by Andrew Price
Daily Lobo columnist
Four and a half years after Sept. 11, 2001, and three years after the Iraq war, the debate over policy has been bitter and divisive in this country.
Against the advice of his defense lawyers, Zacarias Moussaoui took the stand Monday in his own defense, and promptly made the prosecution's and the defense's cases.
Moussaoui told of how he had dreamed about flying a plane into the White House, and how after telling Osama bin Laden about this dream, bin Laden chose him to be one of the Sept. 11 hijackers. He also said Richard Reid, the infamous "Shoe Bomber," was to be one of his crew. Oddly enough, he claims he doesn't know any of the others who were to commit this cowardly crime with him.
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When asked if he had lied to officials after his capture, he claims to have done so in order to avoid our interference in the attacks - in other words, he is guilty as charged.
The defense, on the other hand, has been saying all along that Moussaoui is crazy and therefore shouldn't get the death penalty, because it is cruel and unusual punishment to execute mentally ill people.
What I am wondering is, what difference does it make? Would we all feel better knowing that the people flying planes into our buildings are nutcases? By our standards they are crazy, but there seems to be no shortage of people willing to die in order to inflict terror and cause death. They are fighting for an ideology that the Western world just can't seem to understand.
Is this war in Iraq something the Bush family is waging for personal enrichment, or is it an inevitable conflict caused by two societies so alien to each other that the question of conflict was when it would happen, not if it would happen?
Yasser Arafat once stood in front of the general assembly of the United Nations, pistol holstered at his side, and said that all nations had fought for independence at one time or another. Are people like the hijackers freedom fighters struggling for the right to govern themselves as they see fit, or are they fighting for the right to take away our right to govern ourselves the way we see fit?
If the ultimate goal is the peaceful sovereignty of their respective nations, then we are completely in the wrong and should withdraw from these conflicts immediately. On the other hand, if governments and borders are not the issue, and we are facing a radical sect of a major religion - a radical sect that thinks its God wants the whole world bowing to Mecca and agreeing to live under the oppressive rules and dogma they intend to impose upon us - then I say it is not only the right thing for us to do, it is our obligation to engage these people for the good of our children and grandchildren.
The debate over the last three years of the Iraq War has been divisive in this country. The question as to whether Iraq was even part of the problems we are discussing has been central to the debate. None of the banned weapons have been found, and perhaps the ousting of Saddam Hussein was a knee-jerk reaction to the cowardly attacks of Sept. 11.
But the consensus among all the intelligence agencies in the world was that Iraq either had those weapons or was close to having them. Saddam was, and still is, a sworn enemy of the United States, along with various others around the world. What was our margin for error had all these agencies been right about Iraq's capabilities? It wouldn't have been the first time two or more unassociated entities had come together in order to attack a common enemy. Japan, Germany and Italy weren't exactly buddies before they decided to plunge the world into war.
As it is, we are fighting our enemies on foreign lands, and it is not going as well as we would hope. President Bush was probably foolish to declare the major military operations over on the deck of that aircraft carrier, but he did say all along that this struggle would take a long time and that it would be a difficult conflict.
Perhaps most important - even though we hear daily about casualties and suicide bombers in Iraq and other places in the world - since Sept. 11 we haven't had to hear about any of that happening here in our homeland.
