Nearly Six Years and Counting

Hello Everyone!

It's Friday the 13th today. But the real day of infamy this month lies not that old superstition about Friday the 13th, nor anything to do with Jason Voorhees. No, I'm afraid it is something much more terrible than old wives tales or a celluloid monster from Crystal Lake.

The sixth anniversary of the Iraq War is only a week from today. Now the Iraq War has outlasted US involvement in WWI, WWII, Korea, and even the US Civil War. It has not yet equaled, dare I say it? The Vietnam War.

Now having opposed the war since before it happened, I have been amazed for the past six years by the extent to which certain consequences of the war have not much been talked about. And what not only the previous administration, but also most of the larger media, and even much of the anti-war movement didn't consideracceptable to even mention in public. Supposedly these forbidden topics were rendered taboo for fear of being seen as being "against the troops" and/or in the anti-war movement for fear of "alienating Middle America".

The most egregious of which are the consequences of this war for the people of Iraq. Of course, the number of Iraqis who have been killed by violence, hunger, increased crime, and lack of medical care as a result of this war is not known. But estimates range from 100,000 to over 1 million, and most critics suggest that these estimates tend be extremely conservative at best. On top of that the number of displaced Iraqis now stands at 1.7 million people with about 100,000 living in other countries in the Middle East. And we know relatively little about how these people are surviving although it is clear that many are on the margins at best.
More people still have gone through this time without enough to eat, without medical care, without safe water, and without work. Many children have not been able to continue school for much or all of the past six years, often having missed out on their chances at an education.
And even if and when peace is found again in Iraq it could take many years for the society to get back on its feet at even a basic level.

Also little talked about in the mainstream media are the amounts of, unexploded munitions that can kill or maim decades later, and depleted uranium which can cause cancer or horrendous birth defects centuries later, in many regions of Iraq. Both of which are very difficult, dangerous, and expensive to clean up at even the most cursory levels.

Even less known is the fact that this destruction is largely occurring in one of the world's largest hotspots for biodiversity of major food crops and historical staples. Namely Iraq includes most of the center of genetic diversity for common foods such as wheat, barley, rye, oats, lentils, lupine, vetch, alfalfa, clover, apples, cherries, pomegranates, figs, pears, hawthorn, and quince. And currently not much is known about the effects of this war and its destruction upon those important biological resources. However, the consequences of squandering crop biodiversity should speak for itself. Or so I would hope.

See you next post! And

Say Goodnight readers.