Like most Americans, I support wholeheartedly President Bush'sdecision to send military forces into the Persian Gulf area to thwartthe aggressions of Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
My great reservation is that millions of Americans do not fullyunderstand that, in making a military move of moral and politicalprinciple, our president is placing some 50,000 American boys betweenIraq and a hard place. And when the going gets tough and we begin tocount the casualties, a lot of Americans will claim they weren'taware of the perils.
We know the Iraq side of the deadly jaws into which our GIs arebeing sent: a nation with a ruthless leader who has more than amillion almost suicidal troops under arms, an arsenal of mustard andnerve gases in artillery shells, bombs, missile heads - which Husseinhas used to win an eight-year war against Iran and the Kurds - andIraqis inspired by all the emotions of race and religion to believethat they can "annex" anything within their grasp. The "hard place"is the spot from which "the devil," the United States, assumes therole of destroying Saddam Hussein's Iraq so as to guarantee suppliesof Persian Gulf oil to the factories, schoolhouses and automobiles ofTokyo, Tallahassee, Toronto and Tipperary.
An awesome number of Arabs and Palestinians are siding withHussein, propelled by grievances, hatreds, notions of ethnicsolidarity that are centuries old.
My view from the start has been that Hussein is on a madmission, and that he will commit the lives of a million Iraqis, hisentire arsenal of chemical warfare, to make the gulf area a"graveyard" before he will retreat. The United States has entered anarena of warfare in which a lot of people are going to die. Those ofus who have exhorted the president to stand strong must not becomeweak-kneed when we begin to see what could be a gruesome price ofstanding up to a grotesque tyrant.
Carl T. Rowan is a nationally syndicated columnist of theChicago Sun-Times.
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