Editor insight: Baldwin peace protest out of step
December 3, 2004Mike Moore
Sports Editor
To be honest, I thought the cold weather would send him away. Instead it just moved him. Matthew Milligan, Ortonville sophomore and a member of Peace Action, has protested the war in Iraq with very simple signs such as, “Bring the troops home.”
Fine, that is your opinion and I commend you for standing up for what you believe in. It is your right (which was earned for you) to do so, and the way you have expressed yourself has been very respectable. That was until you and your clan of face-painted pals paraded into Baldwin like a three-ring circus and took over the entrance to the cafeteria.
Seeing you dance to your music while you passed out flyers and smiled at the students lying on the ground, I couldn’t help but fill with resentment for what you are trying to do. Your message remained clear, as it was painted on a sheet covering the windows: “Stop The War Now.”
The students lying on the ground each bore a different message representing Iraqi people. While they lay motionless on the ground, computer paper taped to their lifeless bodies spoke for them, saying, “died in American bomb raids,” or “were killed during gun fights.” Clever, very clever, but you forgot some.
Why didn’t anyone sit there with their head tucked in their shirt with a sign reading, “head sawed off by insurgents,” or “publicly executed while family and friends watched.” Where were those representations?
My problem is not with you protesting, it is with your narrow-minded objective. Let’s imagine for one second you got what you wanted and the war was stopped and every U.S. troop was brought home. What would come of Iraq? Well, basically you would leave a country in ruins, insurgents and terrorist groups would quickly take back control over the unprepared Iraqi army and before long a new dictator would rule. Not to mention you would have to tell the families and friends of nearly 1,500 soldiers that their loved ones died for nothing. Sounds good, huh?
But you did more then just stand there. You also passed out propaganda about the war. You listed the number of American soldiers killed every day (2.2), the total number of coalition forces killed (1,341) and the estimated number of Iraqis killed to date. Pretty startling numbers.
Yet, once again, you accidentally forgot some, such as the total number of Iraqi citizens executed in the past four years (4,000), or the number of women beheaded in that time (130), or how about the number of civilians massacred in 1991 after the U.S. withdrew its forces (30,000). The reason those 30,000 were killed was because they opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime.
You left out a few more numbers. Iranian citizens and Iranian prisoners of war who were gassed and executed between 1980-88 (estimated in the thousands). Also, although you mentioned that the war was “affecting women and children,” you must have run out of room to talk about Saddam’s campaign called “Anfal.” Basically, this was a genocidal campaign to kill anyone who resisted Saddam’s regime. The result was that between 50,000-100,000 Kurdish men, women and children were executed. This does not include the 5,000 people who were gassed in the city of Halabja.
The instructions for this campaign in the Kurdish regions of Iraq were, “All persons captured in those villages shall be detained and interrogated by the security services and those between the ages of 15 and 70 shall be executed after any useful information has been obtained from them, of which we should be duly notified.”
In the Oct. 8 issue of The Pleiad (“Baldwin steps serve as protest platform”), Laura Jordan, Flint senior and president of Peace Action, stated, “People have become too complacent with the rising deaths. It is unacceptable that over 1,000 soldiers have been killed over a war with pretenses that are completely false.”
Wait, complacent with whose deaths? You mentioned the 1,000 soldiers, but you seemed to have forgotten the nearly 150,000 I just mentioned. I guess a life is only worth protecting if it is an American life.
In that same article Milligan said that he “protests for humanitarian reasons and for global peace.” When is the last time you protested over the massacres in Iraq, and not just for American troops? I wonder if Milligan, or Jordan or any members of Peace Action have watched any of the beheading videos. Maybe a “protest for global peace” would have saved those individuals from having their heads removed with a kitchen knife.
Please don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for peace, and I support the resolution of conflicts through peaceful matters as much as the next guy. But there comes a point when we have to be realistic. Nothing peaceful is going to resolve what is happening thousands of miles from your comfy dorm rooms. Whether you agree with it or not, our troops are there, and they are staying until the job is done.
You may feel brave for taking a stand and occupying Baldwin for an hour or two, but you do it with the knowledge that no Saddam loyalist is going to occupy your house and execute your family in a second or two. You got what you wanted, you turned some heads and spread your message. Now, with all due respect, start a new campaign, write signs for something else you believe in, put on some music and dance to a different tune.
The statistics in this article came from the following Web sites: http://www.geocities.com/ckkbarnes/Saddam.html; www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.htm; and http://www.riza-1.com/knowledge/Iraq-atrocities.htm.
