US war criminals?When Bombs Fall, U.S. Will Join Ranks of
War Criminals
March 11, 2003
Robert Scheer:
E-mail story
latimes.com.
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The maiming or killing of a single Iraqi civilian in an
attack by the United States would constitute a war
crime, as well as a profound violation of the Christian
notion of just war. That is because the recent report of
the U.N. inspectors has made indelibly clear that
disarmament is working and that Iraq at this time poses
no direct threat to the well-being of the American
people.
Of course, we are not talking about one or two
casualties. In seriously considering such war strategies
as bringing a city- destroying firestorm down upon a
population half made up of children, the U.S. is planning
to disarm a nation of its weapons of mass destruction by
using weapons that cause mass destruction.
Brutal, preemptive and unilateral war under such
circumstances is -- by the standards of any great
civilization or religion -- morally indefensible and also
seriously damages the reputation of free societies, the
principles of which we are trying to market to the rest of
the world.
To distract us from this essential truth, the president has
shamefully frightened the American people, first with his
baseless attempt to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and
then with unproven claims that Iraq's government and
weapons pose an immediate danger to Americans.
The real story is that U.N. inspectors are reporting
substantial progress in terms of Iraqi cooperation and
the destruction of weapons in Iraq.
George Bush and the 200,000-plus troops he has sent to
the Persian Gulf could take some credit for this, but he
continues to isolate the U.S. as other leading nations
request that the U.N. inspectors be given four more
months to complete their work.
Why the unseemly rush to war when the chief U.N. weapons inspector stated:
"One can hardly avoid the impression that, after a period of somewhat reluctant
cooperation, there has been an acceleration of initiatives from the Iraqi side since
the end of January."
Hans Blix went on to cite increased air surveillance using U.S., French, German
and Russian planes, the unfettered ability "to perform professional no-notice
inspections all over Iraq," rising cooperation on private interviews with scientists,
inspections of "mobile units," destruction of 40% of the Al-Samoud 2 missile cache
and excavation and analysis of a major weapons disposal site.
Most important, Blix noted that for the U.N. to finish its survey of sites, documents
and relevant people, it "will not take years, nor weeks, but months." In the
meantime, he emphasized, "we are not watching the breaking of toothpicks. Lethal
weapons are being destroyed."
And as for the most lethal of weapons -- the one that could end all life on this
planet -- the news from Iraq is even more promising.
"After three months of intrusive inspections, we have, to date, found no evidence
or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq," the
chief atomic weapons inspector told the U.N. Security Council on Friday.
After 218 inspections of 141 sites over three months by the International Atomic
Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei charged that the U.S. had used faked and
erroneous evidence to support the claims that Iraq was importing enriched uranium
and other material for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
So why, considering all this good news, is the White House afraid to allow the
inspections to continue?
Is Bush worried that the weapons may not exist and that his real goal, stated
blatantly in his last press conference, of taking over Iraq might be undermined?
How else to explain the president's indifference to the fact that the evidence of
weapons locations supplied by his own intelligence agencies has not checked out
on the ground?
Terrifyingly, we are hours away from doing irreparable harm to our democratic
heritage by launching a risky, arrogant crusade that most of the world opposes, all
at the behest of a small coterie of neoconservative ideologues plotting to remake
the world in their image and who unfortunately have the ear of our accidental
president.
All this in the name of the victims of 9/11, an attack carried out by Muslim fanatics
originally embraced and trained by the U.S. during the Cold War and whose
proven ties have been with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.
If we pursue this unjust war in the coming weeks, we can surely add the
desecration of the victims' memory to the list of outrages we will perpetrate. |
