Some have recently argued that a war with Iraq now would not be pre-emptive because the first Gulf War never really ended and we've been at war with Iraq for the last 12 years. At first I considered this argument to be a semantic rationalization, but after reading the following article on the severity of the sanctions, I had to agree: we've been laying siege to an entire country for over a decade.Just one excerpt:Under the economic embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council, now in its 14th year, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to decontaminate its battlefields from the 1991 Gulf War.Professor Doug Rokke, the US Army physicist responsible for cleaning up Kuwait, told me: "I am like many people in southern Iraq. I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. Most of my team are now dead."We face an issue to be confronted by people in the West, those with a sense of right and wrong: first, the decision by the US and Britain to use a weapon of mass destruction: depeleted uranium. When a tank fired its shells, each round carried over 4,500g of solid uranium. What happened in the Gulf was a form of nuclear warfare."In 1991, a United Kingdom Atomic Eneregy Authority document reported that if 8 per cent of the depleted uranium fired in the Gulf War was inhaled, it could cause "500,000 potential deaths". In the promised attack on Iraq, the United States will again use depleted uranium, and so will Britain, regardless of its denials.Full article available at:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=380738