Vereen Bell – Professor of English

I am not on principle a pacifist. I am also not unfriendly to the idea of a regime change in Iraq, by some means, if it would have the effect of lifting the irrational sanctions against Iraq. The sanctions alone have been much more effective in killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens–a huge proportion of them children–than any imaginable weapons of mass destruction. Saddam, meanwhile, continues to thrive. I also believe that if it had not been pushed by the Bush administration the UN would have remained comatose in regard to these issues. But I am not afraid of Iraq, and I don’t know anyone who is. Fear of Iraq under present conditions seems ludicrous to me. I am very afraid–for our moral as well as our geopolitical standing in the world, for the world’s economy, and for the future of everyone’s children–of the consequences of war with Iraq, virtually all of which are unpredictable. Our plan to invade Iraq at the cost of thousands of more innocent lives seems to me not only underexplained but cynical and unjust. If Wendell Berry, on one end, and Norman Schwarzkopf, on the other, are opposed to the war, then I am too.