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Departments Election Issues A Letter to Iraqi civilians on the eve of war Between the obvious repression of free speech in your country and the U.S. media's unwillingness to dig for popular Iraqi sentiment, we in America know little about how you feel concerning a U.S. invasion-we can only guess that you are terrified now and busy planning for the survival of your family. We know that you have been oppressed and brutalized by Saddam Hussein and his tyrants, and that your hatred for him has never been in question, but whether you want Americans to invade your country, topple the government, occupy the nation and manufacture a new regime for you based largely on what U.S. officials consider appropriate, remains to be seen. Although the Bush administration says its coming war will be directed against Saddam Hussein and his military supporters only, you know as well as I, that your friends and neighbors will suffer just as much, if not more, than members of the Republican Guard or Baath Party loyalists-bombs are not smart and never will be; they only kill and destroy. People of course are the nation, and any war on a nation will inevitably result in the killing, maiming, starving and brutalizing of its people no matter how moral or "democratic' the invading soldiers consider their mission. From your experience in the Gulf War, you know that war unleashes rockets and bombs on apartment buildings, radio stations and hospitals just often as its does on command-and-control structures and military bases-to admit anything else would be to insult you and the memory of those innocent civilians who died in 1991. I was sickened to learn that my government plans to start this new war by sending thousands of missiles into Baghdad over a 48 hour period as a way of "shocking and awing" you with the U.S.'s military might. Will you be awed as missiles smash through the roof? Will you be impressed as your water supply is destroyed and contaminated? Will you be shocked as your daughter is decapitated by shrapnel? If you are not dead yourself, my guess is that you will simply be ravaged by grief and hatred; hatred toward Saddam, hatred toward America, hatred toward the state of the world for allowing such a slaughter-and I wouldn't blame you one bit for such feelings. I know because I am filled with hatred as well; hatred toward my own government which continues to treat civilian casualties (like in Afghanistan) as minor technological glitches, instead of the massacres they are. There is also a component of self hatred in all of this, as I try to understand my own relative silence and cowardice. Although I have marched against the war and written countless letters to my representatives, I have done so at my leisure and in a calculated manner so as to not threaten my economic or material existence. I have debated the militarists in their own idiom of corporate-military speak, and by doing so have allowed Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld to shape the rules and language of the debate, minimizing my own democracy and deluding myself that I was some brave dissenter or alternative voice in the national debate. I was neither. I was just as necessary to the war plans as the as hawks. I was part of the "rational" opposition that has talked about sanctions and multilateralism and NATO and such other important ideas when I should have been saying, "No to war. No to this one, no to all of them. Period." The violence that will be unleashed in your country does not deserve a measured debate. It deserves only abolition. The random death of your daughters or husbands is not a TV event or a opinion poll-but simply pointless suffering that no politician can ever romanticize. When you see American troops fighting in the streets of Baghdad and Basra, they will have an American flag on their sleeves, but please forgive me if I can't explain its connection to any thing anymore. Know however, that in some small way it does represent me, not as a war proponent certainly, but as an American who failed to make democracy work for him-as someone who let the angry, fearful individuals of this country take control. Although my wife and I aren't Christians or Muslims of Jews, we will pray for us all, and we will speak out against what is happening. We are undoubtedly weak, but There are still many Americans who see themselves in all others no matter how different their appearance may be. I remind myself that I am you. I am the mother crouched down in a bomb shelter, and the U.S. Marine shooting in the streets and also the leaders driving us toward so much violence and hatred, yet I am also this man writing you as letter as afternoon rain pelts against my office window. Stay safe. Sincerely, Robert Fay |
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