Life in Iraq, before and after invasion (web only)

In a highly informative article on www.counterpunch.org, author/activist William Blum details some of the ways in which Iraq is worse off now than it was before the invasion. Below are some excerpts from this article.

Proletarian writers

Subscribe to our channel

Proletarian writers

Subscribe to our channel

Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that 84 percent of the higher education establishments have been “destroyed, damaged and robbed …

Loss of a functioning health care system. And loss of the public’s health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis are rampaging through the country. Iraq’s network of hospitals and health centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, has been severely damaged by the war and looting.

The UN’s World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children were suffering from ‘dangerous deficiencies of protein’…

Thousands of Iraqis have lost an arm or a leg, frequently from unexploded US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are a class of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random scourge on civilians, particularly children.

Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and infect the water, the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed babies …

Iraq’s legal system, outside of the political sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle East; it is now a shambles; religious law more and more prevails.

Women’s rights previously enjoyed are now in great and growing danger under harsh Islamic law, to one extent or another in various areas …

Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security they had enjoyed in Saddam’s secular society; many have emigrated …

Over 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by US forces since the invasion, but only a very tiny portion of them have been convicted of any crime …

Unemployment is estimated to be around fifty percent.”

(‘”Just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein is out of power?” And I say, “No.” Why Bush’s Iraq is worse than Saddam’s’)

> Iraq – occupation becoming increasingly desperate

> Iraqi resistance giving a bloody nose to Anglo-American imperialism

> Iraq Intensified resistance greets Maliki puppet government – Lalkar July 2006