War a battle for liberation

To the Editors:

To quote Union Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, “War is hell.” It is an atrocity. I don’t think for a second that President Bush, his administration or any of the “pro-war” crowd (myself included) really wants to see American soldiers fight in a war.
Nevertheless, there are times in which war is necessary in order to settle disputes that cannot be diplomatically resolved. This is one of those times.
When the first Gulf War ended in 1991, Saddam Hussein agreed that he would fully disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Since then, seventeen separate United Nations resolutions have been issued demanding that Saddam carry out his promise.
Three of these, resolutions 678, 687 and 1441, have authorized the use of force to disarm Iraq in the event that Saddam did not comply. It has been twelve years since Saddam agreed to disarm, and he has not. In this fashion, Saddam Hussein has shown that he does not respond to diplomacy. In this case, the only alternative is to disarm him by force, as authorized in the three resolutions above.

But this war is about more than simply disarming a dangerous man. We are also liberating 24 million people who have lived for over twenty years under a vicious dictator.

Since coming to power in Iraq in 1979, Saddam has “systematically executed, tortured, imprisoned, raped, terrorized, and repressed” those and the families of those who dare to speak out against his regime, as quoted in a document released from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Some call this liberation “forcing” our way of life on another nation. They say that it is unjust, and that by doing so, the United States is engaging in an imperialistic course of action. The first half of that statement is, in most cases, true. In general, it is unjust to impose one’s way of life upon another.

But this case is different: our way of life is freedom, and everyone in the world, no matter in which country they live or under whose leadership they live, deserves to be free. Freedom is not imposed on anybody by anybody because freedom is a right granted to all humans by nature. We are spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world. The spread of democracy is not imperialism.

We need to thank God that we are Americans, and instead of feeling guilty about it, we need to work to spread the freedom with which we have been blessed (and which all humans deserve) everywhere we can.

—Jonathan Wessler
Conservatory first-year