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Wu's defense misplaced

Deputy Secretary-General to the President Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) tells us that the government fully supports the US and its entry into Iraq ("How to clean up the mess in Iraq," April 3, page 8).

He argues, "To make reconstruction meaningful, we must understand the complex conditions facing Iraq both inside and out ... Over a million people died in the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War. In the final stage of that war, Saddam's attention was diverted by Kurds within Iraq. In order to suppress them, he used mustard gas to attack two Kurdish towns, killing over 100,000 people.

But on the The New York Times' op-ed page of Jan. 31, we read about the most famous gassing of the Kurds, in which an estimated 5,000 people died.

The article reads, "But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story."

The author, Stephen Pelletierre, says that there are no other Iraqi gassings on the order of Halabja that he knows about.

He continues, "I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair."

Wu writes, "Media images of this atrocity, including one of a father who was holding a child when the gas suffocated them both, are still vividly etched in many people's minds."

Sorry, but that image has been somewhat crowded out by the more recent images of identical tragedies, carried out today by the mailed fist of the world's most powerful government against what has been essentially rendered into a Vietnam-like will to resist. Those images are not only all over the Internet, but even on the front pages of Taiwan's newspapers, for all to see.

Wu concludes, "The people of Taiwan should show their benevolence, have a broad international vision, and make our voices heard for real world peace. We should make the international community understand that Taiwan's support of the US' anti-terrorism stance is for the sake of world peace."

Sorry, again. Peace, as we all should have learned by now, does not come through war. World War I was "the war to end all wars," right? World War II saw the formation of the UN (at FDR's insistence mind you, joining the UN in January 1942 was tantamount to an Allied country's signing on to the Atlantic Charter, which again promised the end of warfare as a means of conflict resolution), and we all know the rest -- many wars were to follow.

This war once again proves the adage that truth is the first casualty -- this time with Wu on the front lines, vainly trying to hold the fort, vainly fending off the voices calling for human rights, simple respect for international law and the end of the killing of the innocents in the name of whatever cause.

Lynn Miles
Lungtan, Taoyuan
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