Iraq

[jbor]

on 9/2/03 9:19 AM, calbert at hslboxmaster.com at calbert at hslboxmaster.com
wrote:

> There was no great urgency, either on the part of the
> UN or the US, to "get cracking" on Iraq until after 9/11......there seemed
> to be considerable satisfaction with the status quo - the embargo, which I
> have supported here before was sufficiently devastating that Saddam was not
> far from exhaustion.....

Hang on a minute. The UN tried to hold Saddam to the terms of the peace
agreement after the Gulf War for years, and there were all manner of
resolutions, sanctions, diplomatic entreaties, air strikes when he breached
the exclusion zones and launched military attacks on his own people, the
food for oil campaign etc etc to try and ensure that the WMDs and human
rights violations were curtailed. All of them before Sept. 11.

http://serendipity.magnet.ch/more/sc_res_1441.htm

I work with and on behalf of Iraqi refugees on a daily basis. One family of
7 I've come into contact with in the last week - Mum and 6 kids, girl of 16,
younger sisters and brother, Muslim - arrived in this country a year ago.
They'd been in refugee camps in Turkey and Greece for a couple of years
before that. Mum rarely sleeps, doesn't venture out of the house, and she
scolds and hits her children when they laugh at something or seem to be
enjoying themselves. She has what the psychologist calls "survivor's guilt".
Back in Iraq, sometime in '98-99, the family was made to watch on as father,
elder brothers, uncles &c (7 family members in all) were slaughtered by
Saddam's men. It's not an isolated case: quite a typical one in fact.

Assyrian teenagers who are arriving here in the hundreds each month or so
are functionally illiterate because they've been actively prevented from
going to school. Education in Iraq is conducted in Arabic only: the Assyrian
language is forbidden. The only books in Assyrian script which are left have
had to be salvaged from the purges and hidden inside churches. It's part of
a systematic policy of cultural genocide under Saddam's rule. Some of the
Kurds who have come here were forcibly ejected from their homes, stripped of
all their possessions, as Saddam's people occupied their villages, took over
their jobs and lives. (Another favoured tactic of regimes like his is for
the invading soldiers to kill the men and rape and impregnate all the woman
and young girls of a particular ethnic group as they move from village to
village, both to dehumanise and debase the women and to enact a sort of
"ethnic cleansing" in the space of a generation - I can't say for sure
whether or not this is part of Saddam's policy and m.o., but it's certainly
happening in some African countries. But the point is that without an
effective UN stand now against the human rights violations in Iraq there's
no hope of accomplishing anything anywhere else either.)

Forget the name-calling and the inability to string a logical argument or
even a coherent sentence together which is pretty much all they've been able
to come up with in "debating" this issue: it's the brazen ignorance of the
"don't pick on Saddam"-brigade, the unclever and unfunny one-liners, their
facetious dismissals and total self-absorption, which is so thoroughly
offensive and despicable.

So that's where I'm coming from in supporting the UN and hoping and trusting
that it doesn't lose it's resolve over the issue, while at the same time
also being quite sincere in saying I hope it doesn't have to come to war.

best