The first casualty of Pilger...

John Sweeney

28 June 2003

John Sweeney says that John Pilger blames the Americans alone for birth defects in Iraq, and overlooks evidence that implicates Saddam Hussein

Felicity Arbuthnot, Pilger's senior researcher for the film, wrote in a magazine article published in September 1999, 'By early 1992, doctors in Iraq were bewildered by the rise in birth deformities – some so grotesque and unusual that they expected to see them only in textbooks and perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. They compared them to those recorded in the Pacific Islands after the nuclear testing in the 1950s. Cancers, too, were rising, especially among the young, the most susceptible to radiation.'

Hang on a minute. Cancers don't happen overnight. They develop after a latency period of at least four years. The Iraqis reported a rash of cancers in the south from 1992 onwards. The cancers that happened in 1992 cannot, scientifically, have been caused in 1992 – or 1991 when the depleted uranium was used – but at least four years before that. 'To say any different is ridiculous; it would deny the evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki,' Dr Nick Plowman, the head of oncology at Barts, told me.

In the mid-1980s Iranian human-wave offensives almost took Basra, but they were stopped by Saddam's chemical weapons. The UN found incontrovertible evidence that Saddam used mustard gas against the Iranians every year between 1984 and 1988. When the Iranians came close to Basra, the Iraqis dropped gas on their own people, too. Nearly all of the war was fought in Iraq, not Iran, so that's where Saddam dropped his chemical weapons.

Mustard gas – sulphur mustard – is carcinogenic and mutagenic. That is, sulphur mustard causes cancers, leukaemias and birth defects. The children of Iranian soldiers who were gassed by Saddam's men have developed terrible cancers and birth defects. No depleted-uranium weapons were used on them. The children of Halabja, the Kurdish town gassed by Saddam, have developed cancers and birth defects. Again, no depleted uranium was used on them.