SPAIN CONSIDERED AS A WINNER WITH 2003 IRAQ WAR BY JOSE MARIA AZNAR

USPA NEWS - Of the three world leaders who came together in the Azores Islands to publicly defend the Iraq War in 2003, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and the former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, only the latter continues to justify an act killing more than one million innocent iraqi lives...

Of the three world leaders who came together in the Azores Islands to publicly defend the Iraq War in 2003, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and the former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, only the latter continues to justify an act killing more than one million innocent Iraqi human beings.


José Maria Aznar Aznar, who governed Spain with the Popular Party between 1996 and 2004, claims that he only did 'what the majority of European countries' were doing, but that Spain had a higher profile because it held a non-permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council. (El Pais)

He also alleges that Spain 'did not participate in any war' and that 'no Spanish soldier was in Iraq for a single day without United Nations backing.'...Aznar says that he supported the Iraq invasion 'out of a pro-Atlantic conviction, because it was strategically good for Spain, and out of a basic sense of political reciprocity: you cannot ask a friend [Bush] for help, and later deny that same friend your aid when he requests it.' (EL PAIS)

According to Child Victims of War :

The desperate situation of Iraqi children has been largely created by the international community, the US and UK in particular. Iraq has been exposed to :

- Two decades of sanctions and punitive reparation payments which have hit the most vulnerable members of society;
- The destruction of vital civilian infrastructure through targeted bombing;
- The collapse of state apparatus after the 2003 invasion;
- Continuous military violence and the opening of the country to al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist forces;
- A constitution founded on ethnic and religious division and US/UK support of sectarian and misogynist factions;
- Corrupt governance

A survey published in January 2008, conducted in August and September 2007 by Opinion Research Business, a British polling firm, in conjunction with Iraq´s Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies found that about 20% of households surveyed had lost at least one member, and estimated that 1.03 million people had died in the war with a 95% certainty for a number of deaths between 946,000 and 1.12 million.

The deaths of so many men, women and children have had an enormous impact on Iraqi society. According to the Iraqi government,around 4.5 million children have lost one or both parents (almost 1 in 3) and approximately 600 000 children are living on the streets. Child labour has increased with 15% of children under the age of 14 now working. There are now between 1 and 3 million widows in Iraq, many struggling as heads of households and living in extreme poverty.

In the 1970s, Iraq was one of the best countries in the Middle East and North Africa to be a child, but due to decades of war and neglect, it has become one of the worst. Some of the issues facing Iraq´s 15 million children now include the following :

- Each year, around 35,000 infants die before reaching their first birthday
- Over 1.5 million children under the age of five are undernourished
- Around 700,000 children are not enrolled in primary school, while hundreds of thousands more drop out before graduating
- 2.5 million children do not have access to safe water, and 3.5 million lack adequate sanitation facilities

23% of the Iraqi population live on less than $2.2 a day. Women headed households are more likely to live in destitution. An estimated 1 -3 million households are headed by a woman, the majority widows.

In 2003, Professor Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology & public heath at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, wrote: '“¦ the Anglo-American bombing of water supplies, sanitation plants, & the power plants that are necessary for their functioning, constitutes a biological attack“¦the microbial agents that can cause devastating epidemics of diarrhoea are ubiquitous, lethal, & are readily disseminated by destroying the civilian sanitation infrastructure by bombing or otherwise destroying water sanitation & sewage disposal system'