The White House is planning to launch a war against Iraq. Yet there has been no real public or congressional debate about whether an invasion is justified, no convincing explanation of why a war is needed. The international community is virtually unanimous in its opposition to an attack on Iraq, leaving the United States without allies. A full-scale war against Iraq would isolate the US from the rest of the world, undermine the effort against terrorism, and senselessly kill tens of thousands of civilians. The Bush Administration is determined to initiate an illegal and ill-considered invasion. We the people must be just as determined to prevent a war that threatens to tear the world apart.
The serious moral, legal, political, and strategic problems with a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq require that the American public become engaged in the debate over the wisdom of such a dramatic course of action. What is at stake is not just the lives of thousands of Iraqi and American soldiers and thousands more Iraqi civilians but also the international legal framework established in the aftermath of World War II. Despite its failings, this multilateral framework of collective security has resulted in far greater international stability and far less intergovernmental conflict than would otherwise have been the case.
The Bush administration's plan for preemptive war against Iraq so flagrantly violates both international law and common morality that we need a real national debate.
I bear personal witness through seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations to both the scope of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them.
