Web Letters: Conscience and the War

President Bush warned if the US troops were withdrawn from Iraq prematurely, the whole region would slip into chaos.

According to Bush’s previous statements the violence is entering Iraq from Syria and Iran, Turkey is fully protected NATO member while Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are stable democratic regimes and trusted American allies which would eagerly host the American troops withdrawing from Iraq.

It means the American withdrawal would only harm Syria and Iran.

Does it mean we keep our troops in Iraq to protect our enemies from chaos?

Kenan Porobic

Charlotte, NC

Deposing a strongman inspires conflicting and complementary hopes locally, regionally and worldwide. Agendas compete in strengths that vary in the mix of violence, electoral politics and economics, in a slippery rock-scissors-paper interplay.

Martial law imposed by an overwhelming foreign military and police force coupled with elections organized and overseen in the interest of universal suffrage to produce an internationally acceptable clean vote for a constitutional convention can produce a post-fascist Germany and Japan, the variety of post-colonial African states of the 1960s, or a post-Soviet Russia.

Add to that beginning a period of occupation to enforce law and order and deliver economic aid and the choice of whose law, whose economic decisions and for how long produces colonialism like the Raj, Cuba as USSR client-state, or postwar Viet Nam, among other outcomes. Whether the occupier is a single nation, a coalition from the region or outside it, or a UN force, the policy choices for the UN Security Council, NATO or an ad hoc coalition of nations with vital interests of their own in the area, still involve deciding when any intervention is justified and when nation-building becomes imposed cultural change, to the deciders and to the rest of the world.

One possibility is for the UN to declare that one-person, one-vote electoral majority rule with conscience and civil rights for minorities, plus a social safety net. This is the ideal basis for a state but the Security Council will only intervene in any area to prevent genocide and widespread torture, or to relieve epidemic famine and plague.

Such a vote in the UN General Assembly would involve at the least the principle of the supremacy of religious or secular and ideological or pragmatic value, and would establish a standard impossible to apply except by judicial interpretation which would be seen as super-legislative fiat by the losers, whether made by a court or the Security Council.

A treaty proposing any similar or opposing standard for enforcement by regional or coalition forces of its signatory nations would only gather the like-minded, their clients and allies, all of whose interests and positions shift with events. As with supply and demand, it’s the various states’ national interests, including the desire for different kinds of international respect, that intersect given areas’ conflicting interests to produce points of intervention and abstention, where human beings suffer and die, often leaving us a visual record of it, as individual as the 9/11 cell-phone calls.

And yet, the US policy choice is between meliorative-pejorative politics-as-usual and an isolationism or world hegemony based on contemporary Hiroshima-effective demonstrations of authority.

Jerome Davis Muller

San Francisco, CA

Evermore lost are US purveyors and apologists of the wars, having hellbound hypocritically hocked their humanity:

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0311-21.htm

2200 tons of "depleted" uranium (DU) = 25 million dead Iraqis. Their present population -26 million. Genocide.

Victor Bruce Anderson

Eagle Lake, FL

State of the State: The marriage of government and corporate power in the USA is devolving rapidly into enclaves each distinct and separate through the lawlessness and unconstitutional behavior of corporations and government.

Along with this the entire angry and unhappy middle class is restive. The working class itinerants and piece workers find work with the immigrants who are demonized and abused. It is too late now.

“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

Matt Drayton

San Francisco, California

Twelve years of merciless sanctions killed more than one million people in Iraq. Four years of occupation, false promises of democracy and reconstruction have resulted in more deaths and devastation, and plunged the country into a civil war.

The October 2006 issue of the medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that 655,000 people had died in Iraq following the invasion. Oil production, electricity production, and the accessibility of drinkable water are all at lower levels presently as compared to four years ago, under sanctions!

The American Empire focuses on conquest and the acquisition of raw materials like oil. Politicians, with millions in their bank accounts, forget how ordinary people survive. While they bicker over non-binding resolutions, innocent people die, and the American infrastructure crumbles as the Iraqi infrastructure crumbles.

In Iraq and the US, schools and hospitals continue to decay, limiting their care of the people. A nation without a solid educational system is a nation with a limited future. A nation without an efficient medical system is a cancerous nation.

The American people are becoming as powerless as the Iraqi people. We must leave Iraq and allow its citizens the right of self-determination, but the U.S. struggles under a rogue executive. The American government neglects the desires of its own citizens and the citizens of Iraq.

Evacuate by 2008.

Jerie Leep

Tenkiller, Oklahoma

This was supposed to be a cakewalk, not a generational world war.

Harold Forsko

Irvine, CA

I think that some people do not understand the way the world works.

If you spent any time around Arabic people, you would know that they only respect power. I have many Arab friends, and not one of them feels that we should leave Iraq!

Matter of fact, they feel that if we don't take down Iran, they will end up nuking somebody who pisses them off...!!! Ever think of that?

Tim Williams

Redlands, CA

Dr. Cohen implies that the Liberation of Iraq from a lunatic despot bent on acquiring WMD inspired "legions of anti-American terrorists where there were few." What legions? American and Iraqi troops are fighting a small cadre of terrorists and dealing with the pent up ethnic strife Liberation was sure to bring. This strife is not unlike the turmoil the Balkans endured following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Cohen, by mandating America's capitulation to terrorism, denies freedom to legions of innocents.

Unfortunately it is impossible to quantify the hordes of would be terrorists dissuaded by American might and resolve and the deterrence gained by Sadaam’s demise.

One cannot wish evil away; one must fight it. This is a generational World War. There will be vicissitudes. Dr. Cohen must take a deep breath, a long view to preserve his cherished freedoms

William Reis

West Bloomfield, Michigan