| http://archive.showmenews.com/2002/Jan/20020114Comm003.asp
Instead of attacking Iraq, U.S. should embrace it By CHARLEY REESE Published Monday, January 14, 2002 The Bush administration seems to be laying the groundwork to attack Iraq despite the fact that there is not one shred of evidence linking Iraq to the Sept. 11 attack. There are many reasons why the United States should not attack Iraq. The current plan of U.S. attack is to use substitutes for the ground fighting to be supplemented by U.S. air power. There are only two possible sources of sacrificial grunts in Iraq: the Kurds and the Shiites. The price the Kurds will surely demand is an independent Kurdistan, and that will cause problems for Turkey, Syria and Iran. If we use the Shiites and succeed, we will in effect be handing over Iraq and its resources to the mullahs in Iran. Anybody who thinks that it would be an improvement is sorely mistaken. There is no one else. The so-called Iraqi opposition, living off U.S. taxpayers, is an oddball collection of disaffected people, including communists, who have neither standing nor support inside Iraq. As for these defectors you see on television, just remember, they know that only if they say what America wants to hear will they get their goodies. The second reason is that we have done Iraq a great wrong. The sanctions against Iraq, which are the worst since the Middle Ages, have caused the deaths of more than 500,000 children and another 500,000 adults, mostly elderly. You cannot blame this on Saddam Hussein, as American politicians and Israeli apologists so glibly do. The problem with that specious claim is that too many U.S. officials, starting in the first Bush administration, have said publicly that it doesn’t matter what Saddam does or doesn’t do - the sanctions will not be lifted until he is out of office. You can’t get more stupid than that. What incentive does Saddam have to comply if we say publicly that even if he does, we will never lift the sanctions? That was, in fact, the core stupidity of George Bush No. 1’s policy from the beginning: It was all stick and no carrot. Furthermore, two U.N. officials who quit their jobs in disgust have spoken out over and over that the Iraqi government has fairly distributed all the aid it has been able to get. Some of the more honest former arms inspectors have said that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction. Don’t forget, U.N. arms inspectors were in Iraq for seven or eight years, and Saddam did not kick them out. The United Nations pulled them out the last time so President Bill Clinton could do one of his bombing acts. I know many Americans are ill-informed about foreign affairs and are kept in the dark by most U.S. news media. Eventually, however, it will dawn on more Americans that the nations we’re being constantly urged to sanction and bomb are not our enemies, but Israel’s. Now, Israel has the largest and most modern army in the Middle East. If it has a problem with Iraq or Iran or Syria, it should declare war and have at it. There’s no sane reason for the United States to play the role of Israel’s junkyard dog. Finally, the reason we should not attack Iraq is that deterrence works. We deterred a far more powerful opponent that had thousands of nuclear weapons and tons of chemical and biological weapons. We can certainly deter a nation of 20 million with or without weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the country that has held up an effective treaty against biochemical weapons is the United States. The only country in the Middle East that did not sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and does not allow international inspections is Israel. Israel is also the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. And there are more than 60 countries other than Iraq that either have or have the capability of producing biochemical weapons. Rather than attack Iraq, we should lift the sanctions and invite Iraq to rejoin the family of nations. After all, Saddam Hussein is the same man America once treated as an ally. |
