Opinion

Bush's opponents are all wrong

Matthew Caster

This column is not directed at the British, Australians, Italians, or anyone else who has voiced support of the Presidentis hard-line stand against the cruel dictatorship in Iraq and all others who oppose freedom and responsible government around the world.

Nope, this column is meant to offend the French, the Germans, the Russians and anyone else who is convinced nothing needs to be done in Iraq.

Just recently, the Iraqi people re-elected an unopposed "President" Saddam Hussein by an overwhelming 100 percent. Iraqi women and children are being handed AK-47s and marched around in front of television cameras chanting that they will die to defend Saddam from the American infidels. Anyone else find that a little suspicious? Heck, Saddamis own son has stated that, if America attacks Iraq, we will suffer a misfortune that "makes 9/11 look like a joke." We should nuke iem just for threatening something like that.

The Russians, it seems, have a large volume of commerce with the Iraqis that they are afraid will be terminated if a pro-regime-change power invades. So the general idea coming from the Russian Republic is that trade with a brutal regime that has a reputation of killing its own people still looks OK on a balance sheet.

The French seem content to sit around eating cheese, drinking wine and not wearing any deodorant while Iraq and the rest of the Middle East seethes with hatred for Judeo-Christian religions and Western capitalism.

The Germans apparently learned such a great lesson from being soundly thrashed in the two previous world wars that theyive become the sissies of Europe, afraid even to support action to remove a dictator as cruel as the one who got them whipped 60 years ago.

Even in this country, opponents of war in Iraq (roughly 40 percent of the nation, recent polling by Fox News reported) still remain firm in their stance that diplomacy should be the only means of resolving this problem. Anyone remember how well diplomacy worked in Europe in the late 1930s? And look now at how diplomacy is working on the Korean peninsula, as the two nations have had every single weapon in their arsenal pointed at one another since the 1950s.

I just wish everyone would stand up and face the music. Sometimes, a good fight is the only way to solve a bad problem. Was there such a thing as diplomacy on the playground when you were a little kid? Not if the teacher wasnit looking.

We can either whine about the Iraq problem for the next two years waiting for the inspections to fail, while Saddam builds up his forces and increases his stashes of chemical, biological, and perhaps even nuclear weapons, or we can go over there and in 30 days or less (Iim betting) clean everything up.

We watched and waited while the Nazis took over most of Europe last century. We watched and waited while the Taliban regime took over and oppressed the Afghan people. We seem to be watching and waiting while Saddam builds his forces, strikes out against his own people and waits for the chance to obliterate American and Israeli interests in the region. America has the chance now to stop this madness before it builds further. Waiting longer only lets the problems in the region grow harder to control.

The time will soon come when our nation will act, and no matter how vocally the world opposes our pre-emptive efforts, soon everyone will come to realize that what we have done is better for us, better for the Iraqi people and better for the world as a whole. That, my friends, is a fight we ought to start.

Caster, a senior petroleum engineering major, can be reached at patrioticcatmaster@yahoo.com