March 11, 2003

Middle Earth, History, and Current Events
Jim Cooper

Dusty 103 asks of the BBC, do these people not read the news? Do they not know history? The answer is, people in other parts of the world read news that our own media refuses to report. Thus, their perception of history is different.

We know that Saddam is a bad guy -- after all, he gassed his own people. We suspect with good reason that Saddam possesses chemical and biological weapons -- after all, the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations authorized the sale of bubonic plague and anthrax agents to him during their tenure. Saddam acquired chemical weapons components from U.S. companies such as Dow Chemical and Union Carbide, and continued to do so even after it was common knowledge that he was using them on his own people. He continued to benefit from monetary aid from the U.S. after it was known that he was guilty of such actions. The rest of the world knows this. Why don't we?

During the Basra engagement in the Gulf War, thousands of fleeing and surrendering Iraqi troops were simply mowed down where they stood. At least one US pilot and one US tank commander refused their orders and ceased fighting in the face of pointless violence. Defense Intelligence Agency documents declassified in 2001 reveal that in 1991, the U.S. government conducted a study that assessed the potential results of bombing Iraq's water sanitation facilities. The study reported that large numbers of Iraqi children would likely die, and Saddam and his army would most likely be unscathed. We then destroyed Iraq's water sanitation facilities anyway. Subsequently, under the U.S. backed U.N. economic embargo of Iraq, we blocked shipments of medicine and of chlorine, which would have treated the polluted water. Massive numbers of Iraqi children began to die. The standard number cited, based on a UNICEF study, is 500,000 deaths. Duplicate studies have estimated between 300,000 and two million deaths of children age 5 and under. Those who support this war tend to blame this on Saddam. They conveniently ignore the fact that it was the U.S. who destroyed the water facilities, with full knowledge of the consequences. According to the Geneva accords, these actions are war crimes. What sort of end can justify these means? Where is the stark line between good and evil?

Who’s invading here? Who’s Saruman, who’s Sauron? IMHO, you can’t apply Middle-Earth to this situation. There absolutely is good in this world. However, it certainly isn’t delineated by national affiliation. There are good people in America, good people in England, and good people in Iraq. Tolkiens books, to me, represent the struggle of good vs. evil -- not nation vs. nation.