Sjtop this unjust war!" read the signs at a New York anti-war rally this past weekend. "Killers, killers, killers!" protestors shouted in Chicago, in reference to war supporters. And here in Charlottesville, at last Friday's walk-out and march against the war, students likened Bush to a "tyrant" and deemed the war efforts "unjust."
These protestors do not understand how wrong their words are. To describe war supporters as "killers" and the war as "unjust" is a simple-minded characterization of the efforts to protect the world from Saddam Hussein, whose reign has yielded far more horrifying scenes than any protestor could ever imagine. Americans do not know what a "tyrant" is. But the people of Iraq do.
On March 21, ABC's "20/20" ran a segment entitled "A Worthy Cause: Women Who Know of Saddam's Brutality Say This War Is Just," in which four Iraqi women currently living in America were interviewed about life under Hussein's regime. What they revealed is beyond horrific.
The women have seen bodies hanging from poles in the middles of village squares. One woman's 16-year-old cousin was beaten and tortured with electrical shocks for writing something against the government in her school notebook.
According to these women, if a man makes a joke about Hussein, Iraqi authorities will rape the man's wife and daughters in front of him. They videotape the torture and send it to family members as a way to "bring the men into submission."
Inside the Iraqi prisons, Hussein keeps "human meat grinders" in which people are "shredded and disposed of in a septic tank." There are "chemical baths" in which prisoners are thrown and left to literally dissolve.
Perhaps the most visible manifestation of Hussein's tyranny came fifteen years ago, during Hussein's "Anfal" campaign of ethnic cleansing, where Hussein ordered the use of chemical weapons to kill over 60,000 of his own people.
Professor Emeritus Paul S. Shoup wrote in a guest viewpoint column last Friday that "the Iraqi people have never been given the choice to decide which they would prefer -- the war and its uncertain aftermath, or their present unhappy, but peaceful condition."
Well, based on what Hussein does to people who speak out against him, we have no way of asking. The four Iraqi women interviewed for "20/20" are the voices for the voiceless in their native country and say their "friends and loved ones will welcome the coalition troops with open arms." This rang true as U.S. troops entered the Iraqi town of Safwan on Saturday, with one man weeping, "What took you so long? God help you become victorious. I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave" ("You're Late", The Guardian, March 22.). The Iraqi people are desperate for U.S. troops to liberate them from their present unhappy and hardly "peaceful" condition.
Even those Iraqis who live in America are frightened to speak about the horrors of Iraq, for fear that relatives still living there will be subjected to Hussein's tyranny. Therefore, America hears relatively little of what really goes on within the Iraqi borders. However, POWs from the first Gulf War have also stepped up to tell their stories, divulging the tortures to which they were subjected.
"I can tell you that for about 20 minutes of my captivity, they played by the Geneva Convention?the rest of the time, they did not," said one former soldier ("Saddam's Wrath", ABCnews.com, March 14). These POWs tell about "unrelenting torture and misery" in which they were blindfolded and beaten, starved, subjected to chemical injections, made to listen to mock executions and castrations and forced to condemn the war on videotape while held at gunpoint. Disturbing footage has now surfaced showing the brutally mutilated bodies of U.S. soldiers captured by Iraqi forces last week. This is the work of a real tyrant.
Protestors of the war need to wake up. The people of Iraq are terrified and in dire need of our help. Those who question the notion of "pre-emptive war" should ask themselves why, if Hussein wasn't planning on attacking anyone, he defied the United Nations in order to keep his weapons of mass destruction -- weapons that could end up in the hands of terrorists who would love to use them against America. Or they might remember that Hussein has already murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people with these chemical weapons. But mostly, those who oppose the war need only look at the terrified faces of the Iraqi people to understand why Hussein must be removed.
"Knowing what we've been through, knowing what the people in Iraq are going through up to now, and then when we see protesters, that they don't know the reality of the people who are suffering right now," said one of the Iraqi women interviewed for "20/20". "They don't know about torture, they don't know about rape."
Protestors can stand on Main Street, wielding signs and denouncing this "unjust" war -- which happens to be supported by 80 percent of the American people ("Support for War Effort Grows," CBSnews.com, March 24) -- without the fear of being thrown into a meat grinder. This is not the case for the Iraqi people, not until Hussein has been removed. Those who deem the war "unjust" do not know what injustice is; those who call Bush a "tyrant" and our soldiers "killers" do not know the reality of the situation. Perhaps next time the war protestors shout to "stop the war," they'll think about the Iraqis, halfway around the world, praying for just the opposite.
(Kristin Brown's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kbrown@cavalierdaily.com.)
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