| A Redemptive Journey - Why I Am Going to Iraq
I leave for Baghdad on February 3rd. I am going to Iraq with a suitcase of over-the-counter medicines, iron supplements for women, children's vitamins and pain relief pills as a work of mercy to counter the bombs and threats of my government against Iraqi civilians. Saddam Hussein is a tyrant. He spends his country's "oil-for-food" revenues on palaces for himself while his people starve. He developed chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s and used them in the brutal Iran/Iraq war. The United States helped him make these weapons by sending him seven strains of anthrax, chemicals and manuals for their weaponization, and providing him with satellite targeting information for their deployment against Iranian soldiers. The United States condoned his probable use of chemical weapons against Kurdish Iraqis in 1987. Saddam also had a program to develop nuclear weapons before the Persian Gulf War.
The nationwide demonstrations here on October 26th and January 18th protesting war against Iraq and the 39 anti-war resolutions passed by American cities show that the U.S. is not George W. Bush. Just so, Saddam is not Iraq. Iraq is a country of 24 million people with 42% per cent under 19. While Iraqis are not free to demonstrate against their government, neither are most other Middle Easterners. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, Yemen have no more freedom of expression than Iraq. In fact, before the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was the most progressive country in the Middle East with the UN calling it an "emerging first world nation" because female illiteracy had been eliminated and free universal health care, clean water and free education through graduate school had all been achieved. I am going to Iraq because U.N. sanctions against Iraq result in the same number of deaths every three weeks that Al Quaeda visited on the World Trade Center. But the Iraqis dying are children under five, succumbing to malnutrition and disease resulting from the sanctions and our country's deliberate destruction of Iraq's electrical grid and water purification facilities. Bombs and sanctions have now killed half a million Iraqi toddlers as well as an estimated 1.5 million older children and adults. I believe that by intentionally unleashing typhus, malaria, E coli, amoebic dysentery and diphtheria on Iraq's civilians, our country has itself engaged in bacteriological warfare.
I am going to Iraq because during Operation Desert Storm the U.S. and Britain used weaponry made of depleted uranium, an extremely hard and penetrating metal whose radioactivity has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and now contaminates Iraqi air, land and water. Exposure to depleted uranium causes chromosomal damage and elevated cancer rates, especially in children. Future historians may well see the deployment of these weapons as a second nuclear attack by the US against civilians.
I am going to Iraq because our country has exercised its veto 1500 times in the committee overseeing U.N. sanctions on spare parts to repair water and sewage systems, for oil production and communications equipment. We have even vetoed delivery of baby milk powder because it has phosphates, which can be used to make conventional bombs. We approve life support machines, but veto the computers needed to run them; we allow insulin, but veto syringes.
I am going to Iraq because I have seen no evidence that Saddam has actively supported Al Quaeda and other non-state terrorist organizations, which represent the real threat to the United States. Iraq's secularism is loathsome to Al Quaeda. Our own CIA wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last October saying it believed that Saddam would use or release any weapons of mass destruction he might have only if he were attacked by the U.S.
I am going to Iraq because I believe that implementing the doctrine of "pre-emptive war" outlined in the Bush Administration's 2002 National Policy Strategy will destroy the last shred of any idealistic image we like to think we project in the world. We will be seen by the rest of the world as the play yard bully who perpetually picks and "wins" fights with weaker nations. We will give up forever any role we might have enjoyed as a beacon for freedom and opportunity. We will condemn ourselves to continual hatred and contempt from other Muslim countries, handing Osama bin Laden, wherever he is, the most perfect recruitment tool he could ever wish for. My father was a lieutenant general in the United States Marine Corps. He loved our country deeply, and so do I.
I am going to Iraq, not to support Saddam, but in a small effort to help atone for our country's past cruelties to Iraqis and to try to rescue it from the irredeemable error this war would be. Compassionate friends from all over the country are supporting me in making this journey and Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based organization that has had a continuous presence in Iraq since 1996,is making it possible.
I am going to Iraq as part of a prayerful movement in our country and in Europe to stand in solidarity with the beleaguered Iraqi people. We cannot accept the principle of killing people in order to liberate them. We hope to provide a deterrent to invasion, to open a space in which the inspectors can do their work and in which diplomacy may accomplish a peaceful denouement to this conflict. We call wholeheartedly for an end to the catastrophic U.N. sanctions.
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