The Rag Blog

In his novel 1984, George Orwell portrayed a future time in which the explanations of recent events and earlier history are continually changed to meet Big Brother’s latest purpose. Previous explanations disappear down “the memory hole.”

Sound familiar? Any American who pays attention can observe the identical phenomenon occurring in the US today.

Think about the Bush Regime’s changing explanations for the failed US occupation of Iraq. Shortly after Bush’s May 2003 announcement of “mission accomplished,” the mission revealed itself to be very much unaccomplished. Americans were told that the cause of the snafu was a small Sunni insurgency of two or three thousand at the most inspired by “die-hard Baath party remnants. Remember the propagandistic deck of cards identifying the most wanted down to the less wanted? Americans were assured that once Saddam Hussein and his relatives and henchmen were rounded up, our troops would be pelted with the promised flowers instead of roadside bombs.

When the roundups, trials, and executions failed to fix the problem, the “die-hard” explanation disappeared. A new explanation, with no continuity to the old, took its place.

The new explanation was that Syria was allowing foreigners to cross its border into Iraq to commit jihad against the American troops. This explanation lasted until it became all too clear, despite the propaganda, that the “foreign fighters” were remarkably well accepted by, and concealed within, the Iraqi communities that were suffering all the collateral damage of the conflict.

When it came time for the US to create an Iraqi government, it was evident that it would be one dominated by Shi’ites. Then, for a limited time, it was permissible to recognize that the insurgency was popularly based in the Sunnis.

As the insurgency evolved into what the Iraq Study Group described as a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war with US troops unclear on which side they stood, the Bush Regime and the captive media began blaming Al Qaeda for the escalating violence. Americans were assured by the Ministry of Truth that there wasn’t a civil war, just outsiders stirring up conflict. This enabled Big Brother to deny that there was a civil war and to revive fear of terrorist attacks in the US and UK, the new Oceania.

The Al Qaeda explanation was soon discarded into the memory hole. The explanation implied that Oceania’s invasion of Iraq had greatly expanded the ranks and strength of Al Qaeda, thus contradicting big Brother’s claim that his war in Iraq was making Oceanians safe by stamping out terrorism. The Al Qaeda explanation had to depart for another reason as well. Cheney, Israel, and the neocons, the rulers of the new Oceania, plan to attack Iran, and so the insurgency in Iraq is now being blamed on Iran.

The Ministry of Truth has accommodated the latest explanation, just as it did all others before, without remarking on the funeral of the previous explanation. All of a sudden, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, goes down the memory hole.

The American and British media work the same way as the Ministry of Truth in Oceania. A day arrives when the “truth” no longer serves the empire or hegemonic power or center of moral purpose in the world, or for short, the regime. When that day arrives, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, is discarded down the memory hole.

In recent weeks Americans have been fed a series of reports from official sources that Iran is arming both Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Experts, both within the government and without, who have been made more attentive by the Bush Regime’s false charges of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, have disputed the news reports.

But the reports keep on coming. As I write, the latest story is that the US military “discovered a field of rocket launchers near a US army base south of Baghdad armed with 34 Iranian-made missiles.” Can you imagine? The insurgents went to the trouble of lugging powerful missiles within striking distance of a US base and just left them there unfired to be discovered by the Americans. To further serve Cheney’s plan to attack Iran, the media report states: “Earlier this month, US commanders stepped up the charges [against Iran], claiming that senior leaders of Iran’s special forces and of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia have trained Iraqi fighters and provided other support.”

Notice that none of the explanations fed to Americans over the years have ever mentioned, even as a faint possibility, that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq might be the cause of the violence in Iraq.

Allegedly, the US is a free and open country with a free press and a government accountable to the people. Yet, the information fed to the American people is as thoroughly false as that fed to the citizens of Oceania by Big Brother through the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s famous novel.

In Orwell’s novel, despite the totalitarian power of the government, nothing happens to people as long as they accept the government’s intrusive monitoring of their lives and do not become interested in truth or facts.. In such a world, truth and individuality pass out of human consciousness and become unimportant. Citizens survive by accepting Big Brother’s ever-changing reality.

Boeing has enlisted the aid of Elbit Systems, Israel’s major defense contractor, to construct high-tech surveillance along the border of the U.S. and Mexico. So far, the high-tech fiasco is not working and Arizona residents are organizing a lawsuit to halt government spying on U.S. citizens.

Arivaca resident Margaret Keoppen is among those opposing the 98-foot spy tower in her community, part of Project 28 of the Secure Border Initiative.

With a spy viewing range of 10 miles, the spy tower is pointed at the good folks of Arivaca.

“This system is entirely experimental with unknown results and I don’t wish to be used as a guinea pig with resulting harm to me, my family, my animals, area wildlife,” Keoppen told Project 28.

In Tucson, the search for the biggest joke in town–the environmental assessment of the spy towers — began at the public library.

“That’s odd,” said a research librarian, “there are no copies of it here.” Diligent, the librarian plowed through the web and made a phone call.

A copy of the environmental assessment for the new high-tech border surveillance was finally located at the Arivaca library. In Arivaca, the draft copy of the assessment arrived on a Saturday in April, with no public notice.

A typed cover letter from U.S.Customs and Border Protection said residents had four days to respond, April 14 — 18. The library was closed two of those days. Without phone calls from the librarians, no one would have known it was there. Few people had a chance to even read it.

Driving down from Tucson, the earth is scorched from the 114 to 118 degree temperatures. Contrary to the frenzied hype of television news, a drive along the border, through Three Points, then down the road to Sasabe and finally to Arivaca, reveals three Wackenhut buses–all empty — waiting to be loaded with migrants. There wasn’t a migrant in sight. (Wackenhut, with its history of human rights violations, is now on contract to transport migrants rather than Border Patrol. Wackenhut is now Geo Group, but the buses are labeled Wackenhut.)

A stop at a bird walk near Arivaca proves more desolation. Two men with hunting dogs arrive in separate vehicles. One man takes off quickly for another site, both men wearing plain clothes. In this no-man’s land, strangers are assumed to be undercover border agents or Minutemen.

In Arivaca, residents are fighting mad about the spy tower, which was built without consulting them, less than a mile from town.

“You can not see the border from that spy tower, because of the mountains. The only thing you can see is Arivaca,” says one woman living in this community of 2,500.

Arivaca is 12 miles north of the border and the desert mountains are a fortress that the spy tower camera can not penetrate. In fact, the spy tower isn’t penetrating anything, because like all the nine spy towers on Project 28 of the Secure Border Initiative so far, it isn’t working. But more about that later.

The spy tower has the good folks of Arivaca in clear sight. It is a community of artists and ranchers, popular with birdwatchers and nature lovers. The people here savor their privacy. They have selected Arivaca because it is off the beaten track and ensures a quiet life, far from the prying eyes of anyone.

Now, without any consultation, there is a spy tower on the edge of town, with its camera pointed at them. Worse, the Boeing equipment list for Project 28 calls for radar, infrared, lasers, microwave, iris biometrics and facial biometrics.

“Iris biometrics?” Arivacans ask.

In the environmental assessment, there is no research concerning the health effects of the lasers, microwave, iris biometrics and other technology, on humans.

The environmental assessment concludes Project 28 will have “no significant impact.”

However, the assessment lists the endangered, threatened and sensitive life forms, including the Pima pineapple cactus, masked bobwhite habitat, desert tortoise, burrowing owl and lesser long-nosed bat. There’s also Santa Cruz stripe agave, Huachuca golden aster and Lumholtz nightshade. In Pima County, there’s 20 species, including the Chiricahua leopard frog, cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl and southwestern willow flycatcher.

The conclusion for all: The towers will have “no significant impact.”

Arivaca is the territory of migrating bats, including a large population on the move from the nearby ghost town of Ruby. In the assessment, there’s nothing more than a little mumbo-jumbo about the bats.

Local residents wonder if the spy tower’s radar will effect the bats’ ability to hunt. In the white wash of the environmental assessment, it says, “Tower radar is not expected to impact echolocation of lesser long-nosed bat because recent studies determined that some species of bats avoided the frequencies of radar to which they were exposed,” the assessment says.

So, they’re guessing that the bats won’t be impacted.

Here in the Sonoran desert, bats, hummingbirds, bees and butterflies are the major pollinators. Without pollinators, there will be no saguaro, yucca or desert plants.

In the assessment, there’s only brief mention of the endangered jaguar, Panthera onca. It is the largest cat in the Southwest. There’s also the endangered Sonoran pronghorn and the threatened bald eagle.

The environmental assessment is clearly a joke, no one could have manufactured this document with serious intent. After listing the threatened and endangered species here, including bats and jaguars, the environment assessment concludes that wildlife will not be harmed by the spy towers.

Wildlife, it says, is “expected to stay away.”

This is Saturday Night Live funny. It is easy to image the cartoon, as CorpWatch has also imagined and posted on its website, with horns sounding out alerts in the desert. One horn could be honking: “Wildlife — that includes you birds–you’re expected to stay away!”

On the serious side, the assessment admits that warning lights on towers can disorient migrating birds and cause them to fly in circles, resulting in fatal collisions. Red lights attract more birds than white ones. So, the Boeing solution is: “loud hailer horns.”

The assessment talks much more about grasses and birds than it does of spying on U.S. citizens, which it does not address.

Unwarranted spying on U.S. citizens can have dangerous, even deadly consequences. With the spy towers, Border Patrol agents will be able to sit in their cars and watch local residents on their laptop computers, if and when the spy towers begin functioning.

While the rich are getting richer, they’re slashing social security, medicare and other social programs for the rest of us. What gives?

The commercial media is telling us two perfectly contradictory stories about the American economy. The first is how wonderfully rich we are in the United States. The stock market’s booming — some analysts predict the Dow will break the 15,000 this year — the economy is expanding at a healthy clip, productivity growth is up and unemployment and inflation are relatively low.

But, at the same time, we’re also told that we don’t have the money to pay for a robust social safety net. When it comes to paying for universal health coverage, affording retirement security for our elderly, investing in programs for the poor or educating our children, we need to pinch pennies. According to this storyline, we face a looming “entitlement crisis” — we won’t be able to afford to keep the Baby Boomers in good health and out of poverty, we’re told, unless we slash their benefits and privatize the programs that their elderly parents enjoy today.

This is the line we hear from the Administration when it talks about entitlement “reform”: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says that “The biggest economic issue facing our country is the growth in spending on the major entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.” The solution, according to the Heritage Foundation, is to cut entitlement spending: “Reforming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is the only way to get the budget under control.”

How can two narratives that are so clearly at odds with each other be so pervasive? Are we seriously supposed to believe that Paris Hilton has to dig between the cushions of her sofa to buy a can of tuna?

What reconciles these two themes is absent from our mainstream economic discourse: we “can’t afford” all sorts of programs that are clearly in the common good because most of the benefits of our growing economy have gone to a very small group of Americans, who have, in turn, seen their taxes slashed again and again in the past six years. It’s a story that isn’t told as often as it should in the commercial press because it’s a supposedly “liberal” narrative — never mind that über-conservative former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress that there is a “really serious problem here, as I’ve mentioned many times … in the consequent concentration of income that is rising.”

Saying that the majority of the country’s economic gains in recent years have gone to the top one percent of the income ladder understates the trend. You have to cut the pie into even smaller slices to get the full picture. Because while the bottom half of the top one percent of the income distribution have done far better than the average wage slaves, it is a smaller slice still — the top .01 percent — that has grabbed most of the gains–seeing an impressive 250 percent increase in income between 1973 and 2005 — from an economy that’s grown by 160 percent.

An analysis by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez gives us the best perspective of what’s going on for everyone else. They found that despite several periods of healthy growth between 1973 and 2005, the average income of all but the top ten percent of the income ladder — nine out of ten American families – fell by 11 percent when adjusted for inflation. For three decades, economic growth in the United States has gone first and foremost to building today’s modern Gilded Age. The recipients of those gains don’t care about a fully funded Social Security system or a healthy Medicare program — they don’t need them.

WASHINGTON, July 17 (UPI) — More than 100 Iraqi oil, economic and legal experts sent a letter to Iraq’s Parliament urging it to consider their critique of the draft oil law.

A senior Iraqi government official was also given a copy and agreed with the technocrats’ assessment.

“With our conviction for the need of a law to organize the upstream sector and its development, and due to its extreme importance, we emphasize the importance of acting steadily,” the letter states, “and not rushing its issuance before enriching it with more discussions and carry out amendments that ensure the interest of all the Iraqi people.”

The letter calls for a strong central government arm in maintaining and developing Iraq’s vast oil and gas sector, though with the “participation of the regions and the governorates in the operations of planning, implementation and management within a comprehensive vision that ensures the maximum benefits for the whole people of Iraq.”

The oil law has been in negotiations since last summer. The Kurds claim the rights to strong regional control over their share of Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of proven while others want a varied amount of central control. Also at issue is how the sector may be opened up to foreign, private investment.

Iraq produces 2 million barrels per day, of which more than 75 percent are sent to the global market.

The letter, signed by 108 experts, calls for the oil law to be put on hold until ongoing constitutional wrangling is completed. “There are ongoing discussions aiming to amend the Iraqi constitution, including the items relating to oil and gas,” it states. “Hence we do not see, from the legal and technical point of view, the necessity to enact the law presented to you now before the constitutional amendments are finalized.”

The senior Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called for a thorough examination of the law, especially as the U.S. benchmarks requiring the law’s passage by September loom large.

“I think it’s a legitimate call,” the official said. “This law is going to affect our lives; it’s going to affect the lives of our children.”

WASHINGTON (July 17) — The terrorist network Al-Qaida will likely leverage its contacts and capabilities in Iraq to mount an attack on U.S. soil, according to a new National Intelligence Estimate on threats to the United States.

The declassified key findings, to be released publicly on Tuesday, were obtained in advance by The Associated Press.

The report lays out a range of dangers — from al-Qaida to Lebanese Hezbollah to non-Muslim radical groups — that pose a “persistent and evolving threat” to the country over the next three years. As expected, however, the findings focus most of their attention on the gravest terror problem: Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

The report makes clear that al-Qaida in Iraq, which has not yet posed a direct threat to U.S. soil, could become a problem here.

“Of note,” the analysts said, “we assess that al-Qaida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the homeland.”

The analysts also found that al-Qaida’s association with its Iraqi affiliate helps the group to energize the broader Sunni Muslim extremist community, raise resources and recruit and indoctrinate operatives — “including for homeland attacks.”

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative written judgments of the 16 spy agencies across the breadth of the U.S. government. These agencies reflect the consensus long-term thinking of top intelligence analysts. Portions of the documents are occasionally declassified for public release.

The White House brushed off critics who allege the administration released the intelligence estimate at the same time the Senate is debating Iraq. White House press secretary Tony Snow pushed back at the critics Tuesday, saying they are “engaged in a little selective hearing themselves to shape the story in their own political ways.”

“We don’t keep it on the shelf and say `Let’s look for a convenient time,'” Snow said.

“We’re trying to remind people is that this is a real threat. This is not an attempt to divert. As a matter of fact … we would much rather — one of the things we’d like to do is call attention to the successes in the field” in Iraq, he said.

· Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out
· President ‘not prepared to leave conflict unresolved’

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.

The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: “Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo.”

The White House claims that Iran, whose influence in the Middle East has increased significantly over the last six years, is intent on building a nuclear weapon and is arming insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has long favoured upping the threat of military action against Iran. He is being resisted by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence secretary, Robert Gates.

Last year Mr Bush came down in favour of Ms Rice, who along with Britain, France and Germany has been putting a diplomatic squeeze on Iran. But at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. “The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern,” the source said this week.

Nick Burns, the undersecretary of state responsible for Iran and a career diplomat who is one of the main advocates of negotiation, told the meeting it was likely that diplomatic manoeuvring would still be continuing in January 2009. That assessment went down badly with Mr Cheney and Mr Bush.

“Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact,” said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively. They are also reluctant for Israel to carry out any strikes because the US would get the blame in the region anyway.

“The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack, the US will have to take decisive action,” Mr Cronin said. “The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself.”

Almost half of the US’s 277 warships are stationed close to Iran, including two aircraft carrier groups. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise left Virginia last week for the Gulf. A Pentagon spokesman said it was to replace the USS Nimitz and there would be no overlap that would mean three carriers in Gulf at the same time.

No decision on military action is expected until next year. In the meantime, the state department will continue to pursue the diplomatic route.

Sporadic talks are under way between the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, on the possibility of a freeze in Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. Tehran has so far refused to contemplate a freeze, but has provisionally agreed to another round of talks at the end of the month.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said that there are signs of Iran slowing down work on the enrichment plant it is building in Natanz. Negotiations took place in Tehran last week between Iranian officials and the IAEA, which is seeking a full accounting of Iran’s nuclear activities before Tehran disclosed its enrichment programme in 2003. The agency’s deputy director general, Olli Heinonen, said two days of talks had produced “good results” and would continue.

Dear CNN,

Well, the week is over — and still no apology, no retraction, no correction of your glaring mistakes.

I bet you thought my dust-up with Wolf Blitzer was just a cool ratings coup, that you really wouldn’t have to correct the false statements you made about “Sicko.” I bet you thought I was just going to go quietly away.

Think again. I’m about to become your worst nightmare. ‘Cause I ain’t ever going away. Not until you set the record straight, and apologize to your viewers. “The Most Trusted Name in News?” I think it’s safe to say you can retire that slogan.

You have an occasional segment called “Keeping Them Honest.” But who keeps you honest? After what the public saw with your report on “Sicko,” and how many inaccuracies that report contained, how can anyone believe anything you say on your network? In the old days, before the Internet, you could get away with it. Your victims had no way to set the record straight, to show the viewers how you had misrepresented the truth. But now, we can post the truth — and back it up with evidence and facts — on the web, for all to see. And boy, judging from the mail both you and I have been receiving, the evidence I have posted on my site about your “Sicko” piece has led millions now to question your honesty.

I won’t waste your time rehashing your errors. You know what they are. What I want to do is help you come clean. Admit you were wrong. What is the shame in that? We all make mistakes. I know it’s hard to admit it when you’ve screwed up, but it’s also liberating and cathartic. It not only makes you a better person, it helps prevent you from screwing up again. Imagine how many people will be drawn to a network that says, “We made a mistake. We’re human. We’re sorry. We will make mistakes in the future — but we will always correct them so that you know you can trust us.” Now, how hard would that really be?

As you know, I hold no personal animosity against you or any of your staff. You and your parent company have been very good to me over the years. You distributed my first film, “Roger & Me” and you published “Dude, Where’s My Country?” Larry King has had me on twice in the last two weeks. I couldn’t ask for better treatment.

That’s why I was so stunned when you let a doctor who knows a lot about brain surgery — but apparently very little about public policy — do a “fact check” story, not on the medical issues in “Sicko,” but rather on the economic and political information in the film. Is this why there has been a delay in your apology, because you are trying to get a DOCTOR to say he was wrong? Please tell him not to worry, no one is filing a malpractice claim against him. Dr. Gupta does excellent and compassionate stories on CNN about people’s health and how we can take better care of ourselves. But when it came time to discuss universal health care, he rushed together a bunch of sloppy — and old — research. When his producer called us about his report the day before it aired, we sent to her, in an email, all the evidence so that he wouldn’t make any mistakes on air. He chose to ignore ALL the evidence, and ran with all his falsehoods — even though he had been given the facts a full day before! How could that happen? And now, for 5 days, I have posted on my website, for all to see, every mistake and error he made.

You, on the other hand, in the face of this overwhelming evidence and a huge public backlash, have chosen to remain silent, probably praying and hoping this will all go away.

Well it isn’t. We are now going to start looking into the veracity of other reports you have aired on other topics. Nothing you say now can be believed. In 2002, the New York Times busted you for bringing celebrities on your shows and not telling your viewers they were paid spokespeople for the pharmaceutical companies. You promised never to do it again. But there you were, in 2005, talking to Joe Theismann, on air, as he pushed some drug company-sponsored website on prostate health. You said nothing about his affiliation with GlaxoSmithKline.

Clearly, no one is keeping you honest, so I guess I’m going to have to do that job, too. $1.5 billion is spent each year by the drug companies on ads on CNN and the other four networks. I’m sure that has nothing to do with any of this. After all, if someone gave me $1.5 billion, I have to admit, I might say a kind word or two about them. Who wouldn’t?!

I expect CNN to put this matter to rest. Say you’re sorry and correct your story — like any good journalist would.

Then we can get back to more important things. Like a REAL discussion about our broken health care system. Everything else is a distraction from what really matters.

Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

GENEVA: The situation for Iraqi children is getting worse and, in some respects, it was better before the war began, a senior U.N. official said Monday.

“Children today are much worse off than they were a year ago, and they certainly are worse off than they were three years ago,” said Dan Toole, director of emergency programs for the United Nations Children’s Fund. He said Iraqis no longer have safe access to a government-funded food basket, established under Saddam Hussein to deal with international sanctions.

Toole said conditions for women and children in Iraq had worsened significantly since the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, which triggered a wave of sectarian violence and displacement that continues today.

He added that gains made shortly after the U.S. toppled Saddam’s government in 2003, when people were able to move around the country freely and had access to food markets and health centers, had been lost.

“Nutritional indicators, health access indicators are all changing for the worse,” Toole said. He said recently published data showing improvement referred to the situation a couple of years ago and is outdated.

The system of government-sponsored handouts — set up by Saddam’s government to meet the basic needs of Iraqi citizens from 1991 to 2003, when the country was under U.N. sanctions — started to fall apart last year, Toole said.

Apart from shortages of items such as milk and baby milk formula, “the basic Iraqi food basket was fairly secure under the regime because there was food coming in and the government provided the food basket to its citizens,” he said.

Toole could not say whether malnutrition has worsened significantly but he said UNICEF was concerned by reports it has received from refugees fleeing the country.

Toole said that, because of the violence, mothers were too afraid to send their children to school or take them to health centers to get checkups and nutritional supplements.

While efforts are being made to maintain levels of immunization, particularly against measles and polio, UNICEF is worried about the possibility of a cholera epidemic because two-thirds of Iraqis lack clean water. A couple of cases of cholera have been reported in the south of Iraq but so far there has been no major outbreak, Toole said.

BAGHDAD, 16 July 2007 (IRIN) – For two months, Obeid Jaafar Khalifa, 52, has been worrying about how he will cope with looking after his deceased brother’s four children. Obeid already has six of his own children to look after.

“In total, I have to feed 10 children in addition to my wife and me,” said Khalifa, an employee at Iraq’s Agriculture Ministry. He took over responsibility for the children when a car bomb killed their parents five months ago.

The example of Khalil’s nephews highlights the plight of children orphaned by the violence in Iraq. The UN Children’s Agency (UNICEF) said in its update last week on the plight of Iraqi children that the number of war orphans was rising because of the high civilian death toll.

UNICEF is increasingly concerned that the number of vulnerable children in Iraq has outstripped the country’s capacity to care for them.

“Stressed to the limit”

“Families left to care for children who have lost one or both parents are already stressed to the limit, unable to cope with extra burdens. Many of Iraq’s skilled social workers have been leaving the country,” the report said.

Citing the UN’s civilian casualty figures for 2006 which indicate up to 100 civilian deaths per day, UNICEF said: “Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of children will have lost at least one parent. And if violence continues at current levels, even more will lose a parent in 2007.”

“Such children will be automatically deprived of their rights and are likely to fall into potentially harmful forms of labour,” said Kholoud Nasser Muhssin, a researcher on family and children’s affairs affiliated to the University of Baghdad.

“Some 60-70 percent of Iraqi children in Iraq are suffering from psychological problems and their future is not bright,” Muhssin said.

“Some lost their parents or one of their family members or relatives; others witnessed traumatic events or were subjected to sexual harassment,” Muhssin added.

Psychological toll

“Iraq’s conflict is taking an immense and unnoticed psychological toll on children and youth that will have long-term consequences,” said Bilal Youssif Hamid, a Baghdad-based child psychiatrist.

“The lack of resources means the social impact will be very bad and the coming generations, especially this one, will be aggressive,” Hamid added.

According to UNICEF, half of Iraq’s four million people who have fled their homes since 2003 are children. Many were killed inside their schools or playgrounds and gangs routinely kidnap children for ransom.

Since the beginning of this year, Hamid has treated 310 children and teenagers for psychological problems, most ranging in age from 6 to 16. In the past year he has seen about 750 cases.

WHO survey

Last year the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a survey of 600 children aged 3-10 in Baghdad: 47 percent were found to have been exposed to a major traumatic event over the past two years.

Of this group, 14 percent showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In a second study of 1,090 adolescents in the northern city of Mosul, 30 percent showed symptoms of the disorder.