See the letter to President Bush questioning the legitimacy of the war in Iraq!

THE LETTER

Mr. President, I am a writer from a poor nation, a country that was once on your black list. Millions of Mozambicans were unaware of what harm we had done you. We were small and poor: what threat could we pose? Our weapon of mass destruction was, after all, turned against us: it was famine and misery... Some of us found it strange that our name should be tarnished while other nations benefited from your sympathy. For example, our neighbor - apartheid South Africa - was flagrantly violating human rights. For decades we were victims of that regime's aggression. But the apartheid regime earned from you a more lenient attitude: the so-called constructive engagement. The ANC was also on the black list as a terrorist organization!. A strange criterion that would lead, years later, to the Taliban and Bin Laden himself being called freedom fighters by American strategists. Well I, a poor writer from a poor country, had a dream. As Martin Luther King once dreamed that America was a nation of all Americans. I dreamed that I was not a man but a country. Yes, a country that could not sleep. Because it lived startled by terrible facts. And that fear made it proclaim a demand. A demand that had to do with you, Dear President. And I demanded that the United States of America proceed to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction. Because of those terrible dangers I demanded more: that United Nations inspectors be sent to your country. What terrible dangers alerted me? What fears did your country inspire in me? They were not products of a dream, unfortunately. They were facts that fed my mistrust. The list is so long that I will choose only a few: The United States was the only nation in the world to drop atomic bombs on other nations; Your country was the only nation condemned for illegitimate use of force by the International Court of Justice; American forces trained and armed the most extremist Islamic fundamentalists (including the terrorist Bin Laden) on the pretext of overthrowing the Russian invaders in Afghanistan; The regime of Saddam Hussein was supported by the USA while it carried out the worst atrocities against Iraqis (including the gassing of the Kurds in 1998); Like so many other legitimate leaders, the African Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with the help of the CIA. After being arrested, tortured and shot in the head, his body was dissolved in hydrochloric acid; Like so many other puppets, Mobutu Seseseko was brought to power by your agents and granted special facilities to American espionage: the CIA headquarters in Zaire became the largest in Africa. The brutal dictatorship of this Zairean earned no reproach from the USA until he ceased to be convenient, in 1992; The invasion of East Timor by the Indonesian military earned the support of the USA. When the atrocities became known, the Clinton Administration's response was the matter is the responsibility of the Indonesian government and we do not wish to take that responsibility away from them; Your country harbored criminals like Emmanuel Constant, one of the most bloodthirsty leaders of Haiti whose paramilitary forces massacred thousands of innocents. Constant was tried in absentia and the new authorities requested his extradition. The American government refused the request. In August 1998, the US Air Force bombed a medicine factory in Sudan, called Al-Shifa. A mistake? No, it was retaliation for the bomb attacks in Nairobi and Dar-es-Saalam. In December 1987, the United States was the only country (along with Israel) to vote against a motion condemning international terrorism. Even so, the motion was approved by the vote of one hundred and fifty-three countries. In 1953, the CIA helped prepare the coup against Iran following which thousands of Tudeh communists were massacred. The list of coups prepared by the CIA is quite long. Since the Second World War, the USA has bombed: China (1945-46), Korea and China (1950-53), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-1961), Guatemala (1960), Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1961-1973), Vietnam (1961-1973), Cambodia (1969-1970), Guatemala (1967-1973), Grenada (1983), Lebanon (1983-1984), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980), Nicaragua (1980), Iran (1987), Panama (1989), Iraq (1990-2001), Kuwait (1991), Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1994-95), Sudan (1998), Afghanistan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999); Acts of biological and chemical terrorism were carried out by the USA: Agent Orange and defoliants in Vietnam, the plague virus against Cuba which for years devastated pig production in that country. The Wall Street Journal published a report announcing that 500,000 Vietnamese children were born deformed as a consequence of the chemical warfare of the American forces. I awoke from the nightmare of sleep to the nightmare of reality. The war that you, Mr. President, insisted on starting may free us from a dictator. But we will all be poorer. We will face greater difficulties in our already precarious economies and we will have less hope in a future governed by reason and morality. We will have less faith in the regulating force of the United Nations and the conventions of international law. We will, in the end, be more alone and more helpless. Mr. President, Iraq is not Saddam. It is 22 million mothers and children, and men who work and dream as ordinary Americans do. We are concerned about the evils of the Saddam Hussein regime, which are real. But you forget the horrors of the first Gulf War in which more than 150,000 men lost their lives... What is massively destroying the Iraqis is not Saddam's weapons. It is the sanctions that led to a humanitarian situation so grave that two United Nations aid coordinators (Dennis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck) resigned in protest against those very sanctions. Explaining the reason for his resignation, Halliday wrote: We are destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrible as that. And it is illegal and immoral. That system of sanctions has already led to the death of half a million Iraqi children. But the war against Iraq is not about to begin. It began long ago. In the no-fly zones in the North and South of Iraq bombings have been happening continuously for 12 years. It is believed that 500 Iraqis have been killed since 1999. The bombing included the massive use of depleted uranium (300 tons, or 30 times more than that used in Kosovo). We will rid ourselves of Saddam. But we will remain prisoners of the logic of war and arrogance. I do not want my children (nor yours) to live dominated by the ghost of fear. And to think that, in order to live in peace, they need to build a fortress. And that they will only be safe when fortunes must be spent on weapons. Like your country, which spends 270,000,000,000,000 dollars (two hundred and seventy trillion dollars) per year to maintain its war arsenal. You know very well what that sum could do to change the miserable fate of millions of beings. The American bishop Monsignor Robert Bowan wrote you at the end of last year a letter entitled Why does the world hate the USA? The bishop of the Catholic Church of Florida is a former combatant in the Vietnam War. He knows what war is and wrote: You claim that the USA are the target of terrorism because we defend democracy, freedom and human rights. How absurd, Mr. President! We are targets of terrorists because, in most of the world, our government has defended dictatorship, slavery and human exploitation... We are targets of terrorists because we are hated. And we are hated because our government has done hateful things. In how many countries have agents of our government deposed popularly elected leaders, replacing them with military dictators, puppets eager to sell their own people to American multinational corporations? And the bishop concludes: The people of Canada enjoy democracy, freedom and human rights, just like the people of Norway and Sweden. Have you ever heard of attacks on Canadian, Norwegian or Swedish embassies? We are hated not because we practice democracy, freedom or human rights. We are hated because our government denies those things to the peoples of Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinationals. Mr. President, Your Excellency seems not to need an international institution to legitimize your right to military intervention. At least let us find morality and truth in your argumentation. I and millions more citizens were not convinced when we saw you justify the war. We would prefer to see you sign the Kyoto Convention to contain the greenhouse effect. We would prefer to have seen you in Durban at the International Conference against Racism. Do not worry, Mr. President. We, the small nations of this world, would never think of demanding your resignation because of the support that your successive administrations granted to no less successive dictators. The greatest threat weighing on America is not the weapons of others. It is the universe of lies that has been created around your citizens. The danger is not the regime of Saddam, nor any other regime. But the sentiment of superiority that seems to animate your government. Your main enemy is not outside. It is within the USA. That war can only be won by the Americans themselves. I would like to be able to celebrate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And celebrate with all Americans. But without hypocrisy, without argumentation and consumption of the mentally impaired. Because we, dear President Bush, we, the peoples of the small countries, have a weapon of mass construction: the ability to think.