Thousands of Iraqis Contract AIDS from Blue Finger Dye

by christopher taylor

MOSUL--Sunday's national elections in Iraq yielded more than a handful of elected representatives whose task is drafting a Constitution for the Middle Eastern country's burgeoning democracy. The elections also yielded a virulent outbreak of AIDS.

The United States government has been experimenting with a new strain of HIV that can be administered through the skin. The exercise in germ warfare--dubbed the "Blue Finger Attack," or BFA--went through beta testing in polling booths in Mosul and few neighboring towns.

"We used the British smallpox blankets campaign of 1763 as our model," explained Department of Defense spokesman Jim Turner. "We had to think to ourselves: 'who in the world is as expendable today as Ottawans were in the Eighteenth Century.' We had our answer almost immediately: Iraqis."

While the general reaction to the news that many of their countrymen had been infected with HIV was negative, a few Iraqis applauded the news.

"Now I cannot be so easily accused of sleeping around and be stoned to death," said Mosul resident Nawal Ali Nasser. "I can claim it was the Western devil that infected me. And not in the usual way."