Not a war of liberation
The letters of Mr Carmel Vassallo and Mr H.V. Agius (The Sunday Times, March 30) which favoured the US-led war of aggression against the people of Iraq, do a fair job of summing up the arguments insisting on the war in Iraq being a just one.The...
The letters of Mr Carmel Vassallo and Mr H.V. Agius (The Sunday Times, March 30) which favoured the US-led war of aggression against the people of Iraq, do a fair job of summing up the arguments insisting on the war in Iraq being a just one.The reality, however, is far worse than most people imagine.
Contrary to what Mr Vassallo and Mr Agius argue, the war of aggression cannot be considered a war of liberation for the simple reason that liberation cannot be achieved through the destruction of countless innocent lives, violation of international law and UN resolutions and through the creation of a catastrophic humanitarian situation for millions of Iraqis whose only crime is to live under Saddam Hussein's repressive regime.
Seldom, if ever, in history has so much suffering been imposed on an entire nation using the evil of a single man as justification.Tens of thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, perished in the Gulf War of 1991, over a million Iraqis, half of them children under the age of five, according to the World Health Organisation, have perished as a result of the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, and hundreds more Iraqis have died as a result of the routine Allied bombardment of Iraq since the last Gulf War.
All this civilian suffering has been perpetrated by the US under the guise of "containing" Saddam Hussein - which is precisely the reason why we anti-war campaigners who opposed Mr Bush's illegitimate war, recognise that the Second Gulf War is a cynical if brutal attempt by the US to make the people of Iraq pay for the crimes of their leader yet again.
Those who support war with Iraq, like Dr Vassallo and Mr Agius, need to recognise that Saddam's evil has been far too long manipulated by the West to justify the mass murder of innocent Iraqis, in the same way the injustices of the United States were manipulated by the Al-Qaeda terrorists for the mass murder of thousands of innocents on September 11.
Perhaps the time has come to stop condoning the massacre and bloodshed against an entire nation simply because they happen to deplore their leadership.