After reading Moorad Mooradian’s commentary, "What is Richard Perle Smoking?"  (TAR Int’l, 10/05/02), I concur wholeheartedly with Mooradian’s commentary and I also feel compelled to express my dissatisfaction over the way in which President George W. Bush and his chicken hawks are promoting a preempted unilateral attack on Iraq.

Let me say from the onset that I do not look on Saddam Hussein as a misunderstood,  benevolent, peace-loving soul.   Nor do I doubt for a second that he would, if he doesn’t already, support al Quaeda’s terrorists.  But I do believe in the concept of fortifying the power of the U.N. instead of neutralizing it.   And thereafter, to follow its mandates of weapons’ inspection to the letter.   If, after all that, we find credible proof that they do have weapons of mass destruction along with credible proof that we are a prime target, and after all that, we still find the U.N. reluctant to act, then and only then, should we be thinking about war with Iraq.   And if we follow this line of reasoning, I am sure that we won’t be alone, as we are today,  in wanting to bring Sadaam Hussein down.

At this point, I would also like to assure the reader that I am not a pacifist nor am I less patriotic than those who are presently crying for vengeance.   Fact is, some of the fear tactics that this administration is using to get the public’s blessing to go to war, looks similar to the fear tactics that Senator Joseph McCarthy was using in 1954.   For McCarthy, it was the alleged infiltration of communists into our government and into our military.   At present, it is the alleged weapons of mass destruction which Sadaam Hussein has or will have which he may or may not use on us.   

During World War II, I was inducted into the Army and I spent 18 months overseas.   Of the five battles we fought from D-Day to the end of the war in Europe, I experienced one of them as a combat engineer and another three as a line company infantryman.   I have seen war undressed at its horrible worst.   And all I can say is, let’s give the peacemakers a chance at this time.   And if there’s anyone out there who thinks that going through Baghdad house-to-house will be a cakewalk, let us all pray that such will be the case.   But how in God’s name will the chicken hawks justify it if the body bags start piling up?   By telling us of a pending mass destruction that never happened?  The way the old USSR handled it in 1945 was by turning Berlin into a pile of stones and by forfeiting 250,000 lives of their brave warriors in the process.   

Oh, by the way, what happened to the war on terrorism, or Bin Laden and his al Qaeda?   I hear he may be operating out of mainland China or was it the Bermuda Triangle?   In any case, the war on terrorism may not be over for another twenty years so why worry about it.  Of course, the worst part of this scenario is that after we win the war on terrorism, which we will, we still don’t know who’s going to come to the table to sign our surrender terms.   Maybe it’ll be Turkey.

When the World War II war clouds were looming over our United States, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rather than using fear to unite us, instilled heroic determination in us when he said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  

Joseph Vosbikian