Editor,
I am writing this letter in response to the Daily Lobo opinion column, "Iraqi situation deteriorates."
The racial undertones of the article are hard to ignore. I find it immoral that the left is bent on dismissing the aspirations of the Iraqi people in order to use them to punish President Bush.
The column's lengthy litany of fallacies did not offer a single solution for a serious issue. It complains about the democratic process going on in Iraq and claims that it will lead to civil war.
What is so terrible about the majority in Iraq patiently listening to the nonsense of the minority who still want a dictatorship? Here in America, for more than 12 years, we have not been able to come up with a solution for a simple problem like health care. I find the statement about the democratic process in Iraq being supported by some Iraqi-government officials misinformed. Are Saddam Hussein and his Baath party - the only ones who oppose democracy in Iraq - the only legitimate Iraqi officials?
In case you did not know, the current government officials in Iraq are the only legitimately elected officials in the Arab world. I will just enumerate some of the remarkable achievements of the Iraqi people within the last two years. The most remarkable thing is the self-restraint the majority of Iraqis have shown in the face of the atrocities the thugs in Iraq have been committing.
Every time a military or police recruitment center is attacked, there is a new, longer line of volunteers standing in the same place the next day. The revolution of the 8 million Iraqis' blue fingers is a much more eloquent statement than the tons of paper the left in this country is wasting to overshadow this achievement.
The majority of people and politicians in Iraq have made it clear that they want a separation of church and state. Adding the statement that Islam is one of the sources of law in the Iraqi Constitution is no different than saying that law in America is based on the Judeo-Christian heritage.
The left in the West and the Arab world keep pretending that the majority of the Iraqi people are not grateful to America for ridding them of a brutal dictatorship.
You show me an Iraqi who is not glad that Saddam Hussein was deposed, and I will show you a formerly privileged Baathist. The Iraqis did not have roses to display, but their dancing in the streets was all they had to display to the world the expression of their happiness with being liberated from Saddam's nightmare.
Some wonder, if this is true, how come they don't expose the terrorists among them? Here in America, despite the vast resources we have, we have not been able to eradicate organized crime that we have been fighting for generations. For sure, the people surrounding these criminals know who they are. The fact is that the terrorists in Iraq have no support among the Iraqi people and have been defeated politically. Even the head scholar of the Salafi Wahabbist group in Iraq came out and condemned these thugs as deviant, evil people.
What keeps the thugs in Iraq going is their hope that the left in America will force the American government to retreat from Iraq. America betrayed the Iraqis in 1990 and again in 1993. Are we going to betray them again in their hour of need because they are not white or Christian or Jewish?
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Sami Shakir
UNM alumnus
