Depleted Uranium weapons and the Japanese Media
Today, while in the teachers lounge, I flipped through the school copy of the Japanese newspaper, and came across a big two page spread on the depleted Uranium weapons used in the Iraq war, and the effect on the Iraqi children.
It's an issue I'm somewhat familiar with. I first heard about it from Mark Mattison. I then researched Depleted Uranium weapons, and used it in my paper on Clinton's intervention in Yugoslavia (in which depleted Uranium missiles were also used) for my foreign policy class at Calvin College. I subsequently used this information in a Chimes article on the Iraq sanctions, and for teach-in we held with the Calvin College Social Justice committee on the same issue.
Depleted Uranium is very effective for punching through armored vehicles, but unfortunately is responsible for causing deformed fetuses and cancer in areas in which it is used.
Because of the intermittent bombing and use of Depleted Uranium weapons during the Clinton administration, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of deformed fetuses and childhood leukemia cases. With Bush's war, even more depleted Uranium has been used.
The thing about Depleted Uranium weapons is that the problems are well known inside activist communities in the United States (just put "depleted Uranium weapons" in a search engine in Yahoo, and see all the sites that comes up), but you'll never hear a word about it in major media sources. Yet in Japan, it was featured very prominently in the newspaper, along with graphs of the increasing number of child deaths from cancer in Iraq, and pictures of deformed children.
I explained to my Japanese colleagues that this sort of thing is never in the American newspaper, and most Americans didn't know about it. They responded to me that it is frequently in the Japanese press and television news programs, and almost all Japanese are familiar with these problems.
Which brings me back to some familiar ground. I didn't have this web log last year, but those of you who were in e-mail contact with me during the build up to the Iraq war recall I frequently compared the American media to the Japanese media. I don't want to repeat myself too much, but this is another perfect example.