The Brunch Table

I was going through some old files, and I found the political column I used to write for the school newspaper in college. A lot of them are a little silly now…except that a couple bits are really creepy. I will excerpt here…

Sep ‘98, “Whose Good Is It Anyway?”

Today’s DEA can commit civil-rights violations (such as the confiscation of property, imprisonment without trial, and searches and arrests without a warrant) in broad daylight that used to have to be performed covertly, and a Good Samaritan law would only reinforce their highly questionable authority. For those of you who don�t feel personally threatened by the War on Drugs, this only one example of the potential abuses a such a law could lead to. What if the well-cultivated fear of “terrorism” filling the newspapers today evolved into a full-blown witch hunt a few years down the road?

Good thing that didn’t happen, I guess.

Oct ‘98, “Two Birds, 75 Cruise Missiles”

Was the Afghan target a real terrorist base? Or was it a regular army training camp? Was the alleged Sudanese chemical-weapons factory only a pharmaceutical plant? Were the chemical byproducts that our intelligence agents cited as proof of evildoing actually traces of an innocuous antiseptic?

I actually said “evildoing.” Okay, and here’s the big one.

Jan ‘99, “Bombing Baghdad”

I realized that I didn’t know very much at all about the people we were killing some ten thousand miles away. The next day, our local paper (the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia) crowed that “Iraq is Desperate,” running a gleeful tally of the destruction caused by the latest bombardment that listed military and civilian targets alike. And I wondered if that had been the purpose of the attack–to provoke desperation in a country that may or may not have the capability to strike back at us on our own soil.

I’ve got the full text here if you want to read on:

“Bombing Baghdad”
21 January, 1999

Think of cities with icons, architecture so remarkable that you can recognize it in silhouette on a tin of General Foods International Coffee. For example, if it’s backlit in night-vision green and has a bombsight superimposed over it by Time’s art department, you can be pretty sure it’s Baghdad, even without a dead giveaway like the Eiffel Tower to help you out. Whenever it comes time to fire one more barrage of surplus munitions into the city, that same luminous image graces our newspapers and magazine covers. So I was very surprised when I came across rather different photograph of Baghdad in a Newsweek over Christmas break. Office buildings, paved roads, traffic crosswalks, and all the other honor badges of Civilization made it into the frame, a street scene shot in ordinary daylight. It was a slice of city life only made remarkable by the fact that large pieces of those office buildings had gone missing.

I realized that I didn’t know very much at all about the people we were killing some ten thousand miles away. The next day, our local paper (the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia) crowed that “Iraq is Desperate,” running a gleeful tally of the destruction caused by the latest bombardment that listed military and civilian targets alike. And I wondered if that had been the purpose of the attack–to provoke desperation in a country that may or may not have the capability to strike back at us on our own soil. The headline didn’t read “Iraq Surrenders” or “Iraq Unconditionally Accepts UN Inspection Policy.” Instead, we’ve only reminded an allegedly dangerous enemy why they’re angry at us, accomplishing no clear military goal, before lightheartedly swinging the TV cameras back onto the impeachment trial.

Some people believe that our government’s hostility towards Iraq is unwarranted, and that the bombings are morally indefensible. I, on the other hand, had nightmares for weeks after seeing a picture of a smallpox victim in second grade. (For those of you who haven’t had the grisly experience, imagine a human face sculpted out of clay and then stabbed with a pencil.) On purely selfish grounds, I’m willing to read about copious amounts of injustice in our headlines if it insures that neither I nor anyone I know or care about will have to die like that. However, if you support our government’s assessment of Iraq as an imminent threat to American lives, then these ill-planned attacks are still criminally irresponsible behavior. As Suck magazine artfully pointed out last week, the current architects of our Iraq policy would do well to remember the last time our military vastly underestimated a population’s capacity to resist and counterattack. With cheap and readily-available weapons of mass destruction, today’s would-be guerillas have the potential power to take Vietnam home to us.

Playing for short-term political gain, with no clear military goal in mind, needlessly risks the lives of both American soldiers overseas and American civilians back home. It goes without saying that it’s also a monstrous injustice to the hapless Iraqi civilians caught in the middle. There’s a real danger present when a hostile country possesses biological and chemical weapons and has proven willing to use them in the past (never mind, for now, the curious logic that allows certain morally unassailable nations to build up nuclear arsenals in their stead). But firing away at the enemy whenever it’s politically expedient could cause much more trouble then it solves.

If our goverment can’t give us a clear, cogent explanation of how our country benefits by bombing and starving Iraqis to death by the thousands, then we’re only driving our enemies closer to the point at which they’d try to fight back in earnest. If our forces in the Middle East can’t act with our own well-being in mind, then they need to pack up and go home.