by James Glaser
September 17, 2002

It looks like some how, some way George Bush is going to get his war with Iraq and the revenge that George has lusted after will be his. For a while there it looked like some members of Congress would have the integrity to force those wanting war, to produce concrete evidence supporting their position. Now it looks like the desire to look patriotic in an election year will be more important than finding out where the truth is.

In George W. Bush's mass murder speech before the United Nations, he kept on referring to things that happened in Iraq over the past twelve years. Building his case for war with a series of accusations about wrong doings that Saddam has done, that now is a cause for war.

Fair is fair and here is something that happened with the United States and Iraq in 1996 and continues to this very day. On the news program 60 Minutes, May 12th 1996 Lesley Stahl was asking Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright about the US sanctions against Iraq and the effect of those sanctions. Stahl, "We have heard that a half million children have died, I mean, that's more children than died at Hiroshima, and you know, is the price worth it?" Madeliene Albright, "The price--- we think the price is worth it."

Albright made no attempt to deny the figure given by Stalh. Very few if any major US news programs or news papers carried this story, but every Arab news source in the middle east did. Osama bin Laden uses this piece for recruitment work. The United Nations Agriculture Organization (FAO) report of 1996 states that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five have died as a result of US sanctions.

Today with those numbers climbing up to a million, the Bush administration is saying that it is all Saddam's fault. It really doesn't matter whose fault it is, the fact is that a million little kids are dead because the United States and Saddam Hussein have not sat down to a table and talked things out. Never have I heard my government come out publicly asking for face to face talks about our two countries problems.

Oh, we have continued to put pressure on Iraq with monthly bombings for the last twelve years, but never have we extended the olive branch. Think of Iraq, we killed about 150,000 of their people in our last desert war and with those sanctions we have killed at least another 1,000,000. That makes it hard for anyone to bow to our power.

Those in Washington keep telling us that when we attack, Iraq's army will welcome us as liberators. I don't think so. Those people are only told one side of everything and that is Saddam's. Those people know that it was America and George Bush and now his son, that have taken away their babies.

These people are not dumb and when George Bush's son starts telling them that America has no quarrel with the Iraqi people and he is just going to attack Saddam, they think of his dad and the bombings at the start of the first Gulf War. We hit an air raid shelter killing 1,500. We said it was a mistake. We bombed every dam, water treatment plant, and every sewage treatment plant and this was after Bush the first said we had no quarrel with the Iraqi people. We bombed TV stations, electrical generating plants, and radio stations, but we were only after Saddam.

Now this George is telling both the Iraqi people and the citizens of the United States that he is only going after Saddam. Constantly American military officers are on TV and radio programs telling us how much care and time we take in "targeting" bombing raids so innocent people are not hurt. This is war and all that goes out the window. It sounds good, but simply is not true.

Think about America bombing the Red Cross compound in Afghanistan and then going back two weeks later and bombing it again. Think about America Bombing the Canadians in Afghanistan, Killing four and wounding about a dozen. Heck if we have "Friendly Fire" deaths of our own troops in every war, just think how many mistakes are made with civilians. We are taking the utmost care not to kill our own people, but it happens and if you ask combat veterans you will find it happens quite a lot. Civilian deaths are not even reported.

Neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney have ever had to live through the actual chaos of war. That is the reason that they can constantly push for an attack on twenty some million people and think only those we deem guilty will get hurt. Neither man has any idea of what they are talking about and those who do and have expressed their doubts about this war, are ignored.

Every time America kills a child, we make many potential terrorists or many people that will help finance terrorism. America has been talking about this second war with Iraq for over a decade, George Bush is obsessed with getting Saddam. In all of this time, I have never heard one person worry about the children of Iraq. It looks like that task is being left up to the American people and I can only hope we can cry out loud enough to stop our killing of those children.