From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Sep 28 2002 - 08:10:41 MDT
On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Samantha Atkins wrote:
Sorry Samantha, but I cannot let these claims go unchallenged.
> We have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq.
Huh? By "we", I presume you mean the U.S. The U.S. (and its allies)
caused the deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
soldiers only *after* they invaded Kuwait. Any deaths due to sanctions
are the responsibility of the United Nations (not the U.S.). Furthermore,
you fail to take into account how many people Sadaam might have had killed
in northern and southern Iraq if he were entirely free of sanctions.
> Exactly what threat is one small nation even with an evil ruler
> compared to the one remaining superpower bent on aggression at
> its sole discretion?
But *where* is "its sole discretion"? If the U.S. were acting on
"its sole discretion" we would have nuked Baghdad by now and we
wouldn't be having these complicated discussions that are on the
front pages of papers every day. It is precisely because that
"one small nation" has a huge wealth of oil resources on which it
can draw to develop WMD and can potentially give those weapons to
individuals who have no reluctance to use them (even if they must
die in the process -- i.e. they behave irrationally) that one must
be concerned with the situation and seek to resolve it.
> Are you kidding about no checks and balances outside Iraq? Were you
> asleep during the last decade of sanctions and bombings of the country?
I'm not asleep. The sanctions were approved by the U.N. Care to make
an argument that the U.N. is a puppet of the U.S. government? The
bombings as I understand it are primarily of SAM sites that target
the planes enforcing the no-fly zones. If you review your history
you may find a major cause of WWII was due to the fact that France and
Britain ignored the fact that Germany was re-arming itself when it was
supposed to be "disarmed".
WWII cost some 40 million lives -- care to go through that again?
> If Iraq did anything major outside its borders Saddam is quite aware
> there would be tremendous hell to pay. But if we attack now, with no
> good reason I might add , then he has far less of a deterrent against
> more agressive action.
Perhaps true. But you fail to address the probability that the Iraqi
people would be *far* better off with Sadaam removed and the citizens
living in a society with no sanctions and potentially a "real"
democracy.
Sanctions are the price that the Iraqi people are paying for not
having removed Sadaam as their "leader".
Robert
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