Posted on 10/22/2003 9:15:51 PM PDT by dutchess
Our military can end the regimes of today with military might. But, then, we must step up and finish the job. We need to contribute to feed, clothe and educate the citizens of these countries; otherwise, the terrorist will come back and recruit.
Even President Bush recognized this. In his State of the Union address, he said that America will help the oppressed people "secure their country, rebuild their society and educate all their children-boys and girls."
Why does this responsibility fall to us? Because of what the regimes have been doing to them. And unless we step up and aggressively, collectively contribute to the cause....it will only be a matter of time before the next 9/11.
9/11 made this cause both of our destinies, the people oppressed by regimes and the people of the US are bound together. We must win together to win this one. In a way we have become related by blood. Their freedom and our homeland security have been watered by the blood of those willing.
"It is no coincidence the name of the coalition is The Coalition Of The Willing. It is costing us the lives of our children that is a mighty bond." Luz C. Cintrón, April 2003
See Ragtime Cowgirl's post about France and Germany's decline to Iraqi Aid here
Let's hear from some Iraqi Natives about this trick:
I have been imprisoned, tortured and gassed by Saddam Hussein's regime. I know what life is like inside Iraq.
So I can assure these demonstrators that they wouldn't survive a month if they were dropped into Baghdad and forced to live as Iraqis live. They would be arrested and tortured as soon as they started complaining about the lack of basic human rights.
I was born in Halabja, close to the Iranian border in the northern Kurdish region. After graduating from school, I became a mathematics teacher there. In the mid-1980s, a law was passed decreeing that all teaching must be done in Arabic. No more would we be allowed to teach in Kurdish. There were demonstrations. Some students burned books in protest.
These young protesters soon found themselves fleeing Iraqi intelligence officers who were sent to our town to round up the demonstrators. I helped hide these youths in the school's physics lab and they managed to escape.
But someone must have informed the authorities because I was arrested the following day. I was held for three days, during which I was forced to sit in ice-cold water and, like so many other Iraqi women, endure many humiliations.
After I was released, Iraqi intelligence officers followed me everywhere. No one was allowed to speak to me. I was soon fired and told not to go anywhere near my school or any of my former pupils. I was reassigned to the education department office of the regional government in the city of Suleimaniyah.
In 1987, I received a memo from the director calling me to a meeting. I arrived to find the hall packed with friends and colleagues. Intelligence officers surrounded the building and arrested all of us. Before being taken away, the women were told, "Bring your menfolk who are peshmergas (anti-Saddam Kurdish guerrillas) or bring divorce papers."
I did neither. That was the day I decided to join the peshmergas. Once released, I fled to the mountains, living the life of a guerrilla - a life of hell.
In 1988, 21 members of my family died of suffocation when Saddam's forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons. Fortunately, my mother, brothers and sisters were in Suleimaniyah and survived. I wasn't so fortunate. Saddam's forces launched a chemical attack on the small mountain village of Kanyto where I was living. I survived, although badly injured, and spent three months in a hospital recovering from the chemical burns blistered my body from head to foot.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, I decided to leave my homeland: I fled to England and resumed my teaching career at a school for boys in London. Since then, the most dangerous thing I have to deal with these days are unruly teenagers. This is the world that the protesters know, not Saddam's world of chemical weapons, of arbitrary terror and rape.
How many opponents of the war have spoken to an Iraqi woman who has been raped in front of her father and son by Saddam's thugs? How many have asked an Iraqi mother how she felt when she was forced to watch her son being executed - and then ordered to pay for the bullet that killed him? How many know that these mothers have been forced to applaud as their sons died, or face execution themselves? I saw and heard all this in the village of Suleimaniyah. I still hear the clapping.
I have spoken to many people in northern Iraq over the last few weeks. They all agree that the threat of war advocated by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair may be the one chance to rid Iraq of the disease that is Saddam Hussein. Like myself, they worry that Saddam will see the war protests as a sign of weakness.
Giving U.N. weapons inspectors more time to determine whether Iraq is complying with international demands that it give up its weapons of mass destruction is a bad joke. Saddam will never disarm. He will lie, cheat and bluff his way out. He always has and always will.
Freshta Raper is head of mathematics at a boys school in London. Institute for War & Peace Reporting
Click here to hear another Iraqi Native who called into a radio show.
I would like to post pictures of this hoax; but they are disturbing. So click here to see this great intelligence hoax.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
Click!