War Is Peace
Editor Matthew Rothschild
And the American public is not clamoring for war.
Actually, a majority of Americans don't want the war unless the United States gets U.N. approval.
And a growing segment of the population is against the war, no matter what.
I've been speaking on one campus after another lately, and the resistance to this war is building. Bush is sorely mistaken if he believes the citizenry will fall in line for this one.
What was laughable was Bush's assertion that "the United States takes the resolutions of the Security Council seriously."
As scholar Stephen Zunes has noted, Israel has violated 32 such resolutions, Turkey 24, Morocco 17, and Iraq 12. Somehow, we don't hear Bush talking about regime change in Israel, Turkey, and Morocco.
And what was grossly offensive was Bush's assertions that this war would be "for the sake of peace" or in "the cause of peace" or "defending the peace."
How Orwellian is that?
In this war for peace, Bush warned that the United States would use "whatever means" to confront Iraq.
This is a prospect that must concern all of us who worry about innocent people being killed in Iraq,
Worrisome, too was Donald Rumsfeld's recently published assertion that we should not limit the military's options by considerations of "collateral damage." (Rumsfeld said that "the National Command Authorities must not dumb down what is needed by promising not to do things" such as "not to permit collateral damage"). If saving civilians is dumbing down, I'm all for it.
Bush also implicitly acknowledged that war may prompt Saddam to do what Bush is so concerned about in the first place: use weapons of mass destruction against the United States. "We will confront an enemy capable of irrational miscalculations, capable of terrible deeds."
Now if I were the parent of a U.S. soldier, I'd be furious at Bush today for jeopardizing my child's life. If Saddam ends up using these weapons on invading U.S. troops, Bush will have a lot of explaining to do.
-- Matthew Rothschild
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------