Posted on 03/02/2003 5:42:48 PM PST by redcoyote7
By Steve Wampler My Voice Published Sunday, March 2, 2003
For months, anti-war activists, Hollywood elitists and liberal congressional Democrats have incessantly attacked President Bush's plan to force Saddam Hussein to comply with a U.N. disarmament resolution. Some groups, such as Not In Our Name, have proclaimed that large numbers of Iraqi civilians and children would be killed by any war to oust the longtime dictator. In effect, the anti-war groups purport to represent the Iraqi people.
Interviews in the British press with Iraqi exiles make clear, however, that the people of Iraq largely want an end to Saddam's governance by rape, torture and murder.
They want an end to the massacres and the genocides. And they also make it plain, with an anger fueled by years of tyranny, that the anti-war protesters do not represent those who suffer in Iraq. In other words, the anti-Iraq war protests cannot be "held in their name." On Feb. 16, hundreds of Iraqi exiles, many with intimate knowledge of Saddam's murder and mayhem, staged their own counterprotest in London.
One London Iraqi exile, Ali al-Ezzawi, 51, told the Daily Telegraph there must be "a war against Saddam to help the Iraqi people." Three members of al-Ezzawi's family died at the hands of Saddam after the Shiite revolt in 1991. "I lost my wife, my brother, my wife's sister. The Iraqi soldiers just came and shot them. Every Iraqi will tell the same story," al-Ezzawi said.
"The people on the anti-war march don't seem to realize; they don't have any idea what Saddam Hussein is like, the massacres, the genocides," al-Ezzawi said. "I am supporting a war against Saddam. It's not a war against Iraq; it is a war against Saddam. It doesn't seem to be a point that many people on the anti-war march are making."
A friend of al-Ezzawi, Saad Qasim, 53, shared his own encounter with Saddam's murdering army: "My 11-year-old son was killed in 1991 by Iraqi soldiers. He was just a kid. They shot him as he went to get some water.
"Saddam Hussein doesn't care. He is the biggest criminal in the world. There needs to be a war against Saddam, a war for the Iraqi people. That has to be better than allowing him to continue killing all these people."
While America's newspapers seem strangely -- and largely -- quiet on the views of Iraqi exiles and the people of Iraq, Britain's newspapers teem with stories of Saddam's tyranny. The renowned Times of London (Feb. 17) recited the story of Amal al-Mudarris, a noted radio newscaster in Baghdad, who one day made contrary remarks about Saddam's wife. The Times reported: "Shortly after, her radio station was surrounded by police and she was arrested. Once tortured, she was hanged. Then her tongue was cut out and sent to her family. Since it came to power, Saddam's Baath Party is estimated to have killed 5 percent of Iraq's population.
In a Feb. 14 letter to The Guardian, Dr. B. Khalaf, a doctor who served in the Iraqi army and now lives in London, asked the anti-war protesters, "Where were you while Saddam has been killing thousands of Iraqis since the early 1970s? And where are you now, given that every week he executes people through the "court of revolution," a secret court run by the security office? Khalaf asked: "Why, out of about 500,000 Iraqis in Britain, you will not find even 1,000 of them participating?"
It is likely the coalition forces will be hailed as liberators. In Afghanistan, it is the U.S. that ended public hangings in soccer stadiums, stopped the whipping of women whose burkhas opened in the wind and enabled children to watch movies and fly kites.
It is Bush, not the anti-war protesters or the Hollywood crowd or former Presidents Carter and Clinton, or France and Germany, who occupies the high moral ground. It is Bush who wants to remove Saddam's yoke of oppression.
Did the U.S. anti-war protesters rail against Saddam because U.N. inspectors decided in 1999 that the dictator had "biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax?" Have they condemned Saddam's policies of repression and war that have killed more than 1 million people? Did the peace-at-any-price crowd call for the tyrant to disarm? Did they demand Saddam stop governing by rape, murder and torture? The answers are no.
In the face of the anti-war protests and unfair criticism from two former presidents, Bush's solution for Iraq -- requiring disarmament by Saddam or a regime change -- represents the best hope for the Iraqi people. And for the American people, too.
Wampler, a Tracy resident, hosts a radio talk show. He holds a master's degree in political science from the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.
Visit his website at: www.stevewampler.com
2014 - the U.S. and other allied forces were greeted as liberators, only on certain occasions and in certain places of great oppression.
The positive response, in other words, came only from a minority of people in Iraq.
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