Step up your opposition to the Chicken Hawks’ war on Iraq

The Iraq attack is on. The shadow U.S. president, Head Chicken Hawk Cheney, sounded the call this week in a forceful speech. And I think Head Chicken Hawk Cheney is so wrong that it’s hard to focus on anything else, even a looming deadline for a larger project.

The Chicken Hawks are on the verge of starting World War III, or at least a much larger war in the Middle East that will eventually affect all of us. I know a lot of people want to stop them. I have already increased my support of peace organizations and made plans to participate in some public demonstrations in the Dallas area against the Chicken Hawks’ offensive, blood-for-oil war. I have been writing letters, making calls, battling against Chicken Hawks in chat rooms and message boards, even invoking Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and call to love our enemies, to what seems like little avail. But I persist, as do many others, against the odds. Who knows, I might even march across the entire damned country again, as I did in 1984 in protest of Reagan-Bush’s Cold War policies.

Anyways, Head Chicken Hawk Cheney made it sound like Saddam Hussein is a menace to the world worse than Hitler was in the 1930s. A message to Chicken Hawks Cheney-Bush: Hussein might be bad in numerous ways, but Iraq is no Nazi Germany. And the U.S. today is more like Nazi Germany was than Iraq is.

Iraq is still severely weakened by the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, when our bombs destroyed many Iraqi civilian facilities like homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals and more than 100,000 Iraqis died, along with 148 Americans. And it’s really hurt by the economic sanctions imposed by the UN in 1990, with underlying support from the U.S. More than one million additional Iraqis - many of them children under the age of five - have died of sanctions-related causes like amoebic dysentery and starvation. In fact, Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. Attorney General, reported to the UN Security Council in 1997 that the number of Iraqi children under age five who died increased from about 7,000 in 1989 to 57,000 in 1996. That number continued to rise to 78,000 dead in 1998, according to the Iraq Resource Information Site.

Iraq has some 2,000 tanks and several hundred aircraft and spends a piddling $1.4 billion annually on defense, less than Vietnam, Columbia, and Kuwait. How can you compare tiny Iraq to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, which probably had the world’s most powerful military machine at the time and was a real threat to world peace? How is devastated Iraq supposed to overtake us, especially when UN inspectors like Scott Ritter say they have no weapons of mass destruction? If Saddam can get a nuclear bomb, so can any two-bit dictator, and then what do we do? Are we going to go after all the two-bit dictators? How will we find them all when we can’t even locate bin Laden?

Then look at the U.S.: We are arguably the most powerful, sophisticated military machine in known history. We spend about $396 billion a year on the military – and that number is expected to increase substantially in the coming years [at the height of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, we spent about $300 billion]. The closest country in military spending is Russia at $60 billion annually, according to the Center for Defense Information. Another country in that "axis of evil" the Chicken Hawks wants us to fear so much, North Korea, spends even less at $1.3 billion. Iran, the third "evil" country, is up there at $9.1 billion but still only ranks 13th in the world in military spending [see http://www.cdi.org/issues/wme/spendersFY03.html for a list of what other countries spend].