War Talk
March, 2003--The City is the World. The World is the City. We are all one community, divided by fences we can see through, walls we can hear through; our hearts all beat faster in fear or in joy the same way. In this troubled time--this time made troubled by the ambitions of the petty and powerful among us--it is a sin to remain silent.
My country's president, and the corporate soldiers of his coterie, are striving to engage the world in war, a war premised on hypocrisies. It is my duty as a citizen of this country, as a denizen of this earth, as one life among many lives, to speak out.
There are those who might say that this publication, "a web magazine about city living," is not the place to speak of these things. But the City is the World. The World is the City. We are all one community, divided by fears born of lies and laziness. And this war, if it comes, will be as grave an insult to the winners as to the losers.
While there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a dictator and an evil person, this is not George Bush's rationale for war. There are other countries run by evil dictators with whom my country gladly traffics, and has trafficked in the past, in exchange for advantages gained by that traffic.
While it is possible that Saddam Hussein retains a few weapons of mass destruction, there are other countries who oppress their own peoples, whom the world knows to own hundreds, often thousands, of weapons of mass destruction, and who keep those weapons aimed at the United States--and with whom the United States engages in commercial and political transactions.
Saddam should be removed, or his power to harm his own people and their neighbors minimized, but not through the exercise in hypocrisy that George Bush's war would represent.
George Bush's war seeks to establish three premises:
1) The right of the United States to arrogate control of resources anywhere in the world by use of force. In this case, it is oil.2) The right of the United States to install client regimes favorable to US interests, by force or connivance.
3) George Bush's questionable legitimacy as president, by creating a crisis which will incline the people to unite behind him without question.
George Bush, as the world knows, actually received fewer votes than Al Gore, but gained the presidency through an accounting manipulation of the outdated Electoral College system. He is trying to create the need for war with Iraq by manipulating the United Nations and domestic opinion. The premises he seeks to legitimize (those which I have outlined above), if accepted by other nations of the world, would lead to chaos; if tolerated in the United States, to tyranny.
I propose that the United Nations, in concert with the world court, accuse Saddam Hussein of crimes against humanity and force him to defend himself before his own people and all the peoples of the globe--that he be impeached, in fact, and if convicted, peacefully but firmly removed from power and a fair and free election held in Iraq. He has obviously contravened the principles of the United Nations innumerable times, especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Iraqi peoples (and they are many) can then themselves decide the policies of their nation.
Iraq, however, is in no way an "imminent threat" to the security of the United States--only to the security of George Bush. The world must not support the illegitimate aspirations of an unelected president bent on arrogating sovereignty over another country for the sake of power, revenge, and economic gain, be it Saddam Hussein or George Bush. (I need not remind you that it is Bush who is advocating the use of nuclear weapons in Iraq.) To do so would belie the charter that underwrites our existence as a community of nations.
The United Nations must oppose George Bush's efforts to contrive a war in Iraq, and must do so loudly and clearly.
It--we--must then prosecute Saddam, as is also just.
We cannot bring about a peaceful and prosperous world by tolerating the arrogance, the selfishness, and the cruelty of these two men.
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