We're in Iraq to
protect Kurds?
By Reggie Rivers
Denver Post Columnist
September 6, 2001
Thursday, September 06, 2001 -
Imagine that Saddam Hussein had taken over the World Trade Center in New York,
and there were 10,000 Americans trapped inside with him. In an attempt to force
him out, we turned off the electricity so the building boiled during the summer
and froze during the winter.
Without electricity, there were no
lights and no way to use any equipment that needed to be plugged in. We cut off
the water supply, so there was nothing to drink, nothing to clean with and the
toilets didn't flush. The longer the standoff lasted, the more unsanitary the
situation became, leading to disease, malnutrition and death.
Would we support this strategy if it
were happening on our soil to Americans? Of course not. But since it's Iraqi
citizens on the other side of the globe, we'll applaud for a full decade while
children continue to die because of the embargo that we instituted. We'll talk
about the evils of Hussein while people die in hospitals from relatively minor
injuries that went untreated because basic medical supplies were unavailable.
I've read that more than 1 million
people have died in Iraq as a result of the decade-long embargo, and nearly half
of those have been children under the age of 5.
We say that we're doing this because
we want to hurt Hussein, but he's living in a well-appointed penthouse at the
top of the Word Trade Center with a generator that provides everything that he
needs. It's the people trapped in the floors below him who suffer.
But we don't care about this genocide
against the Iraqis because we've got to stand behind our government no matter
what it's doing.
Last week, I asked how long we'd sit
by while our government maintained no-fly zones in Iraq, and I've been swarmed
with e-mails from people who complain that I don't understand the basic issue.
It's about the Kurds, they wrote.
Saddam Hussein was killing the Kurds and our no-fly zones are part of a
humanitarian effort to prevent further attacks.
There's no doubt the Kurds lead a
tough life. They've basically been told to assimilate or die. They don't have
political rights, freedom of speech or even the right to speak their own
language. Nearly 2,000 Kurdish villages have been destroyed, forcing more than2
million Kurds to flee into the mountains.
Even there they are not safe, because
the army pursues them for miles and miles and weeks at a time. The Kurds have
been shot, bombed, gassed, raped, tortured, burned and dismembered, and tens of
thousands have been killed.
And that's just what Turkey has done
during the past decade.
That's right. Turkey. Our ally. While
we've maintained the no-fly zone in the north to "protect" the Kurds, Turkey has
continued its open extermination policy against the Kurds, routinely sending its
army across the border into Iraq to get a better shot at the Kurds.
We haven't done anything to stop them
because Turkey is an ally. We launch our planes from Incirlik Air Base in
Turkey. So if the Turks want to kill a few Kurds, we're not going to complain.
In fact, we'll arm them to the teeth so that they can do the job more
effectively.
The Turkish army is using
Lockheed-Martin F-16 fighter planes, Textron-Bell Cobra and Super Cobra attack
helicopters, United Technologies/Sikorsky Black Hawk troop transports and
various U.S. tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery systems to attack
Kurdish villages. Seventy-five percent of Turkey's arms came from the United
States.
But we're in Iraq to protect the
Kurds?
When it comes to foreign policy, we're a nation that mostly accepts whatever the
government tells us without questioning, examining or debating. Even if you
agree with the no-fly zones, how can you agree with an embargo that aims to
unseat Hussein by killing off the youngest, oldest and most infirm people in
Iraq?
Former Denver Broncos player Reggie Rivers (reggierivers@clearchannel.com) writes Thursdays on the Post op-ed page and is a talk host on KHOW Radio (630 AM, weekdays from 3 to 5 p.m.).