Invading Iraq would amount to mass murder of Iraqi civilians

The estimates of the toll of death and misery which might result from an attack on Iraq do not include the use of nuclear weapons which the US is said to be planning (Los Angeles Times, January, 26, 2003). To quote from the piece by William Arkin.

"According to multiple sources close to the process, the current planning focuses on two possible roles for nuclear weapons: attacking Iraqi facilities located so deep underground that they might be impervious to conventional explosives; thwarting Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction."

The bizarre contradiction inherent in using nuclear weapons - the ultimate "weapons of mass destruction" - for the purpose of eliminating "weapons of mass destruction" appears to have escaped the warmongers in the Bush administration.

As the author of the LA Times piece also observes, planning for the possible pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons "rewrites the ground rules" and "moves nuclear weapons out of their long-established special category and lumps them in with all the other military options". Until now, even the U.S. reserved the use of nuclear weapons for retaliation against nuclear attacks or immediate threats to national survival. This very significant and terrifying shift in U.S. policy on nuclear weapons use passed with barely a shiver in the Australian media.

We know that Saddam Hussein is a bloody murderer. But when his brutality was at its worst, when he used chemical weapons on the Kurdish people, there was barely a whimper from the US who were then his allies, who were then providing him with the materials and technology to manufacture biological and chemical weapons to use against Iran. Do we intend to teach him that the manufacture and use of such weapons is a serious breach of his international obligations by bombing the people of Iraq - in breach of our international obligations? Why look to war as the only solution?

In fact, this is not a war in the sense that we normally understand it. A unilateral attack would be just that. Iraq has not attacked the US or the United Kingdom or Australia. The use of the word "war", as one of my constituents said to me, is designed to cultivate the perception that we are under attack and that war is the most effective response to that threat.

As one anti-war activist wrote:

"To call something a "war" creates a willingness to use force in the service of what appears to be an indisputable objective - the desire to overcome one's enemy. It creates a sense of battle - of hoped for victory for one side and hoped for defeat for the other. It conveys a sense of strength behind the willingness to use force. It rallies a country around its common identity as a people, thereby engendering patriotism and the willingness to fight and/or make sacrifice for one's country. It creates a picture of a common enemy that must be stood up to. To call something a "war" mobilizes national sentiment behind a common objective, justifies the use of military power as the means to achieve this objective, amplifies whatever existing resentment, prejudice, or hatred may exist toward the people or peoples one is waging war against, and through its call to patriotism, moves people to make personal sacrifice for the greater good."

All too often the debate about a possible attack on Iraq focuses on the strategic issues of interest to military specialists and those fascinated by the technical possibilities of combat. Rarely is enough attention paid to the savagery of modern warfare.

We need to speak the truth about the suffering any attack would inflict upon our fellow human beings, to repudiate the all-too-ready use of force. We need to tell Bush and Blair and Howard that we will not be complicit in an act of mass murder.