From contributor David Keppel Davidkeppel@earthlink.net
This article printed as an op-ed piece in the Indianapolis Star

Stop World War IV
by David Keppel

April 18, 2003

The United States has defeated Saddam Hussein's forces in Iraq. But this may only be the start of a world war.

No one mourns the fall of a tyrant. The peace movement shares the relief of all Americans that "only" 114 Americans have died so far -- though we fear that a new generation of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians will suffer Gulf War syndrome from depleted uranium in U.S. armor-piercing projectiles.

Patients overflow Baghdad's hospitals, which have gone without medicine, water and power. Victims in the residential al-Hilla district were dismembered or blown to bits by our cluster bombs, which Amnesty International calls "inherently indiscriminate weapons." We make no attempt even to count, much less name, the dead of a nation we claim to liberate.

Asked about the looting -- unhindered by American troops -- that destroyed 5,000 years of priceless antiquities in Baghdad's National Museum, President Bush said, "Well, no kidding." Defense Secretary Ronald Rumsfeld commented, "Freedom is untidy." Then we let the National Library burn. Yet, American forces guarded the Oil Ministry and the Interior Ministry, which holds records of Saddam Hussein's secret police. Lucrative contracts go to Bechtel and a Halliburton subsidiary.

Before the dead have been buried, those who planned this war mutter dark hints of the next one. Some say that Iraq transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria, an excuse for our failure so far to find proof of Iraqi weapons. Rumsfeld and Bush charge that Syria has chemical weapons of its own. Like Israel, Syria never signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. Reassurances that we have "no plan to attack right now" recall last fall when Bush had "no plan on his desk" to attack Iraq.

Beyond Syria lie Iran and North Korea, which Bush named in the "Axis of Evil." These wars might involve U.S. nuclear weapons. Attacking Damascus or Tehran would outrage the Islamic world, which awaits justice for Palestinians as well as Israelis. Attacking Pyongyang would engulf the Korean peninsula and severely alienate China and Russia.

Hard-liners who persuaded Bush to attack Iraq, such as former CIA Director James Woolsey, speak of World War IV. Woolsey defines this as a struggle against Middle East states such as Syria, Iran and Libya. [ http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/03/sprj.irq.woolsey.world.war/index.html ]

Why World War IV? Woolsey suggests that the Cold War was World War III, and the United States won it. He masks the difference between deterrence, which largely governed superpower relations, and the current doctrine of preventive war. Gens. Leslie Groves and Curtis E. Lemay proposed a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. President Dwight Eisenhower and every president until Bush rejected that doctrine. Otherwise, the world would have suffered a catastrophic nuclear war instead of seeing the peaceful end of Soviet communism.

Today's hawks are emboldened by weaker rivals. They fail to understand the chaos of proliferation and terrorism. Extremists from Indonesia to Morocco look at Baghdad's hospitals and feel justified in exacting a blood price in American civilians.

If the U.S. becomes an aggressive and fearful empire, it may allow Attorney General John Ashcroft to expand secret arrests, including those of citizens. It would be a sad irony if our wars in the name of democracy exiled it from our own land. We use the poor to fight wars, but pay for them by cutting their services.

With the end of the Cold War, the world had an unparalleled opportunity to rid itself of nuclear weapons. Yet the United States continues to build first-strike weapons, spurring global proliferation. As slavery was abolished, so can our slavery to these weapons be abolished, in the opinion of former Strategic Air Command chief Gen. George Lee Butler. The same principle applies to biological weapons, where our military's genetic engineering is objectively offensive.

The Achilles heel of any empire is the vulnerability of an interconnected world. But instead of fear, we can build bonds of international law and shared humanity. The money devoted to the Iraq war would have brought safe drinking water to the billion people who lack it. That would reduce the risk of global epidemics whose danger is more acute than intentional biological weapons. And it might create good will that would reduce the terrorism risk as well.

When the Soviet Union fell, we inflated Hussein to the size of our former rival. Now that his statue has fallen, let us also topple the idol of exaggerated enmity. We must reject world war and set out on the path to peace.

David Keppel is a writer and activist who lives in Bloomington, Indiana. He is a regular contributor to http://grassrootspeace.org. His writings have appeared in the Indianapolis Star, The Times and the New York Times.

Page created April 19, 2003 by Charlie Jenks