and speaking for the Affirmatives...
A letter from a Cambridge University student of Iraqi decent.
Source: http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7218.asp
Link via : http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/17/1045330515777.html
Iraq and "War"*
Dear All,
I am writing this email after a lot of deliberation about whether I have the right to use my strange and unique position (within our group) to argue the case FOR an invasion in Iraq. But in the end I have decided that I have more to lose if I keep quiet.
Firstly, my parents, my family, are from Iraq. My parents fled from Iraq some 23 years ago leaving everything and everyone behind when at that point 17 of our relatives had been "disappeared" or imprisoned for no reason whatsoever. They sought refuge in Kuwait for 4 years, but once again were forced to flee with us (my brother and I) in tow when Saddam had the Kuwaitis deport the Iraqi men back to Iraq. On the border he had these returnees shot dead.
We were lucky; we made it safely to Britain. My father was lucky - his brother was caught trying to escape and tortured. So here I am, 19 years later, never having set foot in the country of my parents.
The anti-"war" feeling prevalent amongst people I speak to seems to me totally misjudged and misplaced. I have to be honest here and say that I feel it is based partly on a lot on misunderstanding of the situation in Iraq and partly on people's desire to seem "politically rebellious" against the big, bad Americans. And let me say, that I also agree the American government is indeed big and bad; I have no illusions about their true intentions behind an attack on Iraq.
More than you or I, the Iraqis know the ignorant and truly atrocious attitude of the American government towards most of the world's population. Iraqis felt the effect of this when America (and the rest of the West in fact) eagerly supported and supplied Saddam when he waged his war-of-attrition against Iran causing the death of 1 million Iraqis and Iranians and the disappearance of many more - there was no anti-war movement to help them.
They felt the effect of this attitude when America and the West ignored, supplied even, Saddam's use of biological weapons on the people of Halabja, killing 5000 people in one day, and causing the deformed births of babies in the area to this day.
Iraqis know well the untrustworthy nature of the Western governments when the coalition gave Saddam permission, a few days after the end of the Gulf War, to massacre the uprising peoples of Iraq when they had wrested control from him in most cities of Iraq.
The people of Iraq echo our discontentment with America and the West's policy in Iraq, for they know the realities of such a policy far better than any of us shall ever know.
I want to ask those who support the anti - "war" movement (apart from pacifists - that is a totally different situation) their motives and reasoning behind such support. You may feel that America is trying to blind you from seeing the truth about their real reasons for an invasion. I must argue that in fact, you are still blind to the bigger truths in Iraq. I must ask you to consider the following questions:
- Saddam has murdered more than a million Iraqis over the past 30 years, are you willing to allow him to kill another million Iraqis?
- Out of a population of 20 million, 4 million Iraqis have been forced to flee their country during Saddam's reign. Are you willing to ignore the real and present danger that caused so many people to leave their homes and families?
- Saddam rules Iraq using fear - he regularly imprisons, executes and tortures the mass population for no reason whatsoever - this may be hard to believe and you may not even appreciate the extent of such barbaric acts, but believe me you will be hard pressed to find a family in Iraq who have not had a son/father/brother killed, imprisoned, tortured and/or "disappeared" due to Saddam's regime. What has been stopping you from taking to the streets to protest against such blatant crimes against humanity in the past?
- Saddam gassed thousands of political prisoners in one of his campaigns to "cleanse" prisons - why are you not protesting against this barbaric act?
- An example of the dictator's policy you are trying to save - Saddam has made a law to give excuse to any man to rape a female relative and then murder her in the name of adultery. Do you still want to march to keep him in power?
I remember when I was around 8 I went along with my father to a demonstration against the French embassy when the French were selling Saddam weapons. I know of the numerous occasions my father and many, many others haves attended various meetings, protests and exhibitions that call for the end of Saddam's reign. I have attended the permanent rally against Saddam that has been held every Saturday in Trafalgar Square for the past 5 years. The Iraqi people have been protesting for YEARS against the war - the war that Saddam has waged against them. Where have you been?
Why is it now that you deem it appropriate to voice your disillusions with America's policy in Iraq, when it is actually right now that the Iraqi people are being given real hope, however slight and precarious, that they can live in an Iraq that is free of the horrors partly described in this email?
Whatever America's real intentions behind an attack, the reality on the ground is that many Iraqis, inside and outside Iraq support invasive action, because they are the ones who have to live with the realities of continuing as things are while people in the West wring their hands over the rights and wrongs of dropping bombs on Iraq, when in fact the US & the UK have been continuously dropping bombs on Iraq for the past 12 years.
Of course it would be ideal if an invasion could be undertaken, not by the Americans, but by, say, the Nelson Mandela International Peace Force. That's not on offer. The Iraqi people cannot wait until such a force materialises; they have been forced to take what they're given. That such a force does not exist - cannot exist - in today's world is a failing of the very people who do not want America to invade Iraq, yet are willing to let thousands of Iraqis to die in order to gain the higher moral ground. Do not continue to punish the Iraqi people because you are "unhappy" with the amount of power the world is at fault for allowing America to wield. Do not use the Iraqi people as a pawn in your game for moral superiority - one loses that right when one allows a monster like Saddam to rule for 30 years without so much as protesting against his rule.
Some will accuse me of being a pessimist for accepting that the only way to get rid of Saddam is through force. I beg to differ; I believe I have boundless optimism for the FUTURE of Iraq, where Iraqis are able to rebuild their shattered country, where Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, communists - all peoples of any and all backgrounds are able to live in peace and safety and without fear of persecution. I beg you to imagine such an Iraq, such a democracy in the Middle East, and ask where in that do you see pessimism? Such an Iraq is what is being envisaged and sought by many millions of Iraqis; such an Iraq is where I hope I will be able to take my children.
If you want to make your disillusions heard then do speak out, put pressure on Blair, Bush & Co to keep to their promises of restoring democracy to Iraq. Make sure they do put back in financial aid what they have taken over the years, and make sure that they don't betray the Iraqis again. March for democracy in Iraq. If you say that we can't trust the Americans then make sure that you are a part of ensuring they do fulfil their promises to the Iraqis.
So I conclude by asking you to consider your REASONS for supporting the anti-"war" movement, and if you are going, the anti-"war" demo. If you still feel that what I have said does not sway you from this stance, then I can do no more.
In some ways I do admire the movement because it proves what people can achieve when they come together and speak out. Unfortunately for Iraq nobody spoke out earlier.
Please feel free to email me with your counter-arguments, comments, thoughts etc.
Rania Kashi
(* I use apostrophes with "war" because in truth it will be no war, but an invasion. A war presumes relatively equal forces battling against each, with resistance on both sides. A US-led force will encounter NO resistance from the Iraqi people or the army.)
Monday, February 17, 2003
Rob's reply to Amelia
Amelia,
...I think Vietnam is a beaming example of the right idea aimed at the wrong people (the soldiers being the symptom and the politicians being the cause). However military power has always been a political weapon. [Rob indulges in a history lesson on the start of WW1)...anyway enough of history, the fundamental principle of a clear mandate to engage in the act of war remains. Spin doctors have unfortunately been very adept at manufacturing mandates for all sorts of things and popular debate is one way of keeping it in check.
The big difference to 1991 was that the world was responding to the invasion of a sovereign nation when Iraq rolled into Kuwait ("a UN Security Council resolution authorised the use of force to reverse the invasion" BBC website). ironically this is the very thing that the US Administration appears to have planned for Iraq.
I absolutely agree with your comments about the perceived threat being cooked up by the US administration vis a viz the Cold War threat. One can almost see a thread of McCarthyism running through this Axis of Evil campaign ('You're either with us or against us').
I agree with your comment about Hans Blix managing a level of containment of the threat with the inspectors in Iraq. It is a key tennent in modern warfare doctrine, not to occupy strategic land for its own sake but to "remove the enemy's ability to wage war". I do believe this is already being achieved and it points to there being a number of creative means to do so and not just charging in bayonets fixed.
As for the Arab solution, it is idealogically sound but practically impossible to implement. Please look at my friends letter on my website as he explains how the US Administration would not really want to restore democracy to Iraq. This is because a Shi'ite government (the ethnic majority) is likely to align it with Iran, a Kurdish government would challenge Turkey, so a Sunni ruler would be the only acceptable fit. Sunni's are only 17% of the population so it would likley be achieved by dictatorship. [Simon goes into it in better detail in his letter]
I appreciate you comments on the petitions and must admit to normally having higher standards than what I displayed the other day.
Please keep the thoughts coming and bring more people together to consider their own future. My concern is after Iraq is resolved, we may face a crisis of momental scale with North Korea if the same approach is used. Where does it all stop?
Take care
Rob
Amelia,
...I think Vietnam is a beaming example of the right idea aimed at the wrong people (the soldiers being the symptom and the politicians being the cause). However military power has always been a political weapon. [Rob indulges in a history lesson on the start of WW1)...anyway enough of history, the fundamental principle of a clear mandate to engage in the act of war remains. Spin doctors have unfortunately been very adept at manufacturing mandates for all sorts of things and popular debate is one way of keeping it in check.
The big difference to 1991 was that the world was responding to the invasion of a sovereign nation when Iraq rolled into Kuwait ("a UN Security Council resolution authorised the use of force to reverse the invasion" BBC website). ironically this is the very thing that the US Administration appears to have planned for Iraq.
I absolutely agree with your comments about the perceived threat being cooked up by the US administration vis a viz the Cold War threat. One can almost see a thread of McCarthyism running through this Axis of Evil campaign ('You're either with us or against us').
I agree with your comment about Hans Blix managing a level of containment of the threat with the inspectors in Iraq. It is a key tennent in modern warfare doctrine, not to occupy strategic land for its own sake but to "remove the enemy's ability to wage war". I do believe this is already being achieved and it points to there being a number of creative means to do so and not just charging in bayonets fixed.
As for the Arab solution, it is idealogically sound but practically impossible to implement. Please look at my friends letter on my website as he explains how the US Administration would not really want to restore democracy to Iraq. This is because a Shi'ite government (the ethnic majority) is likely to align it with Iran, a Kurdish government would challenge Turkey, so a Sunni ruler would be the only acceptable fit. Sunni's are only 17% of the population so it would likley be achieved by dictatorship. [Simon goes into it in better detail in his letter]
I appreciate you comments on the petitions and must admit to normally having higher standards than what I displayed the other day.
Please keep the thoughts coming and bring more people together to consider their own future. My concern is after Iraq is resolved, we may face a crisis of momental scale with North Korea if the same approach is used. Where does it all stop?
Take care
Rob
Amelia's second letter
Dear Rob,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It really makes me happy to hear from people who are genuinely interested in thinking about this. Like you said: "I would be happy if people just dedicated a few minutes to join this debate and demonstrate what they believe in." And your letter made me think some more about my position.
So please be patient... and if you can't be bothered to wade through my wandering thoughts, please skip to the petition section at the end!
I'm glad you brought up the soldiers, because I hadn't thought about them at all. Sad but I guess not suprising. I completely agree with you that it's important that the world - the politicians - are addressing and debating the issue before sending in soldiers. I don't know very much about this, so it's hard for me to say anything interesting or valuable. Basically, it seems that the problem is that people who don't support a military action and who won't support the soldiers during or after an action, cannot be bothered to influence their governments enough to keep that action from happening. If I won't make my voice heard now, then I should be aware enough to inform myself about the situation of the soldiers and to support them as fellow citizens, even if I don't support the administration, because by my inaction I am partially responsible for them being there. On the other hand, the incredible lack of public support for and acceptance of Vietnam vets in the US - a tragedy - has an influence now on how quick the government is to send in troops. So public action/inaction/opinion does have real effect in the long-run. It would be much faster and less painful if we, the public, were more aware and more organised.
One of the many differences between soldiering now and soldiering through history up thru 1945 seems to be that now, in a professional army, the soldiers are putting their lives on the line not for their beliefs, but for the beliefs or desires of someone else; usually politicians. Maybe that has always been true - my point is that I don't think the post-WWII conflicts involving US troops are cases of self-defense. We appease or ignore lots of dictators.
If the US hadn't have gone into Kuwait in 1991, the resolution of the Iraqi invasion might have been much more complicated. I don't remember whether the US got a UN resolution or not then. However, forcing the UN to take action (by not acting independently) will be necessary at some point, and it is happening. The UN must become a viable organisation capable of timely action to resolve conflicts.
I think the argument that Sadaam is going to use his WMD to hurt us, soon, is not the whole issue, and it may not be correct. During the Cold War, we really believed that the Soviet Union was going to hurt us, soon. This turned out to be totally wrong, but acting on the belief cost a lot of lives. The Russians were nowhere near as close to using nukes as the Americans were (my slightly-informed opinion).
There is the opinion that the goal in Iraq has already been achieved; If there are hundreds of international inspectors crawling and flying over Iraq, the situation is contained. What do you think of this?
The key point, which you also brought up, is involvement of Arab nations. Have you heard the theory that the whole American govt's pro-war stance (threat) is an elaborate political ploy to prod the Arab nations into removing Sadaam? To wit, less than a year ago the US was talking mostly regime change and the Arab states were insisting that the issue is disarmament - now the world is focused on disarmament and the Arabs are seriously (well, media reports) exploring options for organising regime-change in Iraq. I doubt the Bush administration is sophisticated or organised enough to carry out such an elaborate stunt, but it's an interesting thought.
ABOUT PETITIONS
Today I received a different anti-war petition, from a college friend. It's a women's petition, so I hope that doesn't turn you off, but the key thing for me is that after a tiny bit of searching I was able to find it online, and to learn something about how this all works.
The petition itself is on the page www.petitiononline.com/waw2002/petition.html. It may be a little more than you are ready to sign, as it is against American military action period. But, there are other petitions - see below. I did go ahead and sign the women's petition on the website, and I will recommend to other people that they go there and sign the petition online rather than forwarding the letter (as you can see I'm not bothering to send you the letter version).
(The site that organised the petition is called www.unreasonablewomen.org. Interesting site. Other interesting sites (to me at least) I found connected with this are: www.guerrillanews.com and www.adventuredivas.com.)
The petition is hosted by a site called www.petitiononline.com. The site hosts lots of different petitions and collects the signatures as a free service for people and groups who want to organise a petition. Here is what they say about how valid the petition signatures are:
"Ensuring identity without invading privacy is quite a challenge. We don't see that a perfect solution is currently available, given that there is not yet any widespread foolproof system for establishing online identity. An email address is not enough to establish identity by itself, but it is substantially more than just a name, and it provides a link back to a person for (the potential of) confirming identity."
On the website is a FAQ page that talks more about all this stuff.
Hope this information is interesting! Is sure was interesting to me.
Kind regards
Amelia
Dear Rob,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It really makes me happy to hear from people who are genuinely interested in thinking about this. Like you said: "I would be happy if people just dedicated a few minutes to join this debate and demonstrate what they believe in." And your letter made me think some more about my position.
So please be patient... and if you can't be bothered to wade through my wandering thoughts, please skip to the petition section at the end!
I'm glad you brought up the soldiers, because I hadn't thought about them at all. Sad but I guess not suprising. I completely agree with you that it's important that the world - the politicians - are addressing and debating the issue before sending in soldiers. I don't know very much about this, so it's hard for me to say anything interesting or valuable. Basically, it seems that the problem is that people who don't support a military action and who won't support the soldiers during or after an action, cannot be bothered to influence their governments enough to keep that action from happening. If I won't make my voice heard now, then I should be aware enough to inform myself about the situation of the soldiers and to support them as fellow citizens, even if I don't support the administration, because by my inaction I am partially responsible for them being there. On the other hand, the incredible lack of public support for and acceptance of Vietnam vets in the US - a tragedy - has an influence now on how quick the government is to send in troops. So public action/inaction/opinion does have real effect in the long-run. It would be much faster and less painful if we, the public, were more aware and more organised.
One of the many differences between soldiering now and soldiering through history up thru 1945 seems to be that now, in a professional army, the soldiers are putting their lives on the line not for their beliefs, but for the beliefs or desires of someone else; usually politicians. Maybe that has always been true - my point is that I don't think the post-WWII conflicts involving US troops are cases of self-defense. We appease or ignore lots of dictators.
If the US hadn't have gone into Kuwait in 1991, the resolution of the Iraqi invasion might have been much more complicated. I don't remember whether the US got a UN resolution or not then. However, forcing the UN to take action (by not acting independently) will be necessary at some point, and it is happening. The UN must become a viable organisation capable of timely action to resolve conflicts.
I think the argument that Sadaam is going to use his WMD to hurt us, soon, is not the whole issue, and it may not be correct. During the Cold War, we really believed that the Soviet Union was going to hurt us, soon. This turned out to be totally wrong, but acting on the belief cost a lot of lives. The Russians were nowhere near as close to using nukes as the Americans were (my slightly-informed opinion).
There is the opinion that the goal in Iraq has already been achieved; If there are hundreds of international inspectors crawling and flying over Iraq, the situation is contained. What do you think of this?
The key point, which you also brought up, is involvement of Arab nations. Have you heard the theory that the whole American govt's pro-war stance (threat) is an elaborate political ploy to prod the Arab nations into removing Sadaam? To wit, less than a year ago the US was talking mostly regime change and the Arab states were insisting that the issue is disarmament - now the world is focused on disarmament and the Arabs are seriously (well, media reports) exploring options for organising regime-change in Iraq. I doubt the Bush administration is sophisticated or organised enough to carry out such an elaborate stunt, but it's an interesting thought.
ABOUT PETITIONS
Today I received a different anti-war petition, from a college friend. It's a women's petition, so I hope that doesn't turn you off, but the key thing for me is that after a tiny bit of searching I was able to find it online, and to learn something about how this all works.
The petition itself is on the page www.petitiononline.com/waw2002/petition.html. It may be a little more than you are ready to sign, as it is against American military action period. But, there are other petitions - see below. I did go ahead and sign the women's petition on the website, and I will recommend to other people that they go there and sign the petition online rather than forwarding the letter (as you can see I'm not bothering to send you the letter version).
(The site that organised the petition is called www.unreasonablewomen.org. Interesting site. Other interesting sites (to me at least) I found connected with this are: www.guerrillanews.com and www.adventuredivas.com.)
The petition is hosted by a site called www.petitiononline.com. The site hosts lots of different petitions and collects the signatures as a free service for people and groups who want to organise a petition. Here is what they say about how valid the petition signatures are:
"Ensuring identity without invading privacy is quite a challenge. We don't see that a perfect solution is currently available, given that there is not yet any widespread foolproof system for establishing online identity. An email address is not enough to establish identity by itself, but it is substantially more than just a name, and it provides a link back to a person for (the potential of) confirming identity."
On the website is a FAQ page that talks more about all this stuff.
Hope this information is interesting! Is sure was interesting to me.
Kind regards
Amelia
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