Kathy Kelly : an enduring voice in the wilderness against the weaponization of medicine

Kathy Kelly ,an American woman about my age, has packed about two dozen lives into her life when I have barely managed to have one.

She should have a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bravely confound the reality of the continuing weaponization of medicine in the case of Iraq.

Yeah, I know : you totally believed the Tooth Fairy when it swore that the UN specifically exempted medicine from its near-total embargo of goods in and out of Iraq.

Which is why, no doubt, an excess of a half million kids in that country died premature deaths - just from the sheer joy at hearing that news.

A country with a good record at rapidly improving child mortality rates suddenly nosedived the other way : and let us not forget the echo effect upon Iraq children of future generations whose parents were under-fed during their crucial early growth years under the sanctions.

For famine is the gift that goes on giving.

Food and pure water are always the best medicine.

But when they are in short supply, drugs and medical machinery needs to step in.

 When, however, these also are either in very short supply or in the case of medical machinery , broken down from lack of parts - even a nominally less severe famine, in terms of calories, kills far too many by indirect means.

Food, pure drinking water chemicals,  winter clothing and home heating fuel, non-damaged shelters : all are forms of natural medicines, as effective or even more so than antibiotics in keeping kids alive.

Weaponize them and you kill all ultimately --- but the poor, the weak, the elderly and the youngest and nursing mothers - they usually die first.

Government leaders and combat soldiers get their rations and clothing allowance right up to the last.

And let us not forget governments reacting to embargoes by rationing their remaining scarce chemicals and fuel and steel to go to tanks and explosives and aviation fuel instead of to tractors pulling steel plows for food.

All governments respond to embargoes by cutting their weakest citizens off first, and keeping the elite and the military going to the bitter end.

Always have ; always will.

And that bitter end is almost always the destruction of that armed forces and government - not the death of all the state's weakest citizens.

Killing the weakest is immoral - and since it is so ineffective in ending any war, doubly immoral because it is both bloody and bloody inefficient.....