The College Hill Independent

Back

He That is Unjust
An Open Letter to the Pro-War Crowd
. . . by Shaun Joseph

Students, Romans, chickenhawks:

I must commend the sophistry of Mr. Alex Schulman (College Hill Independent, 2/28/03), your ablest representative. His open letter to the antiwar movement was surely one of his most accomplished draggings of pen on paper. At the end, one is so hopelessly exasperated that one is almost convinced that Schulman’s desire to carpet-bomb Baghdad is the very milk of kindness. Almost.

You consider yourselves liberators of the Iraqi people. I wonder how many of you actually believe this, but your man Schulman seems honest, so I’ll suspend my doubts. Perhaps it salves the conscience to think, when you read in the New York Times that the Pentagon will send 3,000 cruise missiles into Iraq in the first two days of war, that it is all in the name of Freedom. Were it only a matter of your personal narcosis, I would not interfere, but these are questions of deadly consequence.

Iraq is an advanced industrial society reduced to extreme material backwardness by the combined effects of war and sanctions. Public infrastructure—roads, sewage, power—is destroyed. One and a half million people, including 500,000 children, have died as a direct result of economic sanctions. Eighty percent of the population now depends on government food rations that will be disrupted during a war. When the bombing begins, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will only be “liberated” from this last mortal coil.

“But wait,” you cry, “Iraq will be free of Saddam Hussein!” Certainly true, and political freedom is worth big sacrifices. However, political revolutions are not accomplished simply by shooting the tyrant; you must replace the tyrannical system.

But, can someone explain to me how a military dictatorship is significantly different from another military dictatorship, simply because the military has now become foreign? Especially when, as the Kurdish politician Sami Abdul-Rahman claims, “In every Iraqi ministry [the Americans] are going to remove one or two officials and replace them with American military officers.”

History
You “patriots” always complain when the antiwar movement recalls America’s sordid love affair with the dictator Hussein. You claim we use this history to score cheap rhetorical points and to hurt your feelings. Acknowledging history, though, is nothing of the sort. Motives are important, and historical background is essential to understanding motives for war. If the U.S. aided Saddam Hussein in his rise to power and in his acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, history is a relevant factor in decididing whether the U.S. is legitimately interested in the liberation of the Iraqi people.

And let me make this absolutely clear: has any US official now pushing for war on Iraq publicly apologized for arming Saddam Hussein? No. Has any U.S. official admitted it was a mistake? No. Has any U.S. official offered to pay reparations to the families of Iranian soldiers killed by illegal weapons provided by the U.S. and its allies? No. Has any U.S. official offered to pay reparations to the survivors of Halabja, gassed with American support? No. Has any U.S. official offered to pay reparations to the survivors of the post-Gulf War uprising, which was put down with U.S. knowledge and implicit consent? No.

The U.S. has done none of these things because, at each historical step, it was in the interest of the American ruling class to take the actions that it did. Each time it spelt disaster for ordinary people in Iraq, and it will do so again because, as history has revealed, imperialism is inherently anti-popular and anti-democratic. It is history which ultimately proves that the U.S. has never acted—and, perhaps never will act—in the interest of liberating the Iraqi people.

An alternative solution
Schulman writes, “To be ‘against’ something implies, axiomatically, being ‘for’ something else.” I think our illucid litterateur is trying to suggest that being against the war implies being pro-Hussein. This is silly. Being against something is equivalent to being for the negation of that something, and implies nothing else. If one believes that the war will make Iraq and the world a worse place, it is enough to oppose it.
As it happens, though, I am not just against the war on Iraq—I have an alternative to American colonization. We should demand an end to sanctions and U.S. intervention, and let the Iraqis take care of their tyrants in their own way.

Yes, I can already hear your howls of protest. But think of it this way: were it not for arms in the 1980s, a blind eye during the uprisings in 1991, and starvation up to today, wouldn’t Saddam Hussein be swinging from a lamp-post? I know how much you have worked yourselves up with hatred for Saddam, but you are very, very late in the game compared to the average Iraqi.

Popular uprising is as practical as real life. Mass protest took down Suharto. Hopefully we are watching a revolution in progress in Argentina. All this is not because of the U.S. government, but in spite of it. Think how much easier, less dangerous, and less bloody social change could be if only our leaders would stay the hell out of it!

It is not an easy road I propose. In my political tradition, however, I do not believe that democracy can be installed by tanks and bombs. If you do not believe in the power of a people to make a revolution, you cannot seriously believe in the power of a people to run their own affairs.

—Shaun Joseph B’03

Back to Indy Home