The Real Casualty Rate from America's Iraq Wars
by Chalmers Johnson May 03, 2003
> <http://www.zmag.org> <http://www.zmag.org>
> IRAQ <http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Iraq/IraqCrisis.htm>
>
> Most young Americans who enlist in our all-volunteer armed forces -- roughly
> four out of five -- specifically choose non-combat jobs, becoming computer
> technicians, personnel managers, shipping clerks, truck mechanics, weather
> forecasters, intelligence analysts, cooks, or forklift drivers, among the many
> other duties that carry a low risk of contact with an enemy. They often enlist
> because they have failed to find similar work in the civilian economy and thus
> take refuge in the military's long-established system of state socialism --
> steady paychecks, decent housing, medical and dental benefits, job training,
> and the possibility of a college education. The mother of one such recruit
> recently commented on her 19-year-old daughter, who will soon become an Army
> intelligence analyst. She was proud but also cynical: "Wealthy people don't go
> into the military or take risks because why should they? They already got
> everything handed to them."
>
> These recruits do not expect to be shot at. Thus it was a shock to the
> rank-and-file last month when Iraqi guns opened up on an Army supply convoy,
> killing eight and taking another six prisoner, including supply clerk Jessica
> Lynch of Palestine, West Virginia. The Army's response has been, "You don't
> have to be in combat arms [branches of the military] to close with and kill
> the enemy." But what the Pentagon is not saying to the Private Lynches and
> their families is that they stand a very good chance of dying or being
> catastrophically disabled precisely because they chose the U.S. military as a
> route of social mobility.
>
> There are serious unintended consequences to our most recent "no contact" or
> "painless dentistry" wars that contradict the Pentagon's claims of low
> casualties. The most important is the malady that goes by the name "Gulf War
> Syndrome," a potentially deadly medical disorder that first appeared among
> combat veterans of the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Just as the effects of Agent Orange
> during the Vietnam War were first explained away by the Pentagon as
> "post-traumatic stress disorder," "combat fatigue," or "shell shock," so the
> Bush administration is now playing down the potential toxic side effects of
> the ammunition now being widely used by its armed forces. The implications are
> devastating, not just for America's adversaries, or civilians caught in their
> country-turned-battlefield, but for American forces themselves (and even
> possibly their future offspring).
>
> The first Iraq War produced four classes of casualties -- killed in action,
> wounded in action, killed in accidents (including "friendly fire"), and
> injuries and illnesses that appeared only after the end of hostilities. During
> 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements
> of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these 148 were
> killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and 145 were killed in
> accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the
> scale of the operations.
>
> However, as of May 2002, the Veterans Administration (VA) reported that an
> additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result
> of service-connected "exposures" suffered during the war. Even more
> alarmingly, the VA revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General
> Schwarzkopf's entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation,
> and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991.
> After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as
> "disabled veterans." In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty
> rate for the first Gulf War is actually a staggering 29.3%.
>
> Dr. Doug Rokke, a former Army colonel and professor of environmental science
> at Jacksonville University, was in charge of the military's environmental
> clean-up following the first Gulf War. The Pentagon has since sacked him for
> criticizing NATO commanders for not adequately protecting their troops in
> areas where DU ammunition was used, such as Kosovo in 1999. Dr. Rokke notes
> that many thousands of American troops have been based in and around Kuwait
> since 1990, and according to his calculations, between August 1990 and May
> 2002, a total of 262,586 soldiers became "disabled veterans" and 10,617 have
> died. His numbers produce a casualty rate for the whole decade of 30.8%.
>
> A significant probable factor in these deaths and disabilities is depleted
> uranium (DU) ammunition, although this is a hotly contested proposition. Some
> researchers, often paid for by the Pentagon, argue that depleted uranium could
> not possibly be the cause of these war-related maladies and that a more likely
> explanation is dust and debris from the blowing up of Saddam Hussein's
> chemical and biological weapons factories in 1991 in the wake of the first
> Gulf War, or perhaps a "cocktail" of particles from DU ammunition, the
> destruction of nerve gas bunkers, and polluted air from burning oil fields.
> But the evidence -- including abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and
> deformities in Iraq and also evidently in the areas of Kosovo where, in 1999,
> we used depleted-uranium weapons in our air war against the Serbians -- points
> primarily toward DU. Moreover, simply by insisting on using such weaponry, the
> Pentagon is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that
> classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.
>
> DU, or Uranium-238, is a waste product of power-generating nuclear reactors.
> It is used in projectiles like tank shells and cruise missiles because it is
> 1.7 times denser than lead, burns as it flies, and penetrates armor easily,
> but it breaks up and vaporizes on impact --which makes it potentially very
> deadly. Each shell fired by an American tank includes ten pounds of DU. Such
> warheads are essentially "dirty bombs," not very radioactive individually but
> nonetheless suspected of being capable in quantity of causing serious
> illnesses and birth defects.
>
> In 1991, U.S. forces fired a staggering 944,000 DU rounds in Kuwait and Iraq.
> The Pentagon admits that it left behind at a bare minimum 320 metric tons of
> DU on the battlefield. One study of Gulf War veterans showed that their
> children had a higher possibility of being born with severe deformities,
> including missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems, and fused
> fingers. Dr. Rokke fears that because the military relied more heavily on DU
> munitions in the second Iraq War than in the first, postwar casualties may be
> even greater. When he sees TV images of unprotected soldiers and Iraqi
> civilians driving past burning Iraqi trucks destroyed by tank fire or
> inspecting buildings hit by missiles, he suspects that they are being poisoned
> by DU.
>
> Young Americans being seduced into the armed forces these days are quite
> literally making themselves into "cannon fodder," even if they have been able
> to secure non-combat jobs. Before we begin to celebrate how few American
> casualties there were in the brief Iraq war, we might pause to consider the
> future. The numbers of Americans killed and maimed from Gulf War II are only
> beginning to be toted up. The full count will not be known for at least a
> decade. The fact that the U.S. high command continues to rely on such weaponry
> for warfare is precisely why the world needs an International Criminal Court
> and why the United States should be liable under its jurisdiction. Because of
> its potential dangers and because the alarm has been raised (even if the
> Pentagon refuses to acknowledge this), the use of DU ammunition should already
> be considered a war crime one that may also destroy the user in a painfully
> crippling way.
>
> Sources:
>
> David Wood, "Shaky Economy Alters Equations of Risk in Today's Military," San
> Diego Union-Tribune, April 27, 2003; Doug Rokke, "Gulf War Casualties,"
> September 30, 2002, on line at <www.rense.com/general29/gulf.htm
> <http://www.rense.com/general29/gulf.htm> >; "UK to Aid DU Removal," BBC News,
> April 23, 2003; Frances Williams, "Clean-up of Pollution Urged to Reduce
> Health Risks" and Vanessa Houlder, "Allied Troops 'Risk Uranium Exposure,'"
> Financial Times, April 25, 2003; Steven Rosenfeld, "Gulf War Syndrome, The
> Sequel," TomPaine.com, April 8, 2003; Susanna Hecht, "Uranium Warheads May
> Leave Both Sides a Legacy of Death for Decades," Los Angeles Times, March 30,
> 2003; and Neil Mackay, "U.S. Forces' Use of Depleted Uranium Is 'Illegal,'"
> Glasgow Sunday Herald, March 30, 2003.
>
> Chalmers Johnson is author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American
> Empire and, forthcoming, The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their
> Country.
>
> Copyright Chalmers Johnson
>
> [This article first appeared on http://www.tomdispatch.com
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com> , a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers
> a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long
> time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture.]