The US government has been trying to convince the American public that a war to remove Saddam Hussein from power would be beneficial to us and to the rest of the world. The issues have generally revolved around whether or not Hussein has tried to develop nuclear weapons and missiles that might carry warheads with nuclear tips to other countries. The media, though at first wary, seems to have taken up the cause of the administration over the last week or so, and polls suggest that Americans are nearly ready to support war.

Tony Blair, without much internal support in Britain, is now on President Bush’s side. The rest of Europe is not convinced, and not a single Arab or Asian ally has been found. Without substantial arm-twisting, none will be found.

Many suggest that President Bush is trying to distract the public from problems in the economy and other areas of American life. Others claim that he is building a populist issue to help Republican Senatorial and Congressional candidates in this fall’s election. Both complaints are likely true to some extent, and the media seems to have forgotten these points entirely.

At the current time, there is no evidence of Iraqi nuclear capabilities, nor is there any evidence of missile capability. The President promises to deliver such information shortly. Even if such claims were true, we certainly are in no danger from Iraq, even to the most paranoid imagination.

There are two reasons, however that initiating a war on our parts would be folly: First, this would increase the perception that our country is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, thus giving rise to far more hatred towards us by 25 percent of the world’s population. Second, the syndrome that we will have to help select a successor to Hussein and remain in Iraq for a great many years, at great peril for our forces (consider Afghanistan) and at US taxpayer expense to the tune of tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars.

We have been down this road before. After all, it was we that placed the Shah of Iran back on the throne there, thus giving rise to an opposition movement within Iran that not only overthrew the Shah but also unleashed an unrestrained hatred toward the US and inspired Islamic revolutions around the world. The president’s father also helped install Manuel Noriega in Panama, and supported Hussein in Iraq, and earlier administrations helped overthrow democracy in such countries as Guatemala, Chile and Indonesia all in the name in preventing the spread of Leftist governments. Thus we have a history of meddling in the sovereignty of other nations to achieve short-range goals, and the repercussions have almost always been negative, often severely so. We have inadvertently undermined democracy and given unspoken assent in the slaughter of many thousands around the world, all in the name of furthering our own narrow interests. As in the cases of Iran and Iraq, these original interests came back to kick us in the butt.

I hope that we all keep these points in mind. Do not be swept away by patriotic calls to war; these calls are neither patriotic nor in our own long-range interests, nor in the interests of the Iraqi people who no doubt will suffer even more during any sustained military operation. The embargo that we’ve enforced upon Iraq has claimed somewhere between 50,000-100,000 lives (depending on the agency keeping such figures). The people there blame us for their suffering, and, unlike Afghanistan, will not support our action there. If we undertake military action, millions in the world would be outraged and several countries, particularly Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, would have a very difficult time restraining the extremists in their countries. With such animosity aimed at us over the next decades, the threat of terrorism would no doubt become a permanent part of American life.