Two months ago, I made my liberal Democrat San Francisco
unionist father very happy by stating firmly,
”
I don’t support undeclared wars.
”
Two months ago, I made my liberal Democrat San Francisco unionist father very happy by stating firmly, “I don’t support undeclared wars.”
One month ago, I estranged myself from my peace activist friend Danielle, who was trying to recruit me for a peace march, by saying, “I don’t support undeclared wars, but I’m not going on any peace marches. Where were all these so-called peace activists when Clinton was waging war in the Balkans? It’s pure partisanship.”
And a week ago, I whimpered to my peace activist friend Carol, who is feeling very lonely because most of her friends are wearing red, white, and blue, “I can’t support undeclared wars – but I think Congress should declare war on Iraq.”
Horror, expediency, reality: many waves are washing away the sands of my political purism. Nor am I alone. Many people, of diverse political philosophies, are finding themselves, as ex-human shield Kenneth Joseph phrased it, “shocked into reality.”
Kenneth Joseph is an American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East. UPI reports that Mr. Joseph, who traveled to Japan with a team of Japanese human shields, spoke to Iraqis who told him “they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”
Another human shield who changed his mind was Daniel Pepper. He wrote in the Telegraph of his epiphany, which resulted from conversations with Baghdad taxi drivers.
“I said, as we shields always did, ‘Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good.’ He looked at me with an expression of incredulity. As he realized I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam’s regime. Until then I had only heard the president spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq’s oil money went into Saddam’s pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family.”
When Pepper asked another taxi driver about the dangers of American bombing, the driver replied, “Don’t you listen to Powell on Voice of America radio? Of course the Americans don’t want to bomb civilians. They want to bomb the government and Saddam’s palaces. We want America to bomb Saddam … All Iraqi people want this war.”
Such conversations were enough for Pepper and Joseph, whose primary motivations were, after, a deep concern for the Iraqi people. They didn’t at all address my concern. I’m sorry that Hussein is a monster who kills his own people and gassed the Kurds, but why should America get involved?
President Bush insists that U.S. intelligence knows that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, and that he has ties to terrorist organizations.
On March 28, British military interrogators were told by captured Iraqi soldiers that Al Qaeda terrorists were fighting with Saddam’s forces near Basra in southern Iraq, in the town of Az Zubayr, where they were coordinating grenade and gun attacks on coalition positions.
And on March 31, in northern Iraq, a coalition of Kurdish peshmerga and U.S. special forces took a group of 40 villages long held by the terrorist group Ansar-al-Islaam. They found hundreds of documents, including passports, addresses and phone numbers, of Islaamist militants living in the U.S. and Europe, including computer disks showing meetings between Ansar and Al Qaeda terrorists.
On September 11th, we were all shocked into reality. The newscasters babbled in their shock. We all flew flags. Slowly we forgot. But terrorists still exist, even if we choose not to remember.
On September 12th, I said that Congress needs to declare war on countries that harbor, train, and supply terrorists. Right now, Congress needs to put aside its petty partisan bickering and do its Constitutional duty: declare war on Iraq. Before it’s over.
