Tuesday, March 11, 2003

A Cambodian Muslim Professor, living in Guam supports a war to end the rule of Saddam.

I, for one, have never been a proponent of war. I protested the Vietnam War during my college days. But terrorism and Iraq shake me to my core.

I am a Muslim. The Koran (5:32) says: "(W)hoever slays a person who had not committed murder or horrendous crimes, it shall be as if he had slain the whole of humanity. And whoever has spared a life, it would be as if he had spared the lives of all people."

A visit to Ground Zero in New York made me numb. How could there be anyone as terrible as Pol Pot, whose policies sent 1.7 million Cambodians to death -- including my parents -- while the world watched in 1975-1978? That Osama bin Laden thanked Heaven for bringing down the World Trade Center, and Saddam Hussein approved, sent a chill down my spine.

The commander of al-Anfal [a campaign that killed 180,000 Kurds] was Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan Majid. Iraqi documents of the al-Anfal campaign include orders and a ledger of executions of men, women and children. Peter Galbraith wrote in the Boston Globe that Iraqi forces videotaped executions and torture sessions, "a bureaucracy of killing." Human Rights Watch charged the Hussein regime with "crimes of genocide."

Claudia Rosett quoted an e-mail from an Iraqi in northern Iraq: "The 'No Blood for Oil' signs are particularly galling." She wrote in the Wall Street Journal that people in northern Iraq are not protesting the "imminent fight," but they "have been preparing to join" the fight to bring down Hussein.

It is a wonder why President George W. Bush would not just say plainly that the United States chooses to fight a war to end a regime of genocide.

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