Quick victory, slow recovery
The pro-war camp crows about the speed and relatively low casualty rate of the war on Iraq. Estimates of huge casualties and an unquenchable tide of refugees were grossly exaggerated, the implication being that the anti-war movement was mobilised under false pretences. What this leaves out is that the effects of war last long after the fighting has stopped.
Starvation threat
According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, Iraq's agriculture is facing collapse with consequent mass starvation a serious threat. Seeds, fertiliser and pesticides have been looted from government warehouses, meaning no crops are being planted. Pumping stations that power irrigation systems have been destroyed. Animal feed and veterinary medicines have been looted. Many thousands of birds have already starved to death. For a population 60% dependent on oil-for-food this is disaster.
Casualties same as during war
Thawra City, formerly Saddam City, is a huge sprawling slum of 4 million people, half of Baghdad's population, mainly extremely poor Shi'a Muslims. Doctors in one of its only two hospitals report that casualties are coming in at the same rate as during the war, around 150 a day. These are victims of cluster bombs, which operate like landmines long after the conflict has ceased, and of the looters and bandits.
The big looters
Scenes of armed men robbing medicines from babies are indeed sickening, but there's another sort of looting going on, on a greater scale. What do you call men who would reduce an entire country to barbarism and impending famine as a business opportunity?
Dick Cheney, US vice president, is former boss of Halliburton, whose Kellogg, Brown, Root subsidiary bagged the contract for repairing the oilfields, and another for $90m catering for Americans "rebuilding" Iraq.
Donald Rumsfeld is Defence Secretary. His directorship of ABB, which sold North Korea nuclear reactors for $125m, didn't prevent him naming North Korea as part of the axis of evil, for possessing nuclear weapons capacity!
George Schultz, ex-Secretary of State, and chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a violently pro-war White House lobbying group, is on the board of directors of Bechtel, the US's largest contractor and one of the favoured five for landing the rebuilding contracts.
Richard Perle, on the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, is managing partner of Trireme, a venture capital company that invests in "homeland security" companies, and has close links with Saudi arms dealers.
The Centre for Public Integrity, a US watchdog, found nine members of the Defence Policy Board have links with defence contractors that won more than $76billion contracts in 2001 and 2002.
