America makes war in Iraq
This just cannot be!? Can it? Not my country! Sadly, yes
In a dispatch quoted below, an AP photographer describes a harrowing journey fleeing American wrath against the city of Fallujah in Iraq.
“I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.”He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he “helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands.”
“I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.”
Somehow this evokes scenes of the worst totalitarian discipline against people trying to flee communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War. How can they call it freedom?
November 16th, 2004 at 09:19
If you can live with dictatorial control of such countries as Cuba, North Korea, and the old Iraq, why can’t you learn to live with what you believe is a warmongering and dictatorial Bush Administration?
You were okay with Saddamite Iraq? How can you defend the mistreatment and murder that the Ba’athists visited upon Iraq for decades and not see the necessity of making Iraq free today? You are sticking up for the wrong people.
Even though we are bringing destruction to some, it is only because we are bringing hope to many others. One bears the other. But America isn’t going to walk away from this fight like Uncle Walter and Hanoi John told us we should walk away from South Viet Nam.
November 16th, 2004 at 13:15
No, I was NOT okay with Saddam. Certainly not like the “tilt-toward-Iraq” wing of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Admins were.
Most of the disastrous policies that have destroyed Iraq since the 70s — including nearly ten years of U.S. support for Saddam Hussein, the first devastating Gulf War, 12 years of brutally-drawn economic sanctions that punished the population but allowed Saddam & Halliburton to profit, the taking of Iraq by force in the early spring of 2003, and now a brutal occupation — have all come with tenacious American insistence. We’re in Iraq to give them liberation and freedom — at 17 rounds a second.
The fact of the matter is, if it hadn’t been for the sanctions, which devastated the society and killed hundreds of thousands of people, it’s very likely that the Iraqis themselves would have sent Saddam Hussein to the same fate as other brutal monsters, also supported by the people now in Washington, like Ceausescu in Romania or Suharto in Indonesia, or Marcos, for example.
November 19th, 2004 at 04:27
The sanctions were cooked up by Euroweenies who didn’t want to finish the job back in 1991. And, at some point, it was the sanctions that enriched Saddam and enabled him to do even more damage to the Iraqi society.
How do you figure that the people would have risen up without our help? The UN was never going to do it because they’re dirty. Europe alone? Ha! It is always Uncle Sam who gets the job. And it was never going to go cleanly.
As for this gripe about how we used to back Saddam, it’s because he was going against Iran. That’s just the way the world works. We also used to back the mujahadeen against the Soviets. Sixty years ago, we benefited from the Soviets fighting against the Nazis on the Eastern Front, too. None of that lasted, except that each aliance served a purpose in its own time and laid the foundation for what came after.
November 19th, 2004 at 04:47
Every whiff of a WMD Saddam ever collected or dreamt about came with American pedigree or approval — through BNL, Matrix-Churchill, DuPont, or any number of other corporations or Kissinger-connected consultancies. The support continued after the Iran war, and even in the aftermath of the first Gulf war.
If this is “just the way the world works”, why didn’t President Bush just say that? Here, Toby, re-write Mr. Bush’s March 15, 2003 radio address and see if you don’t think it has the same impact:
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. This weekend marks a bitter anniversary for the people of Iraq. Fifteen years ago, Saddam Hussein’s regime ordered a chemical weapons attack on a village in Iraq called Halabja. With that single order, the regime killed thousands of Iraq’s Kurdish citizens. Whole families died while trying to flee clouds of nerve and mustard agents descending from the sky. Many who managed to survive still suffer from cancer, blindness, respiratory diseases, miscarriages, and severe birth defects among their children.
The chemical attack on Halabja — just one of 40 targeted at Iraq’s own people — provided a glimpse of the crimes Saddam Hussein is willing to commit, and the kind of threat he now presents to the entire world. He is among history’s cruelest dictators, and we used to back Saddam, it’s because he was going against Iran. That’s just the way the world works.