God, I love Pierre Foglia. He speaks as if he read my mind and I’m going to take the liberty to translate his last article in La Presse. Then, I’m going to be brave and send him an e-mail to tell him how much I admire him for speaking the voice of many!

LET’S NOT BE COWARDS – by Pierre Foglia © La Presse

I read a call to the weapons in the National Post this weekend… Let’s see… I think I’m starting it all wrong, it was in French, thus it could not be in the Post, it was in Le Devoir, excuse me. I start again. I read in Le Devoir of Saturday the chronicle of a lady who said that it was necessary to make the war with Saddam. And why should it be done? Because, explained the lady, it would be coward not to do it. Quite simply. Translated in the language of the barracks: Let’s show Saddam that we have the balls.

It is not to a lady of her age and her experience who I will explain that those balls are like ideas: we can have some without them being ours. Those precisely, are the sabre-rattler right-wing ideas, and the balls of the flower-with-rifle philosophers since September 11. During all times the right has made of cowardice a psychopathology, and even a hysteria. To negotiate? A cowardice. To temporize? A cowardice. All is dishonorable, except war.

And to sigh all together: Ah, if we had shown more firmness with Hitler!

Should we be reminded that Hitler had an ideological project and a formidable machine of war to apply it? Saddam does not have an ideological project, he does not have a religion, he is not even Muslim, this idiot. And especially, he is the head of NO military power, he is not the head of a country that has been under supervision for 10 years, spied by planes 24 hours a day for 10 years, a country famished, bloodless, taken in the strait jacket of the sanctions. A country without navy, without aviation. A country which the Americans and the English have bombed a little bit every-single-day for 10 years. And is this frightening “power” the one that could put the world in such urgent danger that it is necessary to mass 200.000 men at its borders?

Let us be clear. It will not be a match. Before engaging one single soldier on the ground, Americans will bomb, bomb and bomb. They will destroy the remains of Iraq using, as in 1991, shells containing uranium, shells manufactured with their nuclear waste, with a hard radioactivity that lasts a million years… In 1991, the Americans poured over Iraq the equivalent to seven times the power of the atomic bomb of Hiroshima. Destroying the infrastructures, telecommunications, sewers, all. Between 130.000 and 180.000 people dead, 70% were civilian population (Cited in “La Question Irakienne” by Pierre-Jean Luizard, researcher at CNRS and specialist in the history of contemporary Islam).

A cowardice to try to avoid a completely useless war? A war which, after three weeks of bombings, and the thousands and thousands of deaths, will be concluded by the disbanding of the Iraqi army and massive desertions; a war without combatants, just victims? Two hundred and thousand dead for oil?

An enormous machine to crush a goldbeater’s skin that a blow of pin (a coup d’etat) would be enough to deflate?

Two hundred and thousand dead because you are not able to tolerate five more minutes of Saddam, the monster of the monsters who tortures the little children in front of their parents? How many years did you tolerate Pinochet? Bokassa? Amin Dada? Somoza? Trujillo? Stroessner? Not only you tolerated all these, but you installed them, you armed them, you instructed their torturers, the same way you armed and trained Saddam. And you just saw Saddam’s tortures now? Not? You are not serious, he tortures? But this is terrible! Videla-Massela-Galtieri, does that mean something to you? Presidents of Argentina in the 80s. Thirty thousand died, 30.000 arrested at night, academics, trade unionists, you took them along to make helicopter tour above the sea. Splash. No president of the United States ever threatened Videla, nor Galtieri… It is true that they were in the axis which did good to the American interests in the area.

But I get excited for nothing. The war is a certainty. The war has started. Mr. Bush is now fighting his more difficult battle: that of the public opinion. Where the engagement is total. The enthusiastic mobilization of pacifists gives the impression of a hot resistance. In fact, the opposition of the street, the people, is much more tepid, much softer. And it is in this weaknesss where Mr. Bush strikes. In this weakness, next Wednesday, he will insert his famous evidence that the Iraqis hide weapons of massive destruction.

I heard skeptics laugh this morning because this evidence does not exist, that Washington is manufacturing them with haste. The skeptics will be confused. Mr. Bush keeps in his sleeve, since the very beginning, this evidence. It is not significant if it’s manufactured or not. The significant thing, is that you will be shaken. They will show you tricks, things, cans. “Botulinic Acid” will be written on the top, in Arabic. But they will translate for you, do not worry (now that I think, isn’t this evidence the proof that Saddam can hide nothing?). They will tell you the danger of it all in a scene carefully regulated, drum roll and all tralala. Tadam! The moment was chosen a long time ago as having to be the turning point to gain the public opinion. The goal of the operation is to bring millions of people in the world, to say this exactly: “I was a little against the war, but there, really, Saddam exaggerates!”

More than to war itself, the American and international opinion are opposed to an American intervention without the agreement of the United Nations. That will not happen. I wrote it the other day and I persist: France, Russia, Germany will end up joining Bush and Blair. They all together will fill their small can with gasoline in Baghdad. Mr. Chrétien does not say another thing when my colleagues ask if Canada would follow the United States in a unilateral action, don’t ask hypothetical questions, says he, who knows more than you and me what is coming.

Do not ask if there will be the war. It is already happening. Even as you are the objective of the first great battle. Rest reassured, you will not die. We will just deaden you.