The author of this article, a technical writer in Booneville, Mississippi, is the brother of Alex McPeak, the University of Memphis student whose letter opposing war with Iraq ran in On the Fly this week under the title “I Write This in Protest.” Shorn of some passages that seemed to us arguably more ad hominem than directly relevant to the essentials of the issue, this is his response. The division of the McPeak clan on the issue of Iraq may be a synecdoche of sorts for a general divisiveness caused by the controversy in the nation at large.
[W]ere it not for the United States government the very societies that now take pride in themselves, who now protest against us, would not exist at all as free nations. They would be pounded under the regime of one similar to the aforementioned dictator of Iraq who flaunts his image as a warmonger most readily. What surprise that the world, now coming of age, should turn on the most beneficent entity of the twentieth century; the one who made attempts to stay out of wars and urged the powers of the world to simply let it be in the mix of their own war-time affairs; the one that was attacked in spite of its peaceful desires; the one who came into the aftermath to HELP REBUILD the very nations that stood against it and the very precepts it stood for.
Protest against authority is a way of life. In many circles I have heard George W. Bush called everything from a moron to a warmonger for his attitudes towards the government — NOT the PEOPLE — of Iraq. [W]e now have a “to each his own” society where apparently everything goes except justice against egomaniacal dictators, where we now have a world who will, in light of a Saddam Hussein, call into question, not the underhanded tactics of a proven “liar-liar (pants on fire)”, but the actions of a nation to rid the world of such a ruler.
The efforts of the United States government to oust the Iraqi ruler [are] justified by his hesitant attitude to provide proof of the elimination of weapons KNOWN TO EXIST from our previous encounter in 1991. Now there is even more of what is widely known as PROOF that Saddam is indeed playing the innocence card despite the evidence to the contrary.
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Keith McPeak
Booneville, Mississippi