Posted Oct 30, 2002 by combattant pour liberte
I have conflicting emotions about the war with Iraq. On the one hand the result may be the liberation of the Iraqi people - who were oppressed in part by the West when it supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. However, the Iraqis' liberation is obviously not the USA's main objective (are they interested in the liberation of the Palestinians or the Chechens) - and the US Govt. may, in there infine wisdom, install a tyrannical pro-US puppet regime to replace Saddam's tyrannical anti-US Baath regime after the proposed US occupation is over.
I do think it was wrong what the Americans did in the Gulf War: when Iraq invaded oil-rich undemocratic Kuwait - which George Bush Sr had money in - the US persuaded the world to rush to Kuwait's aid and incited an anti-Baath regime revolution among the Shiites in S Iraq. The Shiites believed the US would help them. The US didn't and the Shiites were slaughtered (this is illustrated well in the movie "Three Kings").
Then, of course, there are the problems of the war itself. NATO is known for its indiscrimate high-altitude bombings - lest some of their soldiers get killed (regardless of civillian casulties (although this melodramatic outrage when a single soldier is killed in combat - which is of course bad but comes with the job - has eased up a bit since the intervention in the Afghan Civil War). The West is also well known for justifying the unjustifiable: The murder of thousands in the nuking of Japan, the murder of 16 in the bombing of a Sebian TV station - which Amnesty International considers a war crime (what if the BBC or CNN were bombed for their "propaganda" - would that be right? Or was it right for Al-Qaeda to kill reporter Daniel Pearl?), and the manslaughter of dozens when a Chinese Embassy in Serbia and a Red Cross building in Afghanistan were bombed through gross negligence (what sort of excuse is the most powerful military alliance having an "out of date map").
I'm really confussed.
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