Editor,
Last week, you printed an article by Keith Hudson titled "U.S. Must Take Action." In it Mr. Hudson accused Saddam Hussein of invading Iran for oil, killing innocent people and bullying other countries.
All of these accusations are true.
Hussein invaded Iran in the '80s. The United States supplied him with the necessary weapons (chemical, biological, and conventional) and gave him the green light. The Iranian government wasn't cooperating with the United States, so it was decided that Hussein would take over and create a puppet government for the United States. Ironic, isn't it? The United States is now threatening to go to war with Saddam because he has chemical weapons that the U.S. government gave him.
Why exactly did the United States need an Iranian government to cooperate with them? Oil. When Hussein used the United States supplied chemical weapons to kill his own Kurdish population, the States looked the other way. It was acceptable for him to commit genocide then, why is it different now? Oil. For more evidence about the United States' leniency on genocide, investigate "Operation Paperclip," where the United States imported more than 500 Nazi scientists, failed to charge them with any human rights violations and instead employed them for programs like NASA and in government agencies like the CIA.
Hussein has killed innocent people, but so has the United States of America. In Iraq, while Clinton was in office, the U.S. government was responsible for the deaths of more than 5,000 Iraqi children a month with sanctions and routine bombings. Recently, a Pentagon informant leaked that the U.S. war with Iraq will claim more than 500,000 people (mostly innocent civilians). George W. Bush's "Shock and Awe" plan is to bombard Baghdad with more than 80 missiles in the first 24 hours of the war. For more information on the United States' policies on killing innocent people, investigate their involvement in Nicaragua (the "Soft War-Fare" tactics claimed the lives of many innocent civilians).
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The United States is a bully. There isn't anything that says "bully" like killing children or declaring a "pre-emptive strike."
This war isn't about Hussein's killing innocent people. It isn't about the "weapons of mass destruction" that are somehow eluding U.N. weapons inspectors and all of the millions of dollars of U.S. satellite technology. It is about oil. Think about these facts for a while: Chevron named an oil tanker after Bush's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, for "Faithful and Loyal Service;" Bush and his family have made millions from oil production; Iraq has oil.
For documentation of this information you can attend a Stop the War Machine meeting (www.StoptheWarMachine.org) or do a simple online search. On a personal note, I would like to add that I am a U.S. citizen, but I feel so alienated and helpless that I no longer use personal pronouns when describing any act of the United States.
Georgia Bennett
UNM student
