Number One: The United States government has trapped itself in a macho position where retreat is possible--yet neither is victory. It is thereby hurtles into a dangerous trajectory whose logical conclusion is the use of nuclear weapons.

In fact a 3 February executive directtive has already authorized United States use of such awful weapons of mass destruction.

Consider: the U.S., having put all its prestige and power on the line, is now unable to back off from a minor squabble over the compositon of UN inspection teams. Failing an abject surrender by Iraq--and now, probably even with such a surrender--the United States must attack.

And achieve . . . what? So long as Iraq has oil or even a single personal computer it will have the capacity to produce weapons.

Meanwhile, Iraq need only to continue to endure convential U.S. military attacks--which, however horrific, will be dwarfed by the human devestation already wreaked by the existing, muderous "sanctions"--and the U.S. seemingly comes out a loser.

Its only alternative is to militarily invade Iraq and take it over--a course which is politically and practically near-impossible. After all, VietNam proved for all time at least one thing: it's impossible to occupy a country against the will of its population, no matter how much blood and weaponry you are willing to squander.

Yet the U.S. has positioned itself such that it cannot afford to leave anyone standing in Iraq saying "nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah."

Take it all together--the inability to retreat and the inability to take over--and the only ultimate option is dropping nuclear bombs....

Need anything be said about the consequences--whether moral or even practical--of that?

Number Two: Though oceans of moronic propaganda (reportedly swallowed by some 75% of the U.S. population) would have you believe otherwise, dispassionate investigation shows the United States government stands without a shred of justification for unleashing its vast military power against Iraq.

Consider the thinness of the following arguments:

• "Saddam threw out UN weapons inspectors" Iraq objected to a team composed of thirteen Americans, a Brit and an Australian...and one Russian, a team headed by a former U.S. Marine intelligence officer. They asked that the team's composition reflect that of the United Nations.
• "Saddam placed vast areas off-limits, calling them "presidential palaces" In fact Iraq simply asked that UNSCOM (UN inspectors) put off their inspection until April; following the U.S.-created uproar, Iraq repeatedly invited inspectors--including the entire U.S. Congress--to come investigate these sites for themselves.
• "But Saddam is a madman" No question that he is capitalist dictator, and a murderous one to boot, but there is little evidence that he is insane enough to (say) inveigle oral sex in the Oval Office with the whole country watching.
• "Saddam is an evil dictator" OK, but the twentieth century is filled with U.S. support--sometimes impiclit, usually whole-hog--for monsters ranging from Hitler to Diem (VietNam) to Pol Pot to Mobuto to the genocidal rulers of Rwanda and Yugoslavia--acts so evil that any one of them surely disqualifies the U.S. from acting against Iraq..
• "We must act against weapons of mass destruction" No doubt the world would be a better place without these nightmarish weapons, but the vast majority of them reside inside the United States--and it is the only country to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilians.
• "We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to be wielded by fundamentalist states in the volatile Middle East" Good idea or not, there is only one state in the Middle East which possesses nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, plus high tech missile systems; one state that is openly theocratic and racist; one state that is has a history of extreme military aggressiveness; one state that has repeatedly used unhesitating force against civilians; one state that considers its population the "Chosen People" of God: Isreal. Of course that fundamentalist state owes its existence to the good ol' USA.
• "Saddam has used chemical weapons against his own people" Actually, the greatest use of chemical weapons (if you don't count U.S. use of napalm and Agent Orange in VietNam) since World War #1 was by Iraq--and it took place under the direction of the United States of America. The U.S. provided the satelite data and other military intelligence for Iraq to use against Iran following the deep popular revolution there against the U.S.-imposed dictator, the Shah. Moreover, the U.S. blocked all international efforts to censure Iraq for its unprecedented use of chemical weapons, while simultaneously riduculing Iran's charges as "paranoid fantasies."

Number Three: U.S. military action will weaken the position of workers and the people of the Third World--the immense majority of humanity. The United States attacks are fundamentally aimed at the people of Iraq, not its uppity hireling, Saddam Hussein. It is they who have suffered over a million deaths--600,000 of whom were children--from U.S. "sanctions." It is they who--responding the cynical U.S. call to rise against Saddam in the aftermath of the Gulf War--were slaughtered by Hussein while the U.S. stood back with folded arms, smiling.

Surely it is long past time to revive the old labor slogan "An Injury to One is an Injury to All."

For who are the Iraqi people? "Towel-heads?" "Camel jockeys?" "Sand niggers?" Or even--to the most ignorant racists--"Dot-heads?"

Or are they us ?--workers and farmers, women and kids--fellow working people.

Allowing the U.S. government to drop explosives on the Iraqi component of us will be no less disasterous than was standing by while the government destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers Union.

Moreover, as potential fellow losers, we should not only oppose violence against those of us who live in Iraq, we should demand the removal of all UN inspectors and all other intruders into the sovereign nation of Iraq.

For what Third World country, let alone what working class organization, can be free when the Empire can wantonly violate our independence and our national soverignity? When it can disarm its enemies while reserving the world's greatest arsenal for itself--even while it spends billions of dollars to develop science fiction weaponry?

Of course the strangled and starving Iraqi people can already testify to the consequences of that. Or ask the workers fighting for democracy in the Teamsters (largest U.S. union) about the benevolence of U.S. government intervention: their reformer president was just removed by federal action after he lead a successful strike against the second largest private employer in the country.

* * * *

In the end everything is about violence.

How else is it possible for a handful of super-wealthy to simultaneously dictate and wallow in decadent luxury while the vast majority of humanity stews in disease and lack of education? How else do the top 358 billionaires have more than the annual income of 45% of the world's population, while 6 million children die annually for utterly preventable reasons?

By violence.

For time and time again the poor and oppressed have risen for democracy and against their inhuman living conditions--and time and time again the Empires have unleashed their military might against them. (France, for instance, has sent troops against popular uprisings in Africa 37 times in the past 35 years.)

And it is violence--cruel brutality--that is the single unacceptable evil in the world, the one behavior which crosses the line into inhumanity (though using violence to defend yourself against killers may well be another matter).

If parents tell their children no hitting, can people tell governments anything less than no bombing, no killing, orno war ?

That's why anyone who falls anywhere between the camps of Castro and Pope John Paul II--anyone who abhors murder and injustice--should act now to protest all forms of intervention against Iraq by the killers who own the United States and its government.

And should draw heart from the historic meeting of these two men:

For the future of humankind lies not in billion-dollar science-fiction weapons systems, but in proceeding like Fidel and el Papa did in Cuba: talking frankly to each other, simultaneously disagreeing and finding common ground--and isolating the killers who have put themselves outside of humanity.

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