This letter is in response to your editorial article dated 4-24-03 titled “Catch a tiger by the tail and never let it go.”
Mr. York, are you calling the people of Iraq the Tiger (a wild beast needing to be caged, declawed, made fat and lazy, killed, or thrown in the cage with the other tigers, as you so eloquently put it)? Later on you hint of them being Sunni, Shiites, and Kurds-or are you referring to the now-removed dictatorial rgime of Saddam Hussein? (also known as the butcher of Baghdad), which came to power with the backing of the CIA, was sponsored and supported in every possible way by the West, the East and nearly all of the Arab regimes, during Iraq attack against Iran in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. Saddam Hussein received the most advanced weapons of mass destruction, i.e. attack aircrafts, missiles, chemical, biological weapons and financial support from the USA, other Western and Eastern powers and wealthy Arab rgimes.
Sir, if you are talking about the Saddam regime, as you well know the paper tiger has been symbolically removed. And it was done by the same force which brought it to power and supported it even after the first Persian Gulf War. That force is U.S.A. Thus there is no need to cage it, declaw it, make it fat and lazy, kill it or throw it in the cage with the other tigers. (By the way, you mentioned the paper tiger hunter but you did not say who the other paper tigers may be.)
Are you referring to the people of Iraq, whose religious faith may be Islam of the Shiite or the Sunni school of thought, Christianity of the Orthodox, Catholic, Assyrian or Armenian school of thought, or any other faith? Their ethnicity may be Arab Kurd, Turkmen, Turk, Persian or any other ethnicity; their race being white or black or any other race. Most importantly, they are all human beings created by the same deity, just like you and me (not wild beasts). They are all each other’s neighbors, just like you and me, not beasts to be thrown into the same cage.
The Iraqi people’s history goes back to the Mesopotamian civilization, which is more than 6,000 years old. The present invading army (the removing force of the paper tiger) has brought the destruction of museums, burning of manuscripts, books, libraries and plundering of the 6,000-year heritage of the cradle of the civilization for the Iraqi people. These are the same Western democratic armies which are politically neutral and stand by while the museum, libraries, hospitals and buildings are burned and looted. But they do protect the ministry of oil buildings because they have the mandate to do so by their respective democratic governments.
In my mind, as a naturalized American citizen of Islamic faith, of the Shiite school of thought of Kurdish ethnicity, who is your neighbor, I wonder who is the real audience of your editorial? It certainly is not the Arab street, as you put it, adding, “so why let it upset us that they may not think we are being democratic?” Which means it does not matter as far as you are concerned. Could it be people of Middle Eastern descent living in the Malibu area in general? As you put it, “all we had to do was cock an eyebrow at Syria and the country suddenly became very agreeable.” Or maybe it is Muslims of Kurdish or other ethnicity in particular. Maybe what you mean by caging and declawing is recommending concentration camps right here in Malibu.
Advocating this demonizing, macho, world hegemony kind of international public policy leads to Balkanization problems of massacres, and genocide of the kind we saw in Bosnia Herzegovina in the 1990s, both internationally and locally. Prescribing hardware solutions such as democracy by cluster bomb, in place software solutions such as laws governing the United Nations and NATO, will lead to the hopelessness of the masses.
Mr. York, I am answering your editorial because I am your neighbor who has hopes for his two young children and their offspring, to be raised in this community and on this planet Earth.
Majid Amirani