Why I Reluctantly Support the War to Liberate Iraq

It is with great reluctance. I have decided to support President Bush in his decision for war.

Saddam may use chemical and biological weapons on his own people, the destruction of the oil fields has mostly been avoided. Heavy pollution may come down the Shatt al-Arab waterway into the Gulf to further wreck the environment.

Ghastly mistakes have happened, and we have inadvertently killed civilians in erroneous strikes.

If there is anything we can agree on, it is that we do not hate the Iraqi people and we wish we can somehow avoid killing them, hopefully as few as possible.

After all, their ancestors created, at least as early as Egypt, writing, civilization, defined weights and measures, a place value Base Sixty number system, and the idea of splitting the day into 24 hours and each hour into 60 minutes, each minute into 60 seconds. Several millennia later, an Iraqi named Muhammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi invented arithmetic, to take advantage of the place value Base Ten number system the Arab world had adapted from India. The Mesopotamia Basin is one of the world's special places because of this ancient civilization and its contributions to our modern world. Hammurabi's famous Code, engraved on a tall black stone, contains provisions familiar with all who practice law.

It is just that the place was run by maniacs with no respect for law, their own, Hammurabi's, Islamic, or any law.

But that alone is not a justification for war. As terrible as Saddam's regime is, since we liberated Kuwait while leaving him in control of Iraq, which is like liberating France and Poland while leaving Hitler in charge of Germany, we now need a new justification to unleash the horror of war.

On September 11, 2001, as we all painfully know, we were the victims of a surprise and unprovoked attack, occurring at a time we believed we were at peace. There is no doubt, reasonable or unreasonable, that Al Quaida and Osama bin Laden had everything to do with this attack. The question that remains, did Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq assist Al Quaida in training for and launching the attack on September 11, 2001?

The protesters and others who oppose this war, all say that there "is not one shred of evidence" that Iraq had anything to do with September 11, 2001.

Well, there is a shred, and it has been around since at least 1999. An Iraqi exile named Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami testified to PBS Frontline in January 2002 that he worked as an administrator at the Salmon Pak facility 15 miles south of Baghdad on the Tigris River. The facility is enclosed in a loop of the river (actually near the ancient city of Ctesiphon, Salmon Pak town itself a mile further north) and has a fence that keeps the farmers using the nearby roads from seeing much of it. It has chemical and biological weapon development facilities. It also has a derelict Boeing 707 that Khodada testifies is used to train hijackers. The hijackers so trained are usually non-Iraqis. And Khodada testifies that these hijackers were Islamist fanatics who were ready to engage in suicide attacks. Khodada does not believe that Al Quaida in Afghanistan had such a resource with which to train the September 11 hijackers, the effort required the assistance of Iraq.

Therefore, if this is true, then Saddam has participated in an act of war against the United States and we need no permission from anyone to wipe his regime off the face of the Planet Earth.

Because he most likely did, and because the Bush Administration has undoubtedly the evidence to prove it, it is (though they've not trumpeted it), and with the knowledge that this became a nasty fight with casualties, I must support this war. If Saddam was allowed to develop biological and chemical weapons and train Al Quaida terrorists, such a weapon could be released in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, or Seattle. With an atomic bomb hidden on an ore barge to shield the plutonium radiation from satellite and NEST detectors, terrorists could float it under the bridge at Sydney, into Tokyo Wan, Oslo Fjordan, up the Thames Estuary, into New York Harbor or past Fort Sumter into Charleston Bay. Our attack on Iraq is not unprovoked, it is in response to the events of September 11, 2001, and it is necessary to prevent even worse disasters.

I seriously doubt a President Gore would do anything different, and I would have supported him if it was up to him to order this. The New Zealand Prime Minister's recent statements to the contrary are not an unreasonable speculation on her part, just politically incorrect to say so out loud. I merely disagree with her analysis. President Gore would have had to launch this war, what he would have done differently is pure speculation.

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I now update this page. What can I say? We have liberated most of Iraq, destroyed the Saddam regime, and many Iraqis are dancing in the street. We have confessions by CNN executives that they knew of the atrocities of this tyranny, but did not report. Sounds familiar.

What comes next that will be the test. We have made a good start in An Najaf. Some of Saddam's Fedayeen holed up in the Ali Mosque, the tomb of Ali ibn Abi Talib, son in law of Mohammed whose caliphate is the origin of the Shi'ite branch of Islam. Our soldiers refused to shoot into the mosque. Local civilians went into the mosque and dealt with the Fedayeen themselves, therefore, no damage was done to the shrine and we can say that we are at war with the Saddam regime, and not with Islam. Indeed, our traditions of religious freedom inform our respect for Islam.

Unfortunately, there is a great deal of propaganda circulating in the Arab world that claims we do not respect Islam, when in fact, it is the radicals who abuse this religion to inspire the blind hatred who make peace with us and with Israel seemingly impossible. A lot of this seems to come from Saudi Arabia and its official sponsorship of the worst preachings by its Wahhabist clerics. This Wahhabist extremism is a source of the hatred that fueled the September 11, 2001 events, and it fuels the hatred that makes impossible peace with Israel. If you thought Ku Klux Klan literature is bad, try reading this stuff. This, we will have to deal with, and it is our actions that will speak louder than words.

For the situation in Israel and Palestine, there is plenty of blame to go around. An argument can be made that the leaders of Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and much of the rest of the world, ourselves included, deserve to be dropped into Saddam's plastic shredder for allowing the terrible situation in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip to develop and fester, with all of the human suffering we see.

But punishing the leaders in such a way will not solve the problem, they will merely be replaced with new leaders who will follow the same tired policies. The solution will require the acceptance by all parties of the following propositions:

4.4 million Jews live on the eastern end of the Mediterranean and have no plans to commit mass suicide or to leave. A second Holocaust will not be allowed to happen. They have a right to live in peace with their neighbors.

The non-Jewish Palestinians have a right to live in a nation, at peace with its neighbors.

Those who are descended from Palestinians who fled Israel during the 1948 War should be allowed citizenship in the nations where they were they now live and where most of them have been born. They and the other citizens of these nations have a right to live in peace with their neighbors.

Violence and terrorism must be renounced and strictly punished, with the usual safeguards of due process to protect the innocent caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Money should not be paid to families of suicide bombers and terrorists in reward for the terrorism. The preaching of hatred should be denounced and not sponsored. At the same time, houses should not be bulldozed merely because suicide bombers or terrorists came from them.

The border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt should be controlled by Palestinians and Egyptians, not by Israel. Internal travel within the Gaza Strip and the West Bank should be controlled by the Palestinians, not by Israel.

Mutual disrespect between Israelis and Palestinians should be replaced with mutual respect.

How to get from here to there is up to all of us.

Good luck.

Just a suggestion.

I obviously do not agree with some of the positions taken, but I love well done political satire. These updated War Posters ought to be quite entertaining, as long as you can be a good sport and take a joke. Those who protest the war have been rightly criticized for doing it the wrong way, offending people rather than convincing them to come over to their side. I think this guy is doing it the right way because what he is doing is extremely effective satire.

I have done my own versions of some of these war posters, but I do not have enough space on this Geocities site. I refer you to www.antipeonage.0catch.com . Because I do not want to be accused of "remote loading", you will have to find your way to the jpegs from there.

Naturally, I have to comment on these other War Posters.

I fully agree with the satire of Homeland Security and the USA-Patriot Act. We need to keep our civil liberties. Police and security guards being assholes will not protect an office tower from a plane or an artillery shell crashing into it. Nor will it prevent a truck loaded with several thousand pounds of explosives from demolishing it. Respecting our Constitution is still the best way of preventing people from wanting to commit such an atrocity.

However, if the objection to the Iraq War is that it is wrong to fight war for petroleum, an eminently reasonable position, then why is it the same people who take this position oppose drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and the operation of nuclear power plants?

Duh.

Maybe most Americans just don't want to live the austere "eco-friendly" lifestyle that would please the granolas. (And most Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Europeans, Japanese, etc., truth be told. The complaint in many parts of the world is that people are dirt poor, i.e., they are living an austere eco-friendly lifestyle. And they hate it.)

If it is wrong to fight a war for oil, then we should pursue the reasonable alternatives: nuclear power and drilling off shore and in Alaska. No war needs to be fought to develop these resources! (Can you believe we actually agreed to a treaty making Antarctica off limits for energy exploration?!) "But what about solar and wind power?" you might ask. Well, those who favor nuclear power, such as myself, are not opposed to developing wind and solar power. It is just that we need to develop all of these sources of energy.

Duh.

Build the windmills and solar cells. But to dismantle the bought and paid for Trojan Nuclear Plant in Oregon? That was just plain STUPID! Don't take my word for it, look at your electric bill. The power crisis would not have been as bad if Trojan was there with its 1300 megawatts.

Perhaps the soldier in one of these posters could be saying: "The fewer nuclear power plants we operate, the more windmills we turn off to avoid killing birds stupid enough to fly into them, the more hydroelectric dams we dismantle, the more foreigners I have to kill. NOW do you GET IT?"

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