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UNDILAH PAS DAN BARISAN ALTERNATIF
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Absurd World
Arthur Miller, not my favorite playwright, is nevertheless opening a new
play in Minnesota, "Resurrection Blues," which attempts to satirize the
vicious and absurd state the world has gotten itself into recently.
And the world certainly has ventured into the absurd. Marxist guerrillas
setting off bombs to protest the inauguration of Colombia's new president
kill mostly the poor in Bogot slums. We, of course, kill 500,000 Iraqi
children because they (presumably the children) won't overthrow Saddam
Hussein.
Saddam's neighbors say publicly and directly to the president that they
oppose an American attack and do not feel threatened by Saddam, and how does
the president reply? In the most absurd fashion, like a dummy cut off from
all outside communications, he says, "Saddam is a threat to his neighbors,"
while 6 feet away one of those neighbors, Jordan's King Abdullah, had come
specifically to urge Bush not to attack Iraq.
When I look at some of Bush's statements I find it impossible to imagine
Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower making them. I cannot
imagine any of the three flatly contradicting a guest in the presence of the
guest on a matter of fact on which the guest obviously has the most direct
knowledge. How does Mr. Bush know better than the king of Jordan that Iraq
is a threat to Jordan?
There is no end to absurdity. Mr. Bush's position is, in a screwball way, a
compliment to Saddam Hussein. Deterrence worked against Josef Stalin, one of
the greatest mass murderers in human history, even though he was armed with
a million times more weapons of mass destruction than Iraq, but, in Mr.
Bush's view, it will not work against Saddam.
Then, too, there is the absurdity of the United States simply deciding on
its own that the government of a sovereign nation has to be changed by
force. How would you feel if the president of China announced that the
United States was part of an axis of evil, was a threat to its neighbors,
had gassed its own people (Davidians at Waco) and therefore China was going
to see to it that there is a change of regime in the United States?
The other day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld simply stated, without
any evidence, that members of al-Qaida are in Iraq. A few facts: The
government of Iraq is secular and views Islamist fundamentalists such as
al-Qaida as vermin; The New York Times has reported that some outside
fundamentalists, possibly al-Qaida, have moved into the Kurdish areas of
Iraq. The Kurds, split among communists, nationalists and fundamentalists,
are "America's allies," with an 80-year-history of failed revolts - not a
few of them because the United States cut and ran, as the CIA did most
recently in northern Iraq.
I personally was glad to see that Saudi Arabia flatly said "no" to any
American military action against Iraq based on Saudi soil. When we have a
president who seems unable to listen to advice, who seems almost inhuman in
his ability to repeat obvious falsehoods, then we have to rely on other
countries to force some restraint.
We have no reason whatsoever to go to war with Iraq. Iraq is not a threat to
its neighbors or to us. No evidence whatsoever has been found linking Iraq
to any terrorist act against the United States in the past decade. And who
governs Iraq is none of our business.
I don't know what the real reason is for Mr. Bush's determination to go to
war with Iraq. Probably it has to do with oil. Iraq has more oil reserves
than any country on earth except Saudi Arabia. If it could get its oil
production back to its prewar level, the world price of oil would certainly
drop. It can't get its production back up, however, because we won't allow
it to buy the equipment necessary.
In retrospect, I wish we had had a better choice in the last presidential
race. Our foreign affairs should not resemble the theater of the absurd.
© 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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