[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by myvoice: *
In a word: Saddam.
In three words: Saddam and appeasement.
Now, maybe you can tell me how many of those children would be fed by continuing sanctions and weapons inspections. I haven't seen Hans Blix giving them any cupcakes.
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You forgot his second name Saddam Bush.
Iraqi-Americans rally for war to ‘oust Saddam’
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
DETROIT — While most Arab-American advocacy groups, joined by many liberals and a smattering of conservatives, vehemently protest military action in Iraq, several groups of Iraqi-Americans are waging a war of their own — a war of words against those very protesters. Top Stories
• Saddam given 48 hours to leave
• Market rallies amid hopes of ‘easy war’
• Lightning air strikes, then march to Baghdad
• Kurds flee cities in north
• Democrats rally behind U.S. troops
• Homeless population poses criminal risks
• South Korea’s Kim faces criminal investigation
Their fellow Middle Easterners and their antiwar allies are misguided, says Muhannad Eshaiker, an Irvine, Calif., architect and a member of the Iraqi Forum for Democracy, one of a number of groups favoring liberation of Iraq.
"We support a regime change that is long overdue," he says. "Nobody has been listening to the voices of Iraqis in America, not the Arabs, not the French ... even these peace people, who think that if we remove the sanctions things will be OK. Well, they won't be."
A letter last week from 11 prominent Iraqi-Americans to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice urges the Bush administration to discount the loud and insistent domestic protests against the war.
Those protesters "have no clue what justice is and who has brought war, bloodshed and annihilation by weapons of mass destruction and wholesale devastation to Iraq and the region," they say.
Iraqis here in Michigan, which has the largest Arab and largest Iraqi communities in the United States, are frustrated by the refusal of some of their fellow Middle Easterners to understand their persecution and perspective.
"They speak out of ignorance," says Mohammed Ogaily, a 41-year-old oncologist from Ann Arbor. "It is truly a sticking point in our relations with them, because they haven't lived under Saddam."
Many Arab-American and Muslim groups nationwide have issued statements assailing U.S. military action in Iraq.
For example, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, wrote in an editorial last week that Iraq's situation is "not a matter for the United States or Great Britain. Their involvement has no foundation in international law and can only create greater regional instability."
Arabs and Muslims here who are not Iraqis tend to believe that, too.
"Why would we not start with our so-called friends over there instead of a country that has never attacked us," says Tim Attalla, a Dearborn lawyer and first-generation American whose Palestinian parents came to the United States in 1950. "Why don't we start by bombing Israel, the country that has the real power in the Middle East?"
Muslim and Arab interest groups have been most outspoken on the Iraq issue and say the United States has credibility with Arabs in the Middle East.
Says Imad Hamad, director of the Michigan office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee: "The Iraqi regime is the least of my concerns. We will be able to deal with that — but what will be the public reaction there? Will they buy that we liberated them or will they continue to look at the U.S. as oppressors?"
Iraqis have their answers and their salvos ready. They say other Arabs are partial to Saddam because he has used those national groups for high-level jobs in his regime and paid millions of dollars to families of Palestinian militants while persecuting his own countrymen.
While Iraqis — both Muslim and Christian — have fought plenty of wars, says Nouri Sitto, a Chaldean who owns a sign-making shop in suburban Oak Park, "at least we aren't terrorists."
His icy retort is emblematic of a rift between Iraqis and other Arabs, who tend to live separately here.
Chaldeans are part of Iraq's Christian minority. At the tony Chaldean Club in Southfield, patrons from the local community of tens of thousands of Chaldeans are waiting to celebrate an invasion and liberation of their relatives in Iraq with a sort of anticipation often felt for sporting events.
"We will be here, watching, celebrating our liberation," says Jacoub Mansour, past chairman of the Chaldean Federation, gesturing to the wooden bar and big-screen television. "It will be so good to be gone with Saddam and to see our people free."
Just posting excerpts. Sami Ramadani is an “Iraqi political exile and a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University.” Source: Whose interests at heart?, Sami Ramadani
The Guardian, 18 March 2003
The invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot give my people their freedom. That’s why MPs should vote against war
A couple of weeks ago I went with my partner and our little boy to see our Labour MP, Bridget Prentice, in the House of Commons. We waited for two-and-a-half hours but she neither showed up nor sent a note. I wrote her a brief letter but she hasn’t acknowledged it yet.
We are British citizens of Iraqi origin. My wife, who is Kurdish from Sulaimaniyah, fled Iraqi Kurdistan in the mid-1980s, risking her life in the process. I am also an exile and cannot go back to Iraq because of my resistance to Saddam’s tyranny. Our son is four, and was born here.
As a family, we wanted to tell our MP how we feel now, with war against Iraq imminent. So far, she has supported the government; we went to see her in the hope that, even at this late hour, she will change her mind and vote against war.
My wife sees Iraqi victims of torture every day where she works, at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture; we wanted to tell Bridget Prentice that Iraq is in desperate need of regime change and the establishment of a democratic order. The Iraqi people need it much more than Bush and Blair could ever understand. But democracy for Iraq will not be achieved by bombing and invading the country. It cannot be trusted to George Bush. The US will not accept a democratic verdict which is not to its liking in a strategically important country, possessing the world’s second largest oil reserves. They strangled just such a verdict in Congo in the 1960s and in Chile in the 1970s, and they are working hard to reverse it in Venezuela today.
In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself: it backed Saddam’s party, the Ba’ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists, communists and democrats of all shades; it backed the Ba’ath party in 1968 when Saddam was installed as vice-president; it helped him and the Shah of Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement; it increased its support for Saddam in 1979, the year he elevated himself to president, helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980; it backed him throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs; it encouraged him in 1990 to invade Kuwait when the Arabic-speaking US ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, told him on July 25 1990 that the US had “no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts” when she knew that Saddam’s forces were only one week away from invading; it backed him in 1991 when Bush suddenly stopped the war, exactly 24 hours after the start of the great March uprising that engulfed the south and Iraqi Kurdistan (US aircraft were flying over the scenes of mass killing as Iraqi helicopter gunships were aiding Saddam’s forces crush the uprising); and it backed him as the “lesser evil” from March 1991 to September 11 2001 under the umbrella of murderous sanctions and the policy of “containment”.
Then, having caused the death of about half a million Iraqis, mostly children, through sanctions, Bush and Blair declare that containment and sanctions are not working after all. Blair must reconcile his strongly and suddenly found conviction that war is better than containment with the fact that the US hawks, now prominent in the Bush administration, have been advocating a war on Iraq for the past 12 years - not to liberate the Iraqi people, or to protect the world from weapons of mass destruction, but to impose US hegemony on a strategically important country. September 11 gave them their opportunity. Blair’s “sincerity”, and his sympathy for the Iraqi people are, alas, nothing but grist to Rumsfeld’s mills of war.
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Re: Re: Is it not the duty of the Muslim world to remove a tyrant from Muslim lands?
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*Originally posted by Majestic: *
Then we should wipe out the entrie Middle East and Muslim world of its leaders, cause most of them are in the same boat as Saddam!
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All in due time. First Iraq, then the rest.
Nadia, how many MORE children are YOU willing to write of as collateral damage to Saddam's savage rule over his people?
Let us take an analogy of India and Pakistan. Many times there is shelling across the LOC in Kashmir that result in the deaths of Kashmir civilians on both sides. Does that mean, Pakistan should not reply to India shelling and let India role in Azad Kashmir to protect deaths from shelling of civilians? In the real world war is necessary sometimes to protect the common good. Think long term, not short term. Iraqi people will be free with a government of their choosing. We can talk about WMD and UN all we want, but that is the real, if unintended goal.
Sami Ramadani is simply using his opinion of US and Bush to say that nothing good will come of this war. A completely useless argument. Once Saddam is removed, US will have no choice but to bring eventual democracy to Iraq. Even if they don't, and decide to rule over Iraq themselves, it will still be better then Saddam's rule.
wishful thinking Imdad.. the track record of 'nation building' is dismal.. just look at Afghanistan
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*Originally posted by PakistaniAbroad: *
wishful thinking Imdad.. the track record of 'nation building' is dismal.. just look at Afghanistan
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I'm looking at Afghanistan. It's not perfect, but better then Taliban times.