March 13, 2003

One must look carefully at one's position when the company one keeps is cowardly or an appeaser of terrorism.  The position of most members of the United Nations Security Council and the Vatican have changed this writer's position on war with Iraq.  This writer shall not be counted in the company of appeasers, cowards, or men of no nobility and no honor.  ^1/  The United States must kill the butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein.

It is clear that the United States, if it seeks to militarily disarm Saddam Hussein, will have to go forward without three of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.  These countries are Russia, China, and France.  Though not a member of the Security Council, Germany likewise does not support US action to enforce UN Resolution 1441.  Only Great Britain stands with the United States.

Russia and China may be dismissed without further ado as their belligerent cold war records speak for themselves.  Disconcerting is Germany's failure to support intervention in Iraq.  With a little more than a half a century of behaving themselves, the Germans now turn their backs on any moral obligations to those who protected them during the cold war.  The Germans have had a decade of economic growth subsequent to the reunification of East and West Germany.  German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder does not want to risk that progress by angering his country's trading partners in the Middle East.

French Cowards

On Monday, March 11, Jacques Chirac, the Président de la République, announced that France would veto any United Nations' resolution authorizing combat.  This position should have come as as no surprise to any student of political history.  France has consistently acted in its private, economic self-interest throughout the 20th Century.  It continues that cowardly legacy in the 21st Century.  ^2/

France has a shameful record of appeasement.  In 1940, as the Panzers of Germany's Wehrmacht were posed to reduce France to rubble, the infamous French traitor, Henri Philippe Pétain, negotiated an Armistice with Adolf Hitler.  A government was set-up in Vichy that collaborated with the Nazis, deporting over 70,000 Jews to Germany and marshalling 650,000 workers to Nazi factories.  The Maquis, or French Underground, spent the next five years battling its own evil government to defeat the Nazi invaders.

The Pentagon calls it "shock and awe."  A poor choice of words.  From World War II, the term is schrecklichkeit.  It means terror war.

Hussein has threatened use of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.  Such use would be a disaster for American troops and the Iraqi populace. To preclude a catastrophe, US military command must wage a campaign of such devastating proportions so as to neuter the Iraqi military's capability to launch such weapons and to compel them to surrender.  It shall be US strategy to blast Hussein and his military into the stone age.  Therefore, one should expect a massive aerial campaign and armor blitzkrieg that will make the 1991 Gulf War look like a training exercise.  The sooner the US Army can destroy the Iraqi military, the less a threat of a chemical or biological attack on American forces.

Footnotes:

1/  The United States should give up trying to convince the UN and act unilaterally.

2/  The French do not deserve to retain their seat on the UN Security Council.