I was an eager bombardier in the Air Force during World War II. I served in "the best of wars," the war that killed the most people, but for good purpose. This war had wonderful motives, at least on the part of some people, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was interspersed with other atrocities committed by the good guys against the bad guys. I, being one of the good guys, felt very proud that I was on the good side, and that if atrocities were to be committed, they were to be committed by good guys.
Now the Bush administration wants to take the nation into war against Iraq. It says we're the good guys again. And Bush administration officials think if they use that phrase "weapons of mass destruction" again and again and again that people will cower, cower, cower.
Never mind that Iraq's fifth-rate military power is not even the strongest in the region. Israel, with 200 nuclear weapons, has that distinction. President Bush is not demanding that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rid himself of his weapons of mass destruction or face "regime change." Bush should understand that war always has unintended consequences.
You start a war, you never know how it ends. War also takes its toll increasingly against civilians. In World War I, there was a 10-to-1 ratio of military personnel killed versus civilians, whereas in World War II, that ratio got closer to 1-to-1. And after World War II, most of the people who have gotten killed in wars were civilians. And wars are always wars against children. In every war, unforgivable numbers of children die. But I don't want to insist on the distinction between civilians, who are innocent, and soldiers, who are not.
In what way were the Iraqi soldiers not innocent when U.S. forces buried hundreds of them alive? What of the Iraqi soldiers the United States mowed down in the so-called Turkey Shoot as they were retreating, already defeated? Who were these soldiers on the other side? They weren't Saddam Hussein. They were just poor young men who had been conscripted. In war you kill the people who are the victims of the tyrant you claim to be fighting against. That's what you do.
The Bush administration's rhetoric masks a huge double standard. Who has the most weapons of mass destruction in the world by far? Who has used weapons of mass destruction more than any other nation? Who has killed more people in this world with weapons of mass destruction than any other nation? The answer is simple: the United States.
I don't want to hear anything more about Saddam Hussein's possibly making a nuclear bomb in two years, in five years, nobody knows. We have 10,000 nuclear weapons. We ought to remind our neighbors, remind our friends, remind everybody we can that if we really believe that all people are created equal, then we cannot go to war. If we really believe that the children of Iraq have as much a right to live as the children of the United States, then we cannot make war on Iraq.