The usual media blitz has again succeeded in convincing Americans that it's okay for us to bomb Iraq, and maintain sanctions.  I would like to present an alternative point of view, a view that makes lasting peace more feasible. It's fascinating to me that the burden of proof seems to fall on those who oppose the violence. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Our insistence that Saddam Hussein comply with UN resolutions reveals a double standard.  Author and professor Noam Chomsky explains that Israel violated the 1978 Security Council resolution calling on Israel to withdraw immediately from Lebanon. International law and peace cannot prevail unless we have the same standards for allies and for so-called enemies.  Chomsky also points out,

In December 1975 the Security Council unanimously ordered Indonesia to withdraw its invading forces from East Timor "without delay" and called upon "all States to respect the territorial integrity of East Timor as well as the inalienable right of its people to self-determination."  The US responded by (secretly) increasing its shipments of arms to the aggressors, accelerating the arms flow once again as the attack reached near-genocidal levels in 1978. US-backed atrocities in East Timor were vastly beyond anything attributed to Saddam Hussein in Kuwait.

By the way, where did Saddam get all those "weapons of mass destruction"?  Amy Goodman, host of the radio show Democracy NOW! said on the air on Feruary 13, 1998 that Henry Gonzales, then House Banking Committe Chair, on July 27th, in a 1992 floor speech, said the Bush administration deliberately helped to arm Iraq by allowing US companies to sell to Iraqi military and defense factories, and went on to say there was a full-court coverup of this.  There were 18 US companies.  A few examples:  Honeywell sold fuel air explosives.  Hewlitt Packard, sold computers for the Iraqi Atomic Energy commission, and sold electronic test equipment directly to Iraqi weapons facilities.  Rockwell , Honeywell and Hewlitt Packard all sold high performance electronics to the major Iraqi missile plant.  International Imaging Systems sold imaging technology for missile programs.  Tectronics sold computer graphic terminals for missile center.  Vetco sold vacuum pumps and bellows for nuclear weapons plants.  Swift Lebec supplied magnets for nuclear weapons plants. American Live Cultures sold bacterial research to the Iraqi ministry of defense.  I could go on.
(Listen to Democracy NOW! show, February 13, 1998)

According to articles in the Washington Post, and elsewhere, there is a clear connection between Israeli intelligence and UNSCOM. On the floor of the House of Commons, Wednesday 20 Jan 1999, Sir Peter Emery asks the Prime Minister "what action was taken by himself, or with President Clinton, in response to the admission by a member of the UNSCOM arms inspectors in Iraq that UNSCOM information was being passed to the Israeli Intelligence Service" ( source link). Do we really expect this cruel dictator to comply under these questionable circumstances? When we corner the only visible leader of Iraq with sanctions, then tell him to comply with questionable inspections, we make it unlikely he will comply. And it seems that is our true intention.

We say we intend to continue sanctions until Saddam Hussein is removed from power, yet in the past we have denied and refused to help alternatives.  Chomksy writes:

The rebelling forces in March 1991 were an alternative, but the US preferred Saddam. There was an Iraqi democratic opposition in exile. Washington refused to have anything to do with them before, during, or after the Gulf War, and they were virtually excluded from the US media, apart from marginal dissident journals. "Political meetings with them would not be appropriate for our policy at this time," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher stated on March 14, 1991, while Saddam was decimating the opposition under the eyes of Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf. They still exist. How realistic their programs are, I cannot judge, and I do not think we can know as long as the US remains committed -- as apparently it still is -- to the Bush adminstration policy that preferred "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta," without Saddam Hussein if possible, a return to the days when Saddam's "iron fist...held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia," not to speak of Washington (NY Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, July 1991). (quote taken from http://www.worldmedia.com/).

Author and political analyst Michael Parenti explains that the CIA installed Saddam.  In the '80s Sadam had plenty of "weapons of mass destruction," and we were helping him to use them.  Where was our righteousness then?  Our dubious position toward the Frankenstein we created makes us unfit to lead in this crisis.

Blase Bonpane, professor, author and director of Office of the Americas, a non-profit organization dedicated to peace, asks "Why not have international inspections?"  Israel, for example, has chemical biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.  Why not inspect Israel?  And why not UN inspections of the US?

To date, by far the greatest mass destruction in the region has been committed by the United States.  For example, in previous bombings of Iraq, we destroyed water supply lines, in violation of international law.  And the recent Associated Press release shows a ruptured water main in a Baghdad residential area that officials said was hit by a missile in the current bombing.  And can you imagine what will happen when a cruise missile explodes a supply of VX nerve gas. Who then will be to blame?  And we are still struggling with Gulf War syndrome, the prolonged and partly unexplained sickness of US Gulf War veterans.

Previous bombings and sanctions have only solidified his power and weakened the possibility of political reform in Iraq.

Cruise missiles cost over one million dollars each, and we've already dropped hundreds, just for starters.  We must demand our servants in Washington give us a money-back guarantee that our tax dollars will achieve clearly defined and peaceful goals.  If not, we demand our money back.

A New York Times article, January 8, 1998, reveals that "the United States used the U.N. inspection team to send a U.S. spy into Baghdad to install a highly sophisticated electronic eavesdropping system. The spy entered Iraq in the guise of a U.N. weapons inspector and left the eavesdropping device behind."  (See http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/010899iraq-inspect.html)

The article goes on to explain,

U.S. officials insisted that the information they gathered was only what the commission needed -- insight into the ways in which Iraq concealed its weapons. But they conceded that those very same methods were used by Iraq to protect its president.

It should be no surprise, they said, that U.S. cruise missiles were aimed last month at the same people and institutions that the eavesdropping campaign tried to penetrate -- including the home of the man who runs the security organizations that protect Iraq's secret weapons and Saddam Hussein.

Martin Luther King once said the bombs we drop in Vietnam explode in the ghettos and barrios of the United States.  With deference to Dr. King, the same principle applies to Iraq.  Stop the bombings.  Stop the sanctions.  Use the same amount of money that we spent bombing on a humanitarian gesture of peace to help rebuild Iraq.  Only then will Iraqi people have the strength and motivation for political reform.  We can easily afford it, as we have repeatedly demonstrated by our costly bombing.  This would be money well spent, and would halt the escalation of fear.  As it stands now, the Iraqi people fear the US more than they fear Sadaam.