And So It Begins ...

By TAD BARTIMUS

War is the ultimate human failure.

President George W. Bush has failed as a leader because he did not keep talking until his administration found a peaceful way to solve the Iraqi crisis.

Congress, by turning a blind eye to its constitutional responsibilities to declare or prevent war, has failed its constituents.

The press - gung ho to report a story that will surely boost ratings, revenues and careers -- has failed to ask hard questions and demand straight answers from elected officials.

Secretary of State Colin Powell -- the only person in Bush's inner circle who knows first-hand the horrors of war -- has failed by renouncing diplomacy for combat, thereby signaling that a dove cannot politically survive in a nest of hawks.

Saddam has failed to obey U.N. weapons inspectors' orders to disarm and most probably has weapons of mass destruction he may soon use against invading forces.

Bush has failed to prove any direct connection between Saddam and the perpetrators of Sept. 11, but insists he has the authority to lead us to war.

On the eve of battle, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein hurl insults and ultimatums at each other while the rest of us -- powerless, frightened, confused -- listen to each leader declare that God is on his side and call the other a demagogue. Both men dismiss the United Nations as irrelevant and ignore Secretary General Kofi Annan's judgment that "war is always a catastrophe."

And so it begins ...

A United Nations agency estimates that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could mean as many as 500,000 civilian casualties, leave 2 million people homeless, 10 million hungry, 18 million without clean water, and risk the lives of 1 million children under age 5 because of malnutrition.

The specter of biological and chemical weapons hovers over the civilian population as well as U.S. troops on the Iraqi military front. Saddam boasts that suicide martyrs will die to keep his corrupt, tyrannical regime in power, and urges a house-to-house defense of Baghdad, a city of 5 million people. U.S. intelligence indicates civilian women, children and the elderly may be used as human shields to slow advancing American troops.

The Pentagon has released information that more than 3,000 bombs and missiles will rain down on Iraq in the invasion's first two days as our hometown boys and girls -- Jimmy, Tom, Scott, Jose, Janice, Tiffani, Alvira, Katy and all the rest of our nervous troops -- don protective suits and charge through the desert to kill and maim and be killed and maimed in the name of democracy.

Where will Iraq's schoolchildren, nursing mothers, hospitalized patients, the aged -- ordinary people trying to survive chaos not of their making -- seek shelter from the onslaught? Perhaps under a doorframe, in a bathtub or facedown in a ditch -- not much protection from high-altitude bombers, tanks, flame throwers and cluster ordnance.

Bush will send more than 250,000 Americans into harm's way, a place where he's never been. Innocents will suffer. Homes will become rubble, disease will spread, hunger will kill, hatred will breed, revenge will be sworn, and rage will swell the ranks of Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamic terrorist groups vowing retribution.

Acting in my name -- and yours -- on orders from our president, our troops will win the battle for Baghdad but lose the hearts and minds of 1 billion Muslims who see our attack on an independent Arab state as an assault on Islam. As a Jihad escalates against us abroad and at home in years to come, we will look back on this time and wonder: how did it happen?

One answer is that the man giving the order for war was a C student who didn't like history, never served in combat and, until he became president, had never traveled outside his own country. He was raised in privilege, elected in controversy, surrounded by his father's advisers and spun by experts. He ignored the protests of millions of his own citizens and alienated allies who dated back to the American Revolution. He brushed aside the United Nations because it would not do his bidding and arbitrarily declared, on March 17, 2003, that:

"The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now."

Why then? Because George W. Bush had run out of patience.

Such a reason does not justify the taking of a single human life.

The world has become too small for armed conflict. If, as the president said, there is no longer any room for totalitarian regimes and weapons of mass destruction, neither is there any further use for the concept of a "just war."

Our enemies on this increasingly inter-connected planet are not our fellow human beings, but poverty, disease, ignorance and disillusionment. Until these universal foes are eliminated we're doomed to exterminate ourselves.

© 2003 The Women Syndicate

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