OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR …

FOR CLINTON AND BLAIR 1/2

AMERICA's nauseating President Bill Clinton, as well we know, is a coward and a creep. As is their nature, cowards and creeps tend to wage very dirty wars. In the ongoing Iraqi conflict, if you can believe him, Clinton has but two main allies: God, and the robotic little Tony Blair. God? Even to mention Old Man God's name alongside that of Clinton is an obscenity. The push-button US/UK soldiers who drop their missiles and "buster" bombs on Iraq - gen-tlemen of unbridled courage, never suffering any casual-ties themselves - get plenty of TV coverage. There's one problem. They seem unable to kill Saddam Hussein. But they can and do, kill Iraqi children. And knowingly at that.

Very few outside Iraq have any understanding of just how much these children bear the brunt of UN sanctions, imposed in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and continue to this day. In this issue of APN, thanks to a UK colleague with whom we cooperate very closely and exchange views and material on a regular basis, I am able to bring you both photographs and on-the-spot reports of just what the UN, US and UK are inflicting on this Mid East nation.

My British friend writes: "Today I send you material written by Felicity Arbuthnot. She is a great character, fiftyish, divorced, dedicated. Gentle leftwing and CND, but very balanced, in close touch with the Iraqi business since 1991. Often out there seeing things for herself at close quarters. See if you can help get her story across."

Here is what Felicity writes. Once you have read it, you will understand what Iraqis mean when they say:

"Nothing will be sufficient until all the Iraqi people are dead." I now quote from Felicity's Letter From Basra: "In beautiful, relentlessly battered Basra, Iraq's second city. Where the Tigris and Euphrates meet at the Shatt al-Arab, Iraq's plight under sanctions and recent history are encapsulated. Towering bronze figures line the water front, heroes of the Iran-Iraq war, each with right arm ex-tended towards Iran, forefinger pointing accusingly. Dam-age from the eight-year onslaught (from which losses have been compared to WW1) is everywhere, as is that from the Gulf War barely three years later and the four-day bom-bardment last December. 'We have a saying that if there was a war between France and Germany, Basra would be bombed,' say residents wryly.

"Iraq's cancer/leukaemia malignancy rate has risen as much as 70% since the Gulf War, increases linked to the depleted uranium (DU) weapons used primarily by the US and UK, which leave a radioactive dust throughout the country. According to experts, this has entered the food chain via the water table and soil. In Basra there is a silent holocaust. Starvation, multiple congenital abnormalities, cancers, heart defects, leprosy, water-borne diseases: death stalks Basra's children from the moment of conception.

"Iraq's child mortality will surely go down in history as one of the great crimes of the 20th Century, along with the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the excesses of Pol Pot and Stalin's murderous rampages..