I keep getting messages in my inbox from colleagues at Hunter College who say they are for the war on the grounds that it will liberate the Iraqi people. These colleagues call peace demonstrators “peaceniks” full of “hypocrisy”. My response to them:

A couple of comments these anti-anti-Iraq war posts of late have brought up for me:

1) Bush’s motive for this war is not the liberation of the Iraqi people, although he may give lip service to such a goal in order to try to win over the empathetic among us. In fact, he doesn’t seem to be terribly concerned about the potential suffering and loss of “their” civilians (see point 2 below). Rather, he wants to wage this war to gain control of Iraqi oil, avenge Saddam’s attempt on “Daddy’s” life, vent some frustration at not being able to win the unwinnable “war on terrorism”, and aggressively continue a long policy of American imperialistic intervention.

2) Any American truly concerned about the Iraqi people might first want to question our government’s policy of economic sanctions against Iraq, a means by which we doubly punish innocent people already living under a despotic regime.

3) And speaking of cruel despotic regimes, what is the Patriot Act? What is inadequate health care? What is detention and mandatory registration of males of Middle Eastern ethnic extraction? What is incomparable violence? What about the racism our country was founded and thrived on? You know the new slogan, “Regime change starts….”

4) Have all methods of ridding Iraq of Saddam been explored? Why would it be necessary to induce shock and awe and civilian deaths in order to get him out of power? Are we not even a bit cleverer than that?

5) Why single out Saddam when there are so many despots to choose from? (As the writer below mentions, Nigeria, Rwanda, Chile, Colombia… not to mention Burma, Pakistan, North Korea — oh yeah, what ABOUT North Korea?

6) As a person who lost countless distant relatives in the Holocaust, I agree that war is not always absolutely categorically wrong. However, in terms of the Iraq war, the grounds for which have certainly not been sufficiently justified, I can only sign off this e-mail as a committed — but not, I hope *hypocritical* —

…Peacenik.

Peace.

Nada Gordon