Professor's perspective: Family vendetta doesn’t warrant war

The threat of incurring the wrath of much of the world, the
start of a major war and an irreversible cultural conflict rests on
the irritability or impatience of a single man who has never shown
much interest in the world or its cultures. This reminds me of
those storybook dictators whose burnt toast at breakfast determines
how many heads they will lop off before lunch.

I have some of the same family issues as a president who
personalizes or sentimentalizes so many of his decisions and seeks
revenge for a contract with his dad.

I, too, want to be in a closed room with Saddam Hussein ““
winner take all.

In 1991 my 11-year-old daughter was put on a plane by her French
grandmother in Paris. She was flying as an unaccompanied minor to
India. Her mom was eagerly awaiting her in the Madras airport, but
she never made it. The flight’s short fueling layover in
Kuwait happened to coincide with the very hour that Hussein’s
paratroops hit the tarmac.

His troops kept her in Kuwait City for a few days, then forced
her on a train up the Tigris and Euphrates. She was so resourceful
under these conditions ““ making friends along the way ““
in the style of the kid on the loose in wartime in Steven
Spielberg’s film, “Empire of the Sun,” but for
some strange reason this only makes me angrier.

They kept her at the Al Rashid Hotel under guard, until her
transfer to our embattled embassy where she was put to work, making
herself useful by shredding documents. Unlike the families kept as
human shields, they let her escape to Amman, Jordan. The trip
proved to be an iffy proposition until a sharp Wyoming guy bribed
the border guards with cigarettes.

But this father’s urge to settle a personal score
doesn’t mean I also want to storm and starve a
country’s population and lay waste to their homeland.

It doesn’t mean I back a war because of its
“beneficial political by-product,” as the Bush
administration put it, in distracting Americans from their shaky
economy, or because it will serve as a field test for the decade of
sophisticated weapons development since Desert Storm or a rehearsal
for the battlefield strategies which may be necessary against the
rest of the Axis of Evil.

It doesn’t mean I endorse the daily humiliations visited
upon the Palestinian people which are at the root of much of this
anger which he is personally about to bring back upon us
tenfold.

It doesn’t mean I am willing to turn over my beloved
country to the trio of “Precogs” (Cheney, Rumsfeld and
Ashcroft), so reminiscent of another Spielberg film,
“Minority Report,” who are able to predict which
Americans are disloyal, what crimes they will commit, and
incarcerating or evicting them before they do.

It doesn’t mean I support the erosion of our civil
liberties or the surrender of citizens like the demonstrating
students from my classes to official surveillance or accusations of
un-Americanism.

It doesn’t mean I approve of filling those degrading perp
kennels with blindfolded and chained prisoners who are held without
charges in Guantanamo Bay ““ these cells are so illegal and
un-American they can’t even be placed on our soil.

It doesn’t mean I support the snubbing of deliberations by
experienced diplomats and arms experts. It doesn’t mean I
want turn over to this president the right to decide which leaders
of totalitarian regimes are worth handling with gloves and which
must be snuffed out.

My desire to go one-on-one with Hussein doesn’t disdain
the skills of peacemakers like Kofe Annan, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy
Carter, Vaclav Havel and others who are only a phone call away. It
doesn’t mean I trust the war mongers who weep every time
another shot of the twin towers hits the screen and return to their
desks to tally how many innocent Iraqi men, women and children will
be acceptable collateral damage.

It doesn’t mean any Americans should die for Middle
Eastern oil, and it doesn’t mean that my children and
grandchildren should have to huddle in fear all their lives because
of the whirlwinds of terror that our present administration is
intent on reaping.

Inside every sentimentalist, someone said, beats the heart of a
tyrant.

Not in my name. Not in my name.