Essay by Micah Ian Wright
From Micah Ian Wright book of posters called YOU BACK THE ATTACK - WE'LL BOMB WHO WE WANT

Two months before launching "Operation Iraqi Freedom" President Bush, in his January 2003 State of the Union speech, virtually declared war against Iraq. To convince Americans to "back the attack", Bush presented a history lesson on how "the will for free peoples" and the "Might of the United States" had defeated "Hitlerism", militarism, and Communism." But Bush's comparison of Iraq to Germany and the Soviet Union is fatally flawed.

At the outbreak of World War II, Germany was the most powerful industrial nation in the world. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union, whose army was the largest in the world, kept nuclear weapons trained at the United State. That Iraq has emerged from the 1991 Gulf War, however, has little in the way of offensive military capacity.

The world is united in condemming Saddam Hussein for his atrocious human rights record, including his use of torture. But President Bush is disingenuous when he cites this record as a basis for an American attack on Iraq. The U.S does not bomb, or even condemn, other countries because they engage in human rights violations. To the contrary, since September 11, 2001, the U.S. has knowingly accepted information extracted from SUSPECTED terrorists by intelligence agencies in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and other countries that routinely torture prisoners. Is this war against Iraq simply about the regime of Saddam Hussein or is it about access to Iraqi oil, our dominance in the Middle East, and the building of an American empire.

QUOTE OF THE DAY ... If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers. Thomas Pynchon