LETTER: Lies about Iraq

Editor: In reference to Mike Thompson’s guest commentary of
October 9, I had already planned to vote for Representative
Thompson before I read his piece, even though I’ve mostly quit
voting for corporate politicians. I wanted to reward him for his
voting against the war mongering of our unelected President, and
for his trip to Iraq, and his attendant resistance to the
presidentially-based nonsense that debate, dissent and
information-gathering are somehow unpatriotic.
Even though Thompson’s got a solid anti-war backing in his
constituency, it still took courage in the current Washington
political climate, ruled by fear, to do what he did. Okay, no Green
ran against him, either; but I could have abstained.
My vote comes with this: I must point out how he lied in his
commentary. He wrote: “I also saw the despair that breeds
terrorism. Through Hussein’s repression, children are dying from
curable diseases because they have no access to medicine. Raw
sewage contaminates drinking water. People are afraid to talk
openly. It is appalling to see how this dictator has turned a
nation once so rich into a wasteland of disease and despair —
devoid of hope. ”
I have no doubt Hussein is a fascist dictator who stifles open
talk and whose policies squelch hope and spread despair, Mike, but
who was it, exactly, who dropped roughly 7 1/2 Hiroshimas worth of
bombs on greater Baghdad in early 1991? Also, Mike, who has blocked
the shipment to Iraq, for the last 12 years, of basic foodstuffs
and medicines that could have saved hundreds of thousands of mostly
children, aged, and infirm that died from that raw sewage problem
you mentioned, created by the infrastructure-destroyers in my first
question?
It’s us, in case you forgot: U.S.! It’s exactly these kinds of
lies that help keep U.S. citizens in denial about the very real,
“ground zero” effects of our prodigious bombing of the Iraqi
people, and the genocide-by-deprivation that has followed in the
form of “sanctions”. I cast a vote in your direction in favor of
more truth; that you might find enough courage to speak it. When it
comes to corporate politicians, though, I’m nearly – as you put it
– devoid of hope. But the Iraq tour surprised me, whereas your
commentary did not. Surprise me some more, please. I’m more than
ready.
Art Read, Healdsburg