[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I'd urge you to read Nick Cohen's > article at > http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,684005,00.html
OK, another article in favour of war from the political left. Nick Cohen is a splendid scourge of the government's hypocrisy, which is his specialist area. I actually found this article woolly and unclear, and it didn't address what seem to me to be the main issues - I couldn't do better than Randy's list yesterday, and to repeat what I've already said. What doesn't seem to be mentioned enough is the flip side of the pro-war argument that it is incumbent on the West to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people (which we have blithely tolerated for many years, as has been widely observed) by *bombing them*. I would ask those who are in favour of waging war to consider the effect of war on a people who are already frightened and politically subjugated. IT WILL MAKE THEIR LIVES EVEN WORSE. The talk is of destroying infrastructure, so in addition to the inconscionable numbers of civilians who will be killed, maimed, orphaned, widowed and made homeless and jobless, their basic everyday requirements (electricity, sanitation etc) will be worse, no matter how bad they are now. At the risk of stating the obvious: war is hell. Most of the people on this list have probably not lived through a war, in the sense of living in a city that was being bombed, and would want it to stay that way. As someone who has lived through that experience, which will stay with me forever, I can't accept the same horror being visited on another nation, especially on such sp ecious and flimsy grounds. And this was a fairly short war, which did not involve the sort of monstrous high-tech weaponry which will be deployed in the coming onslaught. Let's remember, whenever the weasel words "weapons of mass destruction" rear their head, who invented most of them, who has the most of them, who has used them while decrying their use by others, and who is directly responsible for people like Saddam Hussein getting hold of them. Azeem in London
