College student responds to pro-war columnist

To the Editors:

This column will address some of the pro-war points that were made in Sam Feldman’s letter two weeks ago. I appreciate his respectfulness and eloquence, but disagree with his points. I tried submitting this as a letter last week, but it was edited out because of its length. I will have to address the pro-war “Myths about Iraq” column in that same issue some other time.
Feldman suggests that this war is “morally, the best avenue for our country to pursue.” This war has nothing to do with morals. If it were about morals, why haven’t we dealt with Saddam in the past two decades, especially in 1988, when he was much more of a threat? If it were about morals, why have we cluster bombed civilian villages in Iraq and Afghanistan to attack their leaders? The bombings in the Gulf War were supposed to degrade Saddam’s capacity, but it was conceded before the bombings even started that they would increase his capacity. What about our sanctions, that the U.N. has estimated have killed 500,000 Iraqi children, punished Iraqi civilians, and have actually helped Saddam? Why did we provide billions in aid to Saddam to kill Iranians in 1982? Why did we use 300-plus tons of depleted uranium as ammunition in Gulf War I, killing Iraqis and our own soldiers with radiation poisoning at near Hiroshima levels? And even if we were to kill Saddam, are we willing to face the 500,000 U.N. estimated Iraqi casualties, and American casualties as well? Saddam may have killed 200,000, but in our attempts to resolve this we’ve killed over 500,000. Is killing another 500,000 really the answer?
Of course this is a war for oil. Former Bush economic guru Lawrence Lindsey let it slip last Fall in a press conference that “the successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.” Iraq’s huge oil resources could satisfy U.S. needs for imported
oil at current levels for almost a century and otherwise benefit the economy by $40 billion. Ask me for my sources. Controlling Iraq would mean dominating most of the energy sources of the world, putting the U.S. in a very powerful position.
About Saddam being a threat — it’s tempting to link Saddam up with Osama Bin Laden, but Feldman himself dismantled that link. Saddam is a terrible person—but why is he suddenly a threat to us now? The C.I.A. admitted that Saddam is not likely to use his weapons unless he is attacked. We’re on an “orange alert” now. What does that even mean? We’ve been told by our government dozens of times since 9/11 that terrorist attacks were about to happen again. Couldn’t it be possible that we’re kept in fear to promote a corporate agenda, to sell an unjust war that would make the government even more powerful? We have to see past these tactics that are meant to isolate and control us.
For more evidence of a corporate agenda in this war, let me just mention the Project for the New American Century, (PNAC) a Washington-based think tank created in 1997, founded by Cheney and Rumsfeld and the like. PNAC’s job is to basically outline what is required of America to create the global empire they envision. Included in their vision is positioning permanently based forces in Southern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. That’s right, we need Iraq’s oil, and we need a permanent military base there. Our troops aren’t leaving once the war’s over.
Feldman writes, “…my point is clear: the so-called ‘blood for oil’ argument would only be valid if the U.S. were in the habit of committing war crimes and ignores who would actually benefit from the opening of Saddam’s oilfields.”
This country was founded on war crimes. What’s worse, they’re still happening today, under our noses. Don’t look to the media to tell you about them, that’s not their job. Who’s going to benefit from opening Saddam’s oilfields? We are, of course; my guess is with a puppet government like we’ve done before. Look at the U.S. 1989 invasion of Panama, which killed over 2,500 people in 24 hours. The U.S. had similar excuses as we do today for going to war—supposedly restoring democracy, getting rid of an evil dictator. The problem? The dictator was Noriega, a puppet employed by the CIA at over $100,000 a year when George Bush Senior was president. The war was started to replace him because he started disobeying orders and we needed control of the canal. This was a war crime. If you don’t know about this, also try researching other American war crimes, like Arbenz and the CIA and Guatemala in 1954, or Allende and Chile and the CIA in 1973, or our death squads in Honduras, or the genocides we’ve completely ignored, like in East Timor. Once you’ve learned the context of what evil things the U.S. is capable of, an unjust war today seems more probable.
Finally, Feldman mentions the Vienna Convention, signed by the U.S. in 1969 that forbids us from utilizing the resources of an occupied country to its advantage. So what? Since when has the U.S. ever followed every convention that it signed? The U.S. signed the Nuremberg Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, both of which are now also part of U.S. federal law under the Constitution, and both of which forbid pre-emptive war (actually “preventative war”), so this whole war is actually illegal. Haven’t we seen that if anything, this war is the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire that it does what it wants, no matter what laws it’s breaking?
As a side note, in that same Review issue, the Review columnists shouldn’t have condemned the anti-war movement for being less important than the AIDS fight. There are a lot of causes worth fighting for, and more often than not, the causes are linked. The same types of companies that are profiting from this war are also profiting from exploiting Africans by withholding cheap medicine. Our movements need cooperation, not competition.

—Jordan Balagot