bombs away

It is old news, but the context today has North Korea with live nuclear weapons, as North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan from North Korea admitted, as on a pbs.org show transcript on US- North Korean affairs. The UN had devoted the month of May of this year to try to come to an agreement on policies concerning disarmament and existing nuclear programs, as part of the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference". The Secretary General, Kofi Annan must have known how hard it would be to see his vision through of a "system of collective security for the 21st century" when he started the conference off, at one point remarking that "the consequences of failure are too great to aim for anything less" (from a transcript of his speech). The US' administration would not reaffirm previous claims to disarmament, but still attacked North Korea and Iran's nuclear arms programs.

We're living in an extension of the Cold War, except now, nuclear fears live with more and more countries joining the nuke race. You have to stop and consider the world's states, from a Martian point of view, to ask why the bigger countries who have the WMDs feel they are so much better at controlling their use than those countries that are just beginning to harvest them. A mid May UN press briefing raised the issue of how the US could possibly pressure start-ups like Iran to quit their nuclear programs after what they have done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US has been using its non-nuclear WMDs in Iraq, making its people's lives a living hell since the very day the war officially started, March 20th 2003. The war's mission had the perfect title, ''Operation Iraqi Freedom,' telling the US people that the goal in bombing Baghdad was to free its people. The Iraqis obviously did not understand that in order to be free they must first die (or maybe we are warping another Islamic premise here? Hey aren't terrorists just Muslims who want to serve Allah by killing us so that they may quickly ascend to paradise? How could they do that? Let's bomb them). The point is that despite 9 - 11, the USS Cole bombing of 2000, the US Embassy bombings of 1998 (which didn't happen on US soil anyway), or even the anthrax scare, we still do not really know what it must be like to live in a true war zone. We can only see snapshots of people dying in Iraq, see the daily body counts of daily 'insurgency labeled' bombings, or witness the names of our own deceased soldiers as they pass down our television screens when our networks feel like making us cry.

That other world is full of terrorists who simply want to kill us and no one knows why. As our Commander in Chief has stated in his 2002 State of the Union address,

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

We must stop them because they threaten world peace. They should have listened to him then, three years ago. They should have known we had to prove ourselves in combat. I truly believe that we are the agressors and that we have allowed countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan to aggregate too much resentment towards us. It is blowing up in our faces, and we can only have speeches like the last reference to put a positive (?) front on our actions. (It doesn't end here, and it did not start with Iraq or the Persian Gulf wars. Historians will tell you the story of 19th and 20th c colonialism, of Euro-US domination of the rest of the globe, as well as the world wars that shaped our times and the political angsts that shaped the times of the world wars. There are no easy solutions. What we have today is an accumulation of way too many issues to be blamed on one president. But we must live in the now, stop ignoring continents like Africa where disease is still a killer threat, and stop creating a US public that is fed by simple speeches that represent our world as a good/evil dichotomy.)