Letter

A safer world?

Is the world going to be a better place if the US goes to war with Iraq some time in the foreseeable future? Is war with Iraq really in the US' national interest? Will Americans be safer?

Granted, war seems inevitable. But it only seems so in the shadows cast by the Bush administration's vision. This administration has never even publicly pretended that UN weapons inspectors would be able to prove that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. At the end of the summer, US Vice President Dick Cheney gave a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in which he opined that sending inspectors to Iraq wouldn't give us any assurances at all that Baghdad has complied.

While the Bush administration's concerns touch on wea-pons of mass destruction, it's main goal is unseating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, rendering Iraq no longer a threat.

No one is saying that Hussein is a good guy. But, is it in the national interest for the US to wage a ground war and then maintain an occupational force for some indefinite period? Hussein is now 65 years old. Even without a war, he'll be out of power in the next 10 or 15 years.

Is the threat that Hussein poses to the US sufficient to go to war? Even in its own region, Iraq is not a powerhouse. Most countries in the region spend much more on their militaries.

Whatever happened to our war on terrorism? How will ground troops in Iraq stop al-Qaeda? Certainly they'll have a good chance of preventing Hussein from arming al-Qaeda. But surely there are al-Qaeda cells regrouping in other countries. How will the world be safer because the US wages war on and occupies one of the least-armed, least-equipped countries in the Middle East?

War in Iraq seems like the slowest, most expensive way -- in terms of dollars as well as human lives -- to fight terrorism. War in Iraq, like all war, will have a host of unforeseeable outcomes but an end to terrorism would not be one of them.

If we really want to stop terrorism why has the US just monitored, and asked the Spanish military to search, a freighter carrying Scud missiles and tanks of nitric acid from North Korea, bound for Yemen, and then release the cargo? The freighter was unidentified, flew no flag and offered a false ship's manifest. Obviously those selling and importing the weapons were trying to keep the transaction secret.

Yemen has been identified as a country in which al-Qaeda is known to be regrouping. Many suspect that if he's alive, Osama bin Laden is likely hiding in Yemen.

North Korea is one of the anchors of the "axis of evil." It has nuclear weapons and has just announced that it is to restart its nuclear program, in defiance of international law. In August, the US growled at North Korea for selling Scud components to Yemen. In November, North Korea delivered weapons to Pakistan.

If this is truly a war on terrorism, why did the US follow international law prohibiting the seizure of the weapons cache bound for a country that we all know harbors al-Qaeda cells? Why should the US honor international law in this instance? When the Bush administration says we're at war against terrorism, doesn't it follow that we have every right to confiscate weapons that could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and be used against us or our allies? Since the administration's rationale for committing US soldiers to an invasion force to bring Hussein down is based largely on his ability to harbor and/or arm terrorists, shouldn't we at least have confiscated those weapons?