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By Root 2302 0

and certainly uncensored capitalist “free press”™): “I thought I had a strong stomach—toughened by the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and Children’s Hospital in southern Iraq. Dr. Amer, the hospital’s director, had invited me into a room in which were displayed colour photographs of what, in cold medical language, are called “congenital anomalies,” but what you and I would better understand as horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly grotesque—and thank God they didn’t bring out the real thing, pickled in formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the back of a chair to support my legs. I won’t spare you the details. You should know because—according to the Iraqis and in all likelihood the World Health Organization, which is soon to publish its findings on the spiraling birth defects in southern Iraq—we are responsible for these obscenities. During the Gulf war, Britain and the United States pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000 depleted-uranium shells. The wretched creatures in the photographs—for they were scarcely human—are the result, Dr. Amer said. He guided me past pictures of children born without eyes, without brains. Another had arrived in the world with only half a head, nothing above the eyes. Then there was a head with legs, babies without genitalia, a little girl born with her brain outside her skull, and the whatever-it-was whose eyes were below the level of its nose. Then the chair-grabbing moment—a photograph of what I can only describe (inadequately) as a pair of buttocks with a face and two amphibian arms. Mercifully, none of these babies survived for long. Depleted uranium has an incubation period in humans of five years. In the four years from 1991 (the end of the Gulf War) until 1994, the Basrah Maternity Hospital saw 11 congenital anomalies. Last year there were 221.”77

There are photographs, too, that I have seen, some of the worst of my life. There are infants with one large eye in the middle of the face; infants—still alive, huge eyes staring—with the exploded heads of the hydrocephalic; infants with translucent skin or skin covered with some unknown white substance or covered with welts or deep split-open fissures or with charred-looking skin or skin like dark glazed pottery; infants with ambiguous genitals (these are called, for some reason, “non-viable children”); infants—unfortunately alive—with no eyes, their bones fused and stunted; an infant—also unfortunately alive—with no anus, and with her bowel and urinary tract on the outside of her body.78

These pictures all lead me to ask, not rhetorically, but with all expectation of answers: What, precisely, is this culture’s calculus of casualties? The lives of how many of these children are worth the life of one efficient executive, one prank-playing stockbroker? How many of these children’s lives are worth one Porsche, or the gasoline it burns to take off in the wind? The lives of how many children add up to the value, to take a unit of modern currency, of a barrel of oil?

The San Francisco Chronicle carried an article on page 3 entitled “Scientist’s Urgent Warning of World’s Failing Environment: Ailing Planet in Need of Mass Conservation.” The article disturbed me for several reasons. First, of course, is that the planet doesn’t so much need mass conservation as it needs to be relieved of that which is killing it: civilization. Next was the article’s placement, on the same spread—implying equivalent importance—with an article, on page two, entitled “Suit Catches Psychic Line Off Guard: Miss Cleo Accused of Rampant Fraud.” On page 1 of this day’s paper, just below the masthead, implying far greater importance, was an article with the headline: “Silver Turns to Gold for Canadian Pair: Skating Union Makes Amends for Judge’s Misconduct.” Above the masthead was a teaser for the most important article of the day, even more