Forty Answers

Reasons for and against war with Iraq.

by Evert Eden

Twenty good reasons we should invade Iraq:

1. Saddam Hussein is a bad guy.

2. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.

3. If Saddam Hussein doesn't have weapons of mass destruction already, he'll have them soon. It's not good for a bad guy to have weapons of mass destruction.

4. Saddam Hussein has been giving us the runaround since 1993.

5. Saddam Hussein could give a nuclear device to terrorists who could smuggle it into the U.S. and blow us up.

6. Saddam Hussein could put weapons of mass destruction on Scud missiles and blow up Israel.

7. We have the most powerful army on Earth and we should use it.

8. Saddam Hussein cannot be trusted. A pre-emptive strike is absolutely necessary.

9. A war with Iraq will be quick and easy. Look at Afghanistan.

10. Saddam Hussein tried to kill our president's dad.

11. Our president has to finish the war his dad started.

12. Saddam Hussein has a lot of oil. We need oil.

13. We need more oil than any other country.

14. Our president and our vice-president are oil men, so they know people who can get the oil out of Iraq and to the U.S. cheaper and faster than anyone else.

15. We've bought Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars and they still don't listen to us. It's time we had a country in the Middle East who listened to us.

16. It'll be cheaper to own Iraq outright than be milked year after year by Israel, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Russia.

17. It'll be good for the people of Iraq if we get rid of Saddam Hussein.

18. We can do a lot of good things in Iraq, like we did in Germany and Japan after World War II.

19. We can bring democracy to Iraq and show all the other Arab countries what a good thing democracy is. Soon all the Arab countries will become democracies, too.

20. The world will be a safer place.

Twenty good reasons we shouldn’t invade Iraq:

1. It's none of our business.

2. There's no connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorists of 9/11.

3. War is bad.

4. A lot of innocent people will get killed.

5. Our soldiers will die and their families will be sad.

6. We may end up fighting in the streets of Baghdad.

7. We can easily contain Iraq with sanctions and the threat of military action, like we did for decades with Russia in the Cold War.

8. We can contain Iraq until Saddam Hussein dies and then everything will be OK.

9. A war will destabilize the whole region with terrible consequences for us all.

10. A war with Iraq will divert us from the war on al-Qaeda.

11. All the Muslims, especially the fundamentalists, will be furious with us. So will all the Arabs, especially the ones on the street.

12. A war with Iraq will create more terrorists who'll come to our country and blow us up.

13. If we invade Iraq, nobody will like us except England, Israel, Bulgaria and maybe Australia. We will be isolated, alone and unilateral.

14. Invasion is an act of empire, and that is bad. It is also an act of cowboy adventurism, which is very dangerous.

15. This is just an excuse for the Pentagon to try out all its new weapons.

16. There's no moral justification for a pre-emptive war.

17. What will we do with Iraq afterwards? It'll be a mess.

18. We're being dragged into another dumb war by the military-industrial complex.

19. We should spend the money that a war will cost us on alternative energy sources like solar power and wind farms.

20. We'll suffer for this. Violence begets violence.

Evert Eden is an ex-South African radical, an advertising writer and a slam poet who's performed his one-man show, How to Cook a Man, on three continents. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper executive editor, 123 Chestnut St., third floor, Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.