February 1998
 

Dear Mr President,

Please consider what you are threatening to do.

You are threatening the lives of thousands of innocent people, including
women and children, to punish one man - a dictator. You are threatening
to destroy Iraq's chemical and biological arsenals by bombing them and
therefore releasing their poisonous contents into the atmosphere to be
breathed in by those people. You have not even excluded the ultimate
threat: the use of nuclear weapons on those people.

Will this threat secure the right to inspect all Saddam's facilities?
Even if it did, biological weapons can be kept in a two-bedroom flat or a
farm or anywhere. The inspections in themselves will not stop Saddam
if he wants to develop these weapons. Nor will threats to bomb his
people, who either support him and are prepared to die, or don't support
him and he would prefer to see dead. The only solution is a political
solution.

88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq in 1991 did not solve the problem,
nor has the deprivation of food and medicine through sanctions helped to
change the minds of the people of Iraq. It has only served to make them
believe Saddam even more. Over a million have died, more than half of
whom were children, as a result of these sanctions. 4,500 children under
the age of 5 are dying every month from starvation and treatable
diseases.

And now you want to bomb them again.

What day and age are we living in, when the United States cannot find
other solutions to conflicts than killing? What double standards are in
play when noone cares about Mordechai Vanunu, nearly 12 years in
solitary confinement for telling the world that Israel secretly has
developed nuclear weapons, while the Iraqi people must be annihilated
because Saddam tried to do the same thing?

Mr President, I beg you to see reason. Do not bomb Iraq.

Signed by: