Depleted Uranium Weapons & the New World Order May 1999

After 50 years of uranium enrichment the US has produced some 1.1 billion pounds of DU waste.2 Over the last twenty years the US military has been developing the use of this DU waste as a high density penetrator in shells, missiles and bullets. These weapons were first used under combat conditions by American and British forces during the war against Iraq in 1991. As of 1997, DU weapons were also being adopted or had been adopted, by the militaries of France, Russia, Sweden, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and South Korea, among others.3 Much of this DU proliferation is the result of US arms sales.4

The success of DU ammunition as an anti-tank weapon, for which there is currently “no satisfactory alternative material” in the words of one British official, 5 has made such weapons invaluable for the American and British militaries. During the Gulf War American tanks found it easy to destroy Soviet made Iraqi T-72 tanks, while no American Abrams main battle tanks were destroyed by Iraqi forces. Without DU shells and against DU armour, Iraqi weapons were useless. As Sara Flounders states: “DU weapons make all others so much scrap metal.”6

But given the toxic and radioactive nature of DU, the use of these weapons has also proved to be massively destructive to both civil populations and the military personnel who use, or come into contact with them. During the Gulf War US forces used large quantities of DU weapons in Kuwait and Southern Iraq, firing some 940,000 small DU shells from A10 ‘tank killer’ aircraft and some 14,000 larger DU shells from tanks.7 DU is also used in Cruise Missiles and was probably present in those missiles used against Iraq during the war. This widespread use of DU ammunition left around 300 tons of DU waste in Iraq and Kuwait. Approximately 70% of a DU projectile is burnt on impact with its target, producing tiny ‘hot’ uranium oxide particles which can be inhaled or ingested. Thus much of the DU waste left in Iraq and Kuwait exists in a very dangerous aerosolised form, which can be carried by the wind far from the battlefield. Leonard Dietz has observed that the ‘fallout range of airborne DU aerosol dust is virtually unlimited.’8 Such micron sized particles can remain in the lungs for years, radiating the surrounding tissue. DU particles can also enter water supplies and the food chain.

Uranium oxide particles, along with the gamma radiation emitted by spent DU ammunitions, have caused a large number of illnesses and deaths amongst Iraqi civilians and former soldiers, and amongst Coalition military personnel since 1991. It is estimated that some 90,000 US veterans are affected by so-called ‘Gulf War Syndrome’, a primary cause of which is probably DU, and that between 2,500 and 5,000 US Gulf War veterans have already died.9 Many more thousands of Iraqis are afflicted by ‘Gulf War Syndrome’. Various health problems have been attributed to DU contamination amongst Gulf War veterans and Iraqi civilians, including leukaemia and other cancers, birth defects, Down’s syndrome, liver, kidney and lung damage, anaemia, immune deficiency and heavy metal poisoning. With its long radioactive half-life and high toxicity, waste from DU weapons will have an unknown but deadly effect on people in Iraq and Kuwait for a long time into the future. A report issued by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in April 1991 estimated that at least 40 tons of DU waste had been left behind after the Gulf War. Even from this low estimate, the report predicted ‘tens of thousands of potential deaths’ from DU contamination.10

World order

The world of the 1990s is one in which certain global tendencies are prominent. Much of the global economy is now controlled by transnational corporations. Out of the 100 largest economies in the world, 50 of them are now corporations.11. The rise of corporate power has created an international elite whose power and interests are both national and international. It is this elite for whom the world economic order is organised, to the detriment of the poor and the marginalized. The establishment of a more comprehensive global capitalism in the late twentieth century has also meant the enforcement of policies of economic liberalisation throughout much of the world. The neoliberalism which has shaped the global economy in recent decades can be linked to the economic and political policies of the US, as the West’s principal political and economic power. This state of affairs is what Noam Chomsky has termed the ‘Washington consensus’.12 The policies of economic liberalisation pursued by Western states and by the US in particular, have been established through the Bretton Woods institutions – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – as well as through the recent General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organisation.

The IMF in particular has forced Structural Adjustment Programmes onto Third World nations affected by the debt crisis since the 1980s. In return for loans these nations are forced to dismantle state derived structures established to protect national economies, abandon social welfare programmes and accept an increased penetration of their economies by Western corporations. These programmes now affect more than 4 billion people worldwide, producing social upheaval, wholesale poverty and starvation, and amounting to what Michel Chossudovsky has termed ‘economic genocide’.13 The nature of the economic divisions between the First and Third world which exist in the contemporary global order are highlighted by the historian Mark Curtis, who observes: ‘The richest fifth of the world’s population account for 84.7 per cent of the world gross national product, while the poorest fifth have only 1.4 per cent; the richest ten people in Britain have as much wealth as 23 poor countries with 174 million people.’14 Economic liberalisation has also had a devastating effect upon the working classes of the First World. The relocation of corporate production in Third World countries where labour is cheap, has resulted in unemployment and lower wages in the West, thus enabling greater exploitation within wealthy countries. As William Robinson has commented the world order of the current era is a ‘world war’ between the haves and the have-nots.15

This economic world order is policed at one level by institutions such as the IMF, but it is also policed at another level by the military power of Western states. In this area the US is pre-eminent. The US has the largest and most technologically sophisticated military complex in the world. This military-industrial complex represents the inequities of the world economic order in microcosm, with public funds being channelled into the hands of corporations which produce the highly expensive weapons used by the US military. Military budgets in the US eat into welfare programmes and reduce the amount of money which can be invested in productive economic development, while in turn the US military is used to back up US corporate power abroad. Since the Second World War US corporations have thrived under the umbrella of US military power.

Irrespective of the claims made for a ‘new world order’ of peace and security, and the high rhetoric of ‘punching the bully in the face’ emanating from Washington, the Gulf War of 1991 was a war fought in the name of military, political and economic power. By fighting the Gulf War the US was able to prove itself to be the only military superpower and assert its role as the global policeman working in the service of the status quo. At the same time the defeat of Iraq presented a violent lesson to any Third World regional power with ambitions which contradicted visions of global order conceived in Washington. The war also enabled the US to consolidate its presence in the Middle East making America the dominant outside power in the region. After 1991 Washington asserted its dominance in the Middle East by lording over the ‘peace process’ between Israel, the Arab states and the Palestinians. Not least of all the US was able to reassert its important economic relationship with Saudi Arabia making sure that substantial profits from Saudi petroleum production went into American corporate coffers.16 Influence over the Gulf states also gives the US influence over other industrial economies, namely Japan and European nations, which are more reliant upon Gulf oil. The Gulf War was a war befitting the contemporary global order, representing an interlude of high intensity military conflict within the low intensity economic conflict which marks the everyday lives of the majority of the world’s population.

Bob Aldridge has described the Trident nuclear missile system possessed by the US as an ‘icon’ of a violent and greedy society.17 This idea of a weapon as an icon for a society, can be expanded to other highly destructive weapons used by Western powers. DU weapons, alongside Trident and other weapons of mass destruction, are icons of a world order in which economic, political and military power comes first and ordinary people come last. The use of DU for its military advantage without regard for the devastating long-term consequences of these weapons on civilian populations, is an example of a world in which power has been prioritised over all other considerations.

Such priorities have existed in the corridors of power in Washington for some time. For example, George Kennan of the US State Department wrote in 1950 that for the US to defend its wealth and world status: ‘We should cease to talk about the vague and . . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.’ The moral world in which DU weapons were conceived and used, is one defined by Kennan’s ethos. This is an ethos which also structures the politics of a global economic system which currently deprives the majority of the world’s population of basic human rights. It is appropriate that DU has been chosen as one of the weapons to defend this inhuman economic order.

Such uses of DU weapons were witnessed in Iraq in 1991 and in Bosnia where the US attempted to reassert its military power in Europe through NATO in 199519. It is now reported that the US and the UK have positioned and might have used DU weapons in NATO’s current war against Serbia20. Again a significant aspect of this conflict is the desire on the part of the US to assert its political presence in an increasingly unified Europe, as ever ‘straight power concepts’ are being prioritised over people.

The Doctrine of Maximum Force

At the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991 the New York Times published a section of a US National Security Review from 1989. This review stated that: ‘In cases where the US confronts much weaker enemies, our challenge will not simply be to defeat them, but to defeat them decisively and rapidly.’ Other outcomes from confrontations with Third World adversaries would be ‘embarrassing’ for the World’s only superpower.21 Thus one element of US military strategies, for the 1990s and beyond, was to involve interventions into the Third World which would be rapid, ruthless and extremely violent, making sure that there would be no misapprehension of what the projection of US military power meant. Such interventions would be used to defeat any regional threat to the political and economic interests of the US and its allies, and as a demonstration to any would be Third World ‘troublemakers’ of the high cost of stepping on toes in Washington. This military policy of ‘maximum force’ was instituted in part in opposition to the ‘gradualist’ policy of building up military force used by the US in Vietnam.22 But the policy when applied to non-white people in the Third World also has a racist aspect to it. The ‘non-people’ of Third World countries are expendable when it comes to asserting US military power in the post-Cold War era, as the people of Iraq found in 1991, or more recently people found in the Somalian capital Mogadiscio during the maximum force campaign pursued by the US in 1993.22

DU weapons are part of this military doctrine of maximum force. During the Gulf War DU weapons gave US forces considerable superiority over Iraqi armour. The DU ammunition which continues to be used by the American military is one product of an ongoing policy of weapons development which is meant to provide the US with total technological superiority on the battlefield. Other weapons of this type include third generation tactical nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, laser and satellite guided bombs, stealth weapons, and massively destructive attack helicopters. Tactical nuclear weapons, for example, are being developed explicitly for use against Third World targets.24

These weapons, and the doctrine which defines their use, leave little room for the consideration of their effects upon people, whether soldiers or civilians. Within the doctrine of maximum force the human element is definitely is definitely a secondary consideration. The use of air power during the Gulf War proved that the US airforce had massive superiority over its Third World foe. But this superiority was asserted not only at the expense of Iraqi troops who were carpet bombed in their front line trenches or slaughtered in the retreat from Kuwait, but also against Iraqi civilians. The air campaign against Iraq was the doctrine of maximum force writ large. US and British aircraft were used to systematically and rapidly devastate the very infrastructure of Iraqi society, destroying power, water, sewage, transport, health, food, and communications systems. Iraqi society was left suffering from a massive trauma which continues to have a terrible effect on its people. Indeed, the UN sanctions regime, which denies Iraq the wherewithal to repair its domestic infrastructure, has meant that the war against Iraq, rather than ending, has gotten worse.

The doctrine of maximum force is the direct product of US global status. The object of this military strategy is not merely upon an enemy, but the image it presents of American power. The right image of the US in the eyes of American military planners is one of a nation which is not only capable of, but also prepared to ruthlessly crush an adversary without reservations or scruples. As Edward Said has stated in relation to the war in Kosovo:

One needs to remember that, since the US is a world power, one calculation that enters its foreign policy decisions is how the deployment of its military might will affect America’s image in the eyes of other countries. Henry Kissinger made that a central concern of his Indochinese policies when he undertook the secret bombing of Laos: your enemies will learn you are prepared to do anything, to the point of appearing totally irrational.

The exercise of massive destruction disproportionate to the goal, say, of stopping an enemy advancing, is a principal aim of this policy. Punishment is its own goal, bombing to display NATO authority its own satisfaction, especially when there is little chance of retaliation.25

In this world of straight power concepts, where the use of maximum force is a goal itself, DU weapons have a despicable logic. The use of DU within the doctrine of maximum force asserts the arrogance of US disregard for the rules of war and human rights. The lesson which DU weapons have littered across the battlefields of Iraq and Kuwait is that the US will use its deadly weapons no matter what the consequences for present and future generations of those people who live in proximity to a conflict.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

On the 12th of December 1977 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 32/84, which reaffirmed the definition of weapons of mass destruction established by the UN in 1948 which defined weapons of mass destruction as atomic explosive weapons, radioactive material weapons, lethal chemical and biological weapons and any weapons developed in the future which might have characteristics comparable in destructive effect to those of the atomic bomb or other weapons mentioned above26

As Geoff Simons has argued, this definition of weapons of mass destruction can be applied to a number of weapons used by the US during the Gulf War, including DU ammunition.27 But a subsequent resolution (1996/16) adopted by the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities attached to the Commission on Human Rights, actually named DU weapons as weapons of mass destruction, defining ‘weapons of mass destruction and indiscriminate effect’ as being in particular ‘nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, fuel air bombs, napalm, cluster bombs, biological weaponry, and weaponry containing depleted uranium.’28 Thus according to one official body of the UN, DU weapons are considered to be weapons of mass destruction, with an emphasis being placed upon their ‘consequential and cumulative effects’. Resolution 1996/16 also called for all states to ‘curb the production and spread’ of such weapons. The main onus of this request falls upon the US and the UK.

At the same time as this resolution was being adopted the UN Security Council was continuing to uphold the devastating economic sanctions regime on Iraq, on the pretext that Iraq presented a threat to international peace through its ongoing possession and attempted manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. Economic sanctions were imposed upon Iraq shortly after the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. After the Gulf War the sanctions regime was continued through its attachment to cease-fire resolution 687 drafted by the US and adopted by the Security Council in April 1991. UNSCR 687 stated that ‘Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision’ of its weapons of mass destruction and related programmes.29 By 1996 the sanctions regime in combination with the purposeful destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure during the Gulf War itself, had caused the premature deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi children and infants. Other estimates made by the UN and the Iraqi Ministry of Health in late 1997, placed the death toll higher at 1,200,000. While in November 1997 UNICEF declared that the current ‘food for oil’ deal defined by UNSCR 986 (April 1995) implemented in late 1996, had done very little to improve nutritional levels among Iraqi children. According to the report, as of late 1997 a further 1,000,000 children were under threat of malnutrition.30 According to Denis Halliday the former UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq, who resigned in 1998, the economic sanctions regime on Iraq continues to kill 6 – 7,000 children every month.31

In particular the destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage systems in combination with a lack of medical care, created either by Iraq’s inability to sell oil or the direct blocking of requests for medicines by members of the UN Sanctions Committee (in particular the US and the UK), has resulted in an explosion of preventable diseases amongst Iraq’s civilian population. For example, in 1989 there were no reported cases of cholera in Iraq, whereas in 1994 1,345 cases of the disease were reported.32 Such effects upon ordinary Iraqi people caused by the planned destruction of the system needed to prevent the spread of disease and the concerted blocking of the ability to fight such illnesses, constitutes nothing less than a ‘particularly vicious form of biological warfare’, in Noam Chomsky’s words.33 During the same period as the after effects of the bombing campaign of 1991 and the sanctions regime were wreaking havoc amongst Iraq’s civil population, the long-term effects of the use of DU weapons during the Gulf War were beginning to be felt. After 1991, cancers, infant mortality and birth defects began to rise at an alarming rate in Southern Iraq, establishing beyond reasonable doubt the status of DU munitions as a weapon of mass destruction and indiscriminate effect.

The situation in Iraq since 1991 has provided an object lesson in the hypocrisy of the US and UK governments, as the main supporters of the economic sanctions regime. These two states clamour for the total elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction while actually using an economic weapon of mass destruction against Iraq. But the hypocrisy goes further than this, for economic sanctions have prevented the Iraqi health service from being able to combat the long term effects of DU weapons. Thus economic sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction have also had the effect of compounding the destructive legacy of the earlier use of another weapon of mass destruction.

The main intention of enforcing the economic sanctions regime on Iraq on the part of the US and the UK is not to foster collective security or the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The bombing of Iraq in late 1998 appears to have rendered the UN weapons inspection programme (UNSCOM) inoperative, while reinforcing the grip of economic sanctions on the Iraqi population. This development emphasises that the primary concern of the US and the UK is not Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but maintenance of the economic sanctions regime as an end in itself.34 The main concern of the US and UK is therefore the military and political containment of Iraq and the maintenance of the status quo in the Gulf region. The containment of Iraq with Saddam in power enables the separation of the upper Gulf, including Iran, from the oil rich and Western oriented states of the lower Gulf region, while also providing a pretext for an expanded Anglo-American military presence in the region. Keeping Iraq’s oil off the market also serves to boost oil prices at a time when the international oil industry is in crisis. The overriding concerns for the US and UK in this context are political and economic, rather than to do with peace or human rights. This point is made abundantly clear by the callousness of policies which continue to starve and poison the people of Iraq.

Conclusion

DU weapons have a place within a world in which the policies of the most powerful states are driven by a desire to maximise their power. Within this world increasing militarisation is encouraged by such states both as a means to assert political power and as a means of getting profits from arms sales. As in other negative trends in the contemporary world order, the US and its British lieutenant, are leading agents of global militarisation. Both the US and the UK35 economies continue to depend upon arms as a primary export. In the case of the Middle East since 1991 the US has made large arms shipments to the Gulf states. In March 1991 Saudi Arabia made an order of $3 billion worth in US arms, this was in addition to the $20 billion order placed in September 1990.36 The Saudi order in March 1991 formed part of the $18 billion worth of US arms sales to Middle Eastern countries that month.37 These sales were made in the same month as President Bush called for restraint on weapons sales to the Middle East.38 A further $6 billion worth of fighter aircraft were sold to Saudi Arabia in 1993. 39

After the Gulf War the US also blocked initiatives which have been aimed at establishing the Middle East as a region free of weapons of mass destruction. Cease-fire resolution 687 which ended the Gulf War recalled and earlier UN objective, proposed in the General Assembly by Egypt and Iran in 1974, and renewed annually, for ‘the establishment of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region of the Middle East.’ 687 continues: ‘Conscious of the threat which all weapons of mass destruction pose to peace and security in the area and of the need to work towards the establishment in the Middle East of a zone free of such weapons.’ But the resolution excluded and amendment proposed by Cuba which would have framed the post-Gulf War settlement in wider and more concrete regional terms. Cuba’s initiative would have meant that the resolution demanded Iraqi disarmament as ‘a first step towards the full elimination of weapons of mass destruction and weapons systems incompatible with the aim of achieving a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in the Middle East.’40 This amendment was blocked by the US because it threatened US power in the Middle East and in particular the regional nuclear monopoly of Washington’s strategic ally Israel. Israel’s considerable nuclear capacity is currently being increased by the development of a second strike capability in the form of nuclear submarines being built in Germany.41 In a world in which an arms race in the Middle East is encouraged by a superpower claiming to be the enforcer of a ‘new world order’ in which peace is the priority, it is not out of place that this same superpower could spread recycled nuclear waste across part of that region.

DU weapons as an element of the doctrine of maximum force will continue to form part of the ‘new world order’. US military planning for the next century involves the further development of flexible and mobile forces which can be used anywhere in the world and which can easily defeat their enemies using advanced weaponry. This means that DU armaments will continue to be essential to the US. The UK will also continue to use such weapons as part of its efforts to gain international prestige by supporting US foreign policy.42 Without a concerted campaign to oppose the use and proliferation of DU weapons, human catastrophes similar to that which has taken place in Iraq will continue to occur. But it should also be noted that DU weapons need to be seen within the political contexts which produce them. Modern weapons of mass destruction are not only the product of technological developments, or of the general escalation of violence and exterminationist policies during the twentieth century. Weapons of mass destruction are also the military consequence of a global order structured by inequity and racism. These weapons are the military face of a world in which power is the final word. Any campaign against DU weapons, also needs to be a campaign for human justice against political, economic and military systems which thrive on injustice.

References

1 Dr. Helen Caldicott, ‘A New Kind of Nuclear War’ in Depleted Uranium Education Project (eds), Metal of Dishonor – Depleted Uranium: How the Pentagon Radiates Soldiers and Civilians with DU Weapons, International Action Centre, New York, 1997, p.20.
2 Dan Fahey, ‘Collateral Damage: How U.S. Troops were Exposed to Depleted Uranium During the Persian Gulf War’ in ibid., p.26.
3 Ibid., p.39
4 Dolores Lymburner, ‘Another Human Experiment’ in ibid., p.52
5 Letter from Alan Casson, Gulf War Veterans’ Illness Unit, Ministry of Defence, to Rabbi Dr. Michael Hilton, 16 March 1998.
6 Sara Flounders, ‘The Struggle for an Independent Inquiry’ in Depleted Uranium Education Project (eds), 1997, op.cit., p.3.
7 Caldicott, 1997, op.cit., p.19.
8 Leonard Dietz, ‘DU Spread and Contamination of Gulf War Veterans and Others’ in Depleted Uranium Education Project (eds), 1997, op.cit., p.140.
9 Dr. Siegwart-Horst Gunther, ‘How DU Shell Residues Poison Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia’ in ibid. p. 169
10 Eric Hoskins, ‘Depleted Uranium Shells Make the Desert Glow’ in ibid., p. 165
11 Mark Curtis, ‘The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order’ Pluto Press, London, 1998, p.94
12 Noam Chomsky, ‘Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order’, Seven Stories Press, New York, 1999, pp.19 – 25
13 Michel Chossudovsky, ‘The Globalisation of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms’, Zed Books Ltd., London, 1997, p.37
14 Curtis, 1998, op.cit. p.91
15 William Robinson, ‘Globalisation : Nine Theses on Our Epoch’, Race and Class, 38:2, October – December, 1996, p.14
16 See, Peter R.Odell, ‘International Oil: A Return to American Hegemony’, The World Today, November 1994
17 Bob Aldridge (ed), ‘The Trident Resister’s Handbook’, Pacific Life Research Center, California, 1993, p.1
18 Quoted in Noam Chomsky, ‘On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures’, South End Press, Boston, 1987, p.16
19 See, James Petras and Steve Vireux, ‘Bosnia and the Revival of US Hegemony’, New Left Review, 218. July/August 1996
20 Paul Brown, ‘Uranium Risk in War Zone’, The Guardian, 13 April 1999, p.4
21 Quoted in Noam Chomsky, ‘The Weak Shall Inherit Nothing’, The Guardian, March 25, 1991, p. 19
22 Michael T. Klare, Pax Americana: US Military Policy in the Post-Cold War Era’ in Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck (eds). ‘Altered States: A Reader in the New World Order’, Olive Branch Press, New York, 1993, p.54
23 See, Alex de Waal, ‘US War Crimes in Somalia’, New Left Review, 230, July/August, 1998
24 See, Michio Kaku, ‘Contingency Plans: Nuclear Weapons After The Cold War’ in Bennis and Moushabeck, 1993, op.cit. pp.61-63
25 Edward Said, ‘It’s Time the World Stood up to the American Bully’. The Guardian, 10 April 1999
26 Quoted in Geoff Simons, ‘The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice’, Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 1996, p. 201
27 Ibid.
28 Resolution 1996/16, adopted August 29, 1996, by the United Nations Committee on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities’. The resolution was adopted through 15 yes votes, 1 no cast by the United States and 8 abstentions, cast mostly by European nations.
29 Security Council Resolution 687, 3 April 1991
30 ‘Nutritional Status Survey at Primary Health Centres During Polio National Immunisation Days (PNID) in Iraq, April 12 – 14 1997, conducted by the Ministry of Health (GOI), UNICEF/Iraq, World Food Programme/Iraq.
31 Ian Williams, ‘“Why I Resigned” – an interview with Denis Halliday’, Middle East International, 587, 13 November 1998, p.6
32 See, Ramsey Clark (ed), The Children are Dying: The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq, International Action Centre, New York, 1996, p.17
33 Noam Chomsky, ‘The Current Bombing: Behind the Rhetoric,’ www.zmag.org/current_bombings.htm
34 See, Phyllis Bennis, ‘The US and Iraq: Towards Confrontation?’, Middle East International, 587, 13 November 1998, p.4
35 See John Lovering, ‘Labour and the Defence Industry: Allies in “Globalisation”’, Capital and Class, 65, Summer 1998
36 Tim Niblock, ‘Arab Losses, First World Gains’ in John Gittings (ed) Beyond the Gulf War: The Middle East and the New World Order, Catholic Institute for International Relations, London, 1991, p.80
37 Alan Freeman, ‘The Economic Background and Consequences of the Gulf War’ in Haim Bresheeth and Nirs Yuval-Davis (eds), The Gulf War and the New World Order, Zed Books Ltd., London 1991, p.162
38 Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Verso, London, 1993, p.105
39 Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New, Pluto Press, London, 1994, p.102
40 Quoted in Phyllis Bennis, Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, Olive Branch Press, New York, 1996, p.39
41 Roni Ben Efrat, ‘Israel’s Army: Cumbersome, Nuclear and Dangerous’, Challenge, 53, January-February 1999, p. 22
43 See, David Edgerton, ‘Tony Blair’s Warfare State’, New Left Review, 230, July/August 1998.