be forced to confront premature death. Many will never know what happened to them. Many will come to the realization that the great military industrial complex, putting profit over people, as it usually does, and America 's upper echelons of governance, straight from the Pentagon and Oval Office, knowing full well the dangers of DU, nonetheless decided to commandeer the future lives of millions, deciding the lives of Iraqi civilians and American soldiers were not worth the millions of dollars saved by using cheaper DU.

The great sadness is that the Iraq Killing Fields, with its ghosts of walking dead, will remain unknown to the vast percentage of humanity, for this scandal will never be allowed to see the light of day, neither by America 's government or the corporate world that owns both it and the media. Greater in scope than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the potential number of deaths greater than some evildoers of times past, Iraq 's Killing Fields will continue killing and deforming, mutating DNA and inflicting untold levels of misery, simply because of its clandestine approach to death, its silent and whispered calls to disease. Its secrecy and cover-up will only be surpassed by its criminality and by the complete callousness of government officials to the plight they helped birth.

There will be no blood and no violence, no bombs or bullets, though abundant suffering. The calamity will not bleed, so it will not lead. It will be boring to the average American, becoming an unspoken genocide free of the violence we are so addicted to and enamored with. The front lines of this battle will be inside hospitals and in the homes of the afflicted, left to confront a destiny not of their own choosing, unable to understand how an invisible weapon of mass destruction could be allowed to be used on civilians and on cities, on humans and on soldiers on both sides. Many will die in disbelief, their lives wasted, slowly rotting from the inside out, seeing their babies deformed, born stillborn or mutated, their last remaining years spent living as ghosts of walking dead, becoming prisoners only of time and of anger.

Iraq 's Killing Fields are as real as the sun, as dangerous as a nuclear weapon, as devastating as any plague. The devastation taking place inside it is anathema to humanity, a war crime and crime against humanity, a malfeasant manifestation by Machiavellian miscreants. If the world entire were made aware of its seriousness, of its criminality and of the callousness of American leaders the backlash would be a giant tsunami of anger. Alas, the quietness of the crime will be elevated, and silence will be the only noise emanating from the plains of the Killing Fields.

Meanwhile, the Killing Fields of Iraq continue to radiate their toxic and deadly poisons, contaminating more Iraqis and Americans with each passing day, like a parasite forever attaching radiation and heavy metals inside human hosts. Only in 4.5 billion years will DU disappear, by then humanity will have ceased to exist. Iraqis ' Ghosts of Walking Dead await humanity 's attention, wanting nothing more than to receive assistance in combating a silent yet devastating killer that is forever altering the Iraqi landscape.

Mired by decades of war with Iran and later the United States, 1.5 million of its citizens, including 500,000 children dead due to economic genocide, 100,000 to 200,000 dead due to American invasion and occupation, and now afflicted by an enemy they can neither see nor touch, the Ghosts of Walking Dead await our response to their hushed and clandestine call for help. In their whispered plea can we see a perpetual future of cancer, death, disease, mutation, deformity and entire generations now endangered and at serious risk of devastation. In their whispered plea can we also see what might happen to tens of thousands of our own men and women, themselves hosts carrying the demons of the Iraqi Killing Fields back home.

The Killing Fields can be felt, their warm winds echoing the cries for help, their plains saturated with the clouds of poison, and of outrage, seeking our full attention in understanding a silent and clandestine genocide taking place where fertility once permeated and where the cradle of civilization once nurtured us before sending us all on our way to all corners of the planet and to most uncertain destinies.

Is the price of what America has done in our name worth our silence and indifference?

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