Thursday, February 27, 2003

Another Nobel Peace Prize winner supports Bush.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel on Thursday lent his voice to the U.S. campaign against Iraq, urging Europe to unify and increase pressure on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to disarm.

"My only suggestion is ... if Europe were to apply as much pressure on Saddam Hussein as it does on the United States and Great Britain, I think it could prevent war," Wiesel said after a meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Wiesel said that in meeting the president he urged intervention against evil. "I think its a moral duty to intervene when evil has power and uses it," he said.

"I'm against war, but therefore I am for intervention," he said. He called for a "moral intervention" first to pressure Saddam, but said war could be a means of intervention if all other avenues fail.

He said he could not compare Saddam to Germany's Adolf Hitler -- a link Bush's father, former President George Bush, made before the 1991 Gulf war.

But he said the world faced a crisis similar to 1938, when France and Britain accepted German territorial aims in Czechoslovakia in what is now regarded as a model of appeasement that emboldened Hitler to launch war in Europe.

"I would not have gone through certain experiences had the world then, had Britain and France then, used diplomacy and the philosophy of intervention," he said.

Asked whether he saw irony in Germany's current role, Wiesel said, "The young people in Germany have learned the value of peace and I applaud them for that, but they also must learn the value of morality. Morality in foreign affairs."

< email | 2/27/2003 08:00:00 PM | link