Also this issue: Hostile Skies Over D.C. -Bruce Schimmel This Is Not A Game Is a war against Iraq in the interest of the world? Here's why France and Germany say no. -Edward A. Aguilar

February 13-19, 2003

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by the Readers

Go Back

(Re: "Back From Iraq," Spencer Witte, Slant, Jan. 30, 2003)

As a Penn alumnus, I am embarrassed by the lack of critical skills evidenced by one of its students in "Back From Iraq." A visit by members of an academic group opposed to military action to enforce the terms of Iraq's previous surrender from a war it started is hardly going to find anything to change their minds from a controlled visit to Baghdad. Rather, we get personal sob stories of people enduring difficult times during and after the Gulf War. That's like Nazis complaining of allied attacks in World War II. Witte states simplistic truisms like "at a most basic level, [Iraqis] want to provide for their families and watch their children grow up healthy."

If these holier-than-thou, self-proclaimed pacifists truly desired peace, they then would demand Iraqi cooperation in accordance with multiple United Nations resolutions. After all, Saddam Hussein has murdered millions of people and is the only known user of weapons of mass destruction still in power. Otherwise, these people are nothing more than collaborators of a mass murderer who will continue to brutalize, torture and kill thousands of Iraqis and possibly others in the years to come.

Jay Borowsky
Philadelphia

There’s Something Happening Here

Stuff you can't learn about the state of the Union from the State of the Union Address:

A huge peace movement is brewing in our fine country today. That's right. During the MoveOn organization's Let the Inspections Work campaign [www.moveon.org], members of Congress throughout the country were presented with 310,000 signatures of Americans who opposed a war in Iraq.

National polls, appearing last month in The Washington Post, show that public support for the war is plummeting. This fall, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., received 50,000 e-mails from U.S. citizens from all over the country protesting threats to wage war on Iraq regardless of United Nations support. On Jan. 18 in Washington, D.C., two million people marched in protest of the war. They were matched by huge numbers in Los Angeles the same day and sang in concert with heavy antiwar actions in the U.K. In fact, this peace movement is worldwide. When George Stephanopoulos showed Donald Rumsfeld the 310,000-name petition and grilled him on the dangers of war, news programs in Australia, Pakistan, Russia and Japan broadcast and discussed the event. Actions in the U.K. speak for themselves. In spite of the British government's pledge to aid the U.S. in a war against Iraq, British citizens are against it.

Because of the hard work and organization of activists the world over, almost everyone except President Bush admits a war on Iraq will not make the citizens of the world safer, and that includes us here in the United States. Almost everyone except President Bush admits that Iraq is not a threat to the peace of any nation. Almost everyone except President Bush admits that there is no case for war. In the case of war on Iraq, the president is writing his own chapter in the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Cheshire Agusta
Philadelphia