Fallujah

The news of the terrible birth defects in this war ravaged city (Tony Blair, are you paying attention?) is truly heart rending. John Simpson and the BBC are to be commended for this outstanding and risky piece of investigative journalism.

The most likely theory to explain this epidemic of birth deformity is the use of by the Americans of some of their most deadly modern weapons when they attacked the city to defeat the insurgents who controlled it in 2004.  White phosphorous  munitions and uranium depleted shells have been mentioned. This is potentially more than appalling. Not only have we the human suffering on an unprecedented scale, several such births a week, maybe as many as a thousand in a year, but also a moral question of titanic proportions.

Was this not a war for which the excuse was the elimination of weapons of mass destruction? What, then, was the U.S doing using white phospherous and depleted uranium in an urban battlefield full of innocent civilians?