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EDITORIAL FOR NOVEMBER ISSUE Dr. Art Goldschmidt What drives President Bush to go to war with Iraq? Saddam Hussein may be a thug and a fraud, but he has opened his country without preconditions to United Nations weapons inspectors. Iraq claims that it has no weapons of mass destruction. By contrast, North Korea claims to have nuclear weapons, which it could readily use against South Korea or Japan. Iraq did invade Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990, but it cannot and will not attack any of its neighbors now. Although many Arab governments might accept a regime change in Iraq, one that has been engineered by the United States, Israel’s main backer, is not welcome. Some Arab heads of state, whose legitimacy is open to question, will wonder if their number will come up next. An American invasion of Iraq will poison U.S.-Arab relations, which are already bad, notably at the popular level. Arab boycotts of American soft drinks, fast-food restaurants, and cigarettes have cut deeply into long-established markets. Will a military invasion of Iraq be quick, cheap, and effective? No one can predict the outcome of a war or a battle. There are too many imponderables. Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, which would face a bleak future without him, will bitterly resist an invasion, making it more likely to be prolonged, costly, and ineffective. But will Saddam choose to flee into exile and abandon his protectors? The United Nations Charter, which the United States signed in 1945, forbids unilateral attacks by its members, unless the Security Council has determined that a country has threatened world peace. The U.S. government at present has little use for the U.N. Bush has won the support of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and his advisers. They believe that an attack on Iraq will help in the war on terrorism. We think not. We believe it will inspire desperate men and women to commit new acts of terrorism against America and its allies. If Iraq has any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, it will unsheathe them, probably against Israel, in response to an American attack. Clearly, the Bush administration’s foreign policies are not aimed at building peace in the Middle East. Vengeance for a 1993 terrorist attack on George Bush the father is a cause Arabs might understand, but that motive rarely comes up in W’s speeches. The real motive is a three-letter word that begins with O and ends with L. And Iraq has plenty of that. Roger Stroope Austin College "Ideas are more powerful than weapons." "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience…Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring" -- Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, 1950 _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk