Today is Monday, 30 July 2007.If the incompetence and vicious ambition of the Bush-Cheney regime has its way, and the majority of Americans continue to embrace their immoral stupor, Iraq will become the next Darfur. Perhaps it has already.
Quoting from a press release describing a report by the esteemed internal aid group, Oxfam, and a coalition of nonprofits:
"The violence in Iraq is overshadowing a humanitarian crisis, with eight million Iraqis – nearly one in three - in need of emergency aid, says a report released today by international agency Oxfam and NCCI, a network of aid organizations working in Iraq.
The agencies' report "Rising to the Humanitarian Challenge in Iraq" says although the appalling security situation is the biggest problem facing most ordinary Iraqis, the government of Iraq and other influential governments should do more to meet basic needs for water, sanitation, food and shelter.
According to the report:
• Four million Iraqis – 15% - regularly cannot buy enough to eat.
• 70% are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50% in 2003.
• 28% of children are malnourished, compared to 19% before the 2003 invasion.
• 92% of Iraqi children suffer learning problems, mostly due to the climate of fear.
• More than two million people – mostly women and children - have been displaced inside Iraq.
• A further two million Iraqis have become refugees, mainly in Syria and Jordan."
[See release here: http://www.oxfam.org/en/news/2007/pr070730_iraq_humanitarian_crisis]
In Baghdad, thanks to USA neglect of the electrical generation and distribution system (and I say USA neglect, rather than Iraqi neglect, because, under the so-called “Pottery Barn” principle: we stole it, we broke it, we own it), the municipal power grid averages 1-2 hours of current a day. Those who can afford private generators and black market fuel do so.
A harrowing article in last Saturday’s
The New York Times describes the fate of most, who cannot afford private generators: they must preserve perishable foods with ice, often made with water contaminated by waste, including human feces.
And now the Bush-Cheney regime proposes to further de-stabilize the Middle East, by pumping several tens of billions of dollars in advanced weaponry into militaristic rogue states such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc.
Ask the average Iraqi, in the words of a one-time Presidential candidate: “Are you better off today than four years ago”?
My blood is boiling and I must attend to our fish, etc. Probably more later.
And Ingmar Bergmann has died.
And, this date in 1945, nearly 900 sailors die in the sinking of the
U.S.S. Indianapolis, torpedoed shortly after it had delivered, to Tinian Island in the Pacific, the radioactive components of the atomic bombs slated for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many were killed in the water by sharks.
