11/12/98
So now we prepare, with the apparent blessings of the 8 Arab nations from the original alliance, to go in and level Iraq once more. Maybe another 100,000 Iraqi soldiers will die, uncounted civilians, and perhaps this time, a lot of Americans as well. I wonder how it was last time that we could be so jubilant at what had transpired. Don't get me wrong, I was sucked into it just as many people were. But it didn't take long to consider the implications of what we had done. The cool videos of missiles piling into corrugated aluminum buildings and blowing them to smithereens never showed the people inside, thankfully unaware of the fate that was approaching them at 1000mph. The pretty shots of anti-aircraft flak guns over Baghdad never showed Iraqi families crouching together, covering their faces with their hands, hoping that they wouldn't be next. Can this be the right thing to do again?And yet, the threat is real. It's not just oil now. There's more to it. Consider Iraq. Persia. How many thousands of years of cultural development have led up to the Iraq of today? Such a long and proud tradition must surely have created a sense of worth and self-respect that a young culture such as ours can only guess at. One that goes far beyond the blind nationalism we cooked up during WW-II. And from that tradition, a driven, aggressive, charismatic leader arose to lead the nation. To lead them, perhaps according to *their* tradition, in a direction which is strikingly different from that of most modern nations. Right? Wrong? By whose definition? Ours? Can we realistically expect Saddam Hussein to yeild to the arguably arbitrary political forces of the western world? I doubt it very much. So there lies the dilemma. No doubt Saddam Hussein felt perfectly entitled to Kuwait, historically and morally. No doubt he feels that the west is horribly wrong in their attempts to suppress him. Given that, it can only be the case that our military actions and sanctions create for him an evil that strengthens his resolve immeasurably. If this is so, then we have, intentionally or inadvertently, created a situation where there may be no mutually bearable solution.
Hence the real threat. Saddam Hussein never did fit into the mold we cast for what we call "civilized". Now, we have given him cause to believe that we are not only foreign in our thinking, but that we, the U.S., and we, the west, are a true evil to be fought against, righteously, relentlessly. And we have every reason to believe that this man is on the brink of having long-range weapons of massive destructive power. What choice have we left ourselves?
We have gone past the point of no return. This situation will not be resolved until two bad things have happened. First, we need to destroy Saddam Hussein. We probably need to kill him. Second, we need to force a fundamental change in the nation (and more importantly the culture) he will leave behind. Like breeding the agressiveness out of an animal in order to domesticate it. It becomes useful to us, but it destroys the true beauty and uniqueness of the animal. This is what we must do to Iraq. It is immoral, inhumane, and inevitable. We shall bear responsibility not only for doing it, but for making it necessary in the first place. God forgive us.
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