May 10,2007
by Mike Ferner
Two elements are necessary to commit the crime of
genocide: 1) the mental
element, meaning intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and 2) the physical
element,
which includes any of the following: killing or causing serious bodily
or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting
conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s
physical
destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent
births; or forcibly transferring children to another group.
Considering that such clear language comes from a
UN treaty which is
legally binding on our country, things could start getting a little
worrisome for Uncle Sam – especially when you realize that
since our
government began waging economic
and military
warfare on Iraq we’ve killed well over one million people,
fast approaching two.
This summer will be one year since researchers
from Johns Hopkins University collected data for a study which
concluded 655,000
additional deaths
were caused by the military war, and things have only gotten worse.
Then consider that the economic war killed an additional 500,000 Iraqi
kids under the age of five during only the first seven years of
sanctions which were in force for a dozen years, according to just one 1999
U.N. report.
Based on the Johns Hopkins estimate of Iraqis
killed in the war, one
could conservatively estimate that another 2.6 million people have been
wounded. The U.N.
estimates
that between 1.5 million and 2 million Iraqis are now
“internally
displaced” by the fighting and roughly the same number have
fled their
country, including disproportionate numbers of doctors and other
professionals.
If you are sitting down and possess a healthy
imagination, try conjuring up similar conditions here in our land.
• Start with the fact that few people
buy bottled water and what
comes out of the tap is guaranteed to at least make you sick if not
kill you
• Three times as many of our fellow citizens are out of work
as during the Great Depression
• On a good day we have three or four hours of electricity to
preserve food or cool the 110-degree heat
• No proper hospitals or rehab clinics exist to help the
wounded become productive members of society
• Roads are a mess
• Reports of birth defects from exposure to depleted uranium
have begun surfacing around the country.
Reflect for a minute on the grief
you’ve felt from a single loved
one’s death. Then open your heart to the reality of life if
we suffered
casualties comparable to those endured by the people of Iraq.
• In the former cities of Atlanta,
Denver, Boston, Seattle,
Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Baltimore, San Francisco, Dallas and
Philadelphia every single person is dead.
• In Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada,
Kansas,
Mississippi, Iowa, Oregon, South Carolina and Colorado every single
person is wounded.
• The entire populations of Ohio and New Jersey are homeless,
surviving with friends, relatives or under bridges as they can.
• The entire populations of Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky
have fled to Canada or Mexico.
• Over the past three years, one in four U.S. doctors has left
the country.
• Last year alone 3,000 doctors were kidnapped and 800 killed.
In short, nobody “out there”
is coming to save us. We are in hell.
Of course our government didn’t intend
to commit genocide in Iraq,
it just sort of happened. The Iraqis kept getting in the way while we
were trying to complete the mission. Mistakes were made as we were
building democracy, but surely no genocide was intended. Indeed, we are
the international deciders of what is and what isn’t
genocide, and we
know full well that intent is a requirement.
It was only “collateral
genocide” and lord knows we did our very best to avoid it. We
are, after all, Good Americans.