U.S. welcome?

To the editor:

In his response to my letter, Stan Hazlett makes the remarkable speculation that, because Saddam gassed Kurdish people, Iraqi mothers will welcome a U.S. attack. Not so, according to the Toronto Star’s Oct. 4 article, “Iraqi children live in fear of bombings.” And, according to MSNBC (Sept. 14), even many Kurds fear a U.S. invasion. After all, the United States provided Saddam with the materials and technology for making chemical weapons, and it continued those shipments long after Saddam began gassing the Kurds in 1988 (see Scotland’s Sunday Herald Sept. 8).

Why else might Iraqi mothers fear U.S. bombs? The U.S. Gulf War campaign and subsequent bombing attacks killed thousands of innocent Iraqis. In addition, Denis Halliday, a former high U.N. official, states Iraq’s entire civilian infrastructure electric, water, health, and sewage systems were bombed in the war. This, combined with a decade of U.S.-led sanctions, has turned Iraq into a “humanitarian catastrophe” (Boston Globe, March 22, 1999). According to U.N. estimates, 5,000 children die per month as a direct result of sanctions. The Toronto Star article also states that cancers and abnormal births are increasing rapidly due to the depleted uranium in U.S. bombs.

Both the United States and Saddam have inflicted cruelty and death on innocent Iraqi people. A child who is bombed, starved or diseased by the United States for a theoretically noble cause is no less dead. When dropping bombs on other countries, it is unfortunate that Americans so often conclude, without asking, that these bombs are welcome.

Lora Jost,

Lawrence