A Vanity Fair piece about the dangers of depleted uranium, which of course we’re using in Iraq:

Dr. Durakovic suspects the military of minimizing the health and environmental consequences of D.U. weapons, and suggests two reasons it may have for doing so: “to keep them off the list of war criminals, and to avoid paying compensation which could run into billions of dollars.” To this might be added a third: depleted uranium, because of its unique armor-penetrating capabilities, has become a defining feature of American warfare, one whose loss would be intolerable to military planners.

In 1991, the U.S. used D.U. weapons to kill thousands of Iraqis in tanks and armored vehicles on the “highway of death” from Kuwait to Basra. The one-sided victory ushered in a new era of “lethality overmatch”-the ability to strike an enemy with virtual impunity. A Pentagon pamphlet from 2003 states that a central objective of the American military is to “generate dominant lethality overmatch across the full spectrum of operations,” and no weapon is better suited to achieving that goal than D.U.

The value of depleted uranium was spelled out more simply in a Pentagon briefing by Colonel James Naughton of the army’s Materiel Command in March 2003, just before the Iraq invasion: “What we want to be able to do is strike the target from farther away than we can be hit back…. We don’t want to fight even. Nobody goes into a war and wants to be even with the enemy. We want to be ahead, and D.U. gives us that advantage.”

If the Pentagon is right about the risks of D.U., such statements should not be controversial. If it is wrong, says retired army colonel Dr. Andras Korenyi-Both, who headed one of the main field hospitals during Desert Storm and later conducted some of the first research into Gulf War syndrome, the position is less clear-cut. “You’d have to deal with the question of whether it’s better not to use D.U. and have more of your soldiers die in battle or to use D.U. and lose very few in the field-but have them get sick and die when they get home.”

Not to mention all the Iraqis dying from it, too…