Response to Ted Lynch in Walpole Times

To the Editor,

This letter is in response to Ted Lynch’s July 13th letter. Mr. Lynch throws up the usual right wing smoke screen spin about Saddam being a bad man and the need to support our troops. To start off, I want to be clear about my point that before the war started the vast majority of Iraqi’s were living a relatively comfortable and secure lifestyle and that the war has turned the vast majority of Iraqi’s lives into a living hell every minute of every day for more than three years now and going on for who knows how many more! If anyone disagrees with this statement then you should have attended Dr. Khudairi’s talk and seen for yourself what his slides depicted.

The gassing of the Kurds was a horrific act. I’d like to ask Mr. Lynch if those that sanctioned this massacre should be held accountable as well as Saddam? Did you know that the Reagan administration provided satellite photos to Iraq which it knew was to be used in “calibrating” Iraqi chemical weapons attacks against Iran and that the U.S. provided dual use helicopters which were used to gas the Kurds? It is a well known fact that the U.S. knew that Saddam was using chemical weapons and continued to support him through the 80’s. You can find this info at www.wikipedia.org and type halabja_poison”. Do you know why the U.S.was at odds with Iran? Because the CIA toppled the democratically elected president of Iran in the early 50’s and installed the brutal Shah who oppressed his people but sold Iran’s oil to us at very good price. When Iranian fundamentalists overthrew the Shah, we lost that secure oil connection. To quote Robert Scheer in an article in The Nation, “Ironically, the U.S. supported Iraq when it possessed and used weapons of mass destruction and invaded it when it didn’t.”

Mr. Lynch’s comment about “The joyous pulling down of Saddam’s statues around Baghdad … was real and spontaneous.”, needs to be addressed. If you Google “saddam statue”, you will find ample evidence that the large statue that most Americans saw toppled was actually staged with no more than 150 to 200 people. What’s particularly interesting about this is the media’s roll in helping the government send misleading impressions back to the American people. This point only helps me to underscore my case for getting info from alternative sources.

Mr. Lynch states that I alleged our soldiers have committed war crimes. Even though there are now a number of instances that indicate a small number of our troops may have committed war crimes, I wasn’t blaming them in my first letter. The examples that I gave were focusing on those higher up the chain of command. This is a perfect example of how the right wing zealots try to distract Americans from the truth! In the case of Iraq, throw in the red herring that Saddam is a bad man and we need to support our troops and everything else becomes irrelevant – even war crimes by top U.S. officials.

In order to state my case as clearly as possible, I want to provide the following info on two of the war crimes I mentioned in my first letter. First, is the war of aggression against Iraq. I’d like to support my view by quoting Benjamin Ferenccz. Mr. Ferenccz should know a war criminal when he sees one. He is a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers after WW II. He has stated that a “prima facie case can be made that the U.S. is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.” This info is available at Truthout.org.

On the question of illegal weapons, I want to quote Prof. Doug Rokke on the use of depleted uranium. Prof. Rokke is the ex-director of the Pentagon’s depleted uranium project who was tasked by the U.S. department of defense with the post – first Gulf war depleted uranium clean up. Prof. Rokke has stated that “There is a moral point to be made here. This war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction – yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves. Such double standards are repellent.”

In closing, I just want to say to Mr. Lynch, that if you choose to continue this debate, that in addition to addressing the above specific statements that you justify your view of supporting our troops by staying the course as George Bush wants us to do, versus the fact that 72% of the troops in Iraq feel we should leave Iraq by the end of the year.

Paul Peckham