By: Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
Professing to be the greater
civilization, the intellect is deliberately disassociated, sanity is interned so
that greed may proceed and allow the savagery of the greater to prey upon the
less. While mankind strives for
nobility, there are some among us who contemplate such base decisions that would
threaten the existence of another nation. Those same powers who would refute that
man is born under one law, and so they bound him by another, targeting him with
nuclear weapons.
Alarmed at such baseness, Philip
Giarldi, A former CIA officer, in an August 1, 2005 issue of The American Conservative[i]
warns that Dick Cheney has issued a request for using tactical nuclear weapons
against Iran. More troubling is that the use of
nuclear weapons is not conditional on Iran being involved in the act of terrorism
against the United
States.
Otherwise stated, Iran is being set up for "an
unprovoked nuclear attack".
Ms. Rice who is rather smug about
having earned herself a major victory by getting everyone on board in referring
Iran to the United Nations Security Council, can also invite these same nations
to share this crime against humanity. Dr. Jorge Hirsch, professor of
physics at UC, San Diego, in his remarkable video
emphasizes the consequences of a US
nuclear attack on Iran[ii]. Each bomb would deliver an incalculable
number of corpses, the radiation fallout, both immediate and residual,
unparallel in magnitude to the tragedy witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago.
Subsequently, as each country races
to acquire an A-bomb to protect itself against an attack by a nuclear-armed
aggressor, we watch the dwindling of our civilization. It is said that when a rich man declares
war, the poor man dies. Today, with
the mockery of the IAEA and the UN Security Council, and above all, with the
United
States issuance of nuclear tactical standby, it
is not just a single nation that is at risk of demise, but man's progress. The hideous claws of war have gripped
Western political leaders and motivated by greed, they are committing cultural
genocide/suicide. Apathy fuels this
madness.
In a democracy, leaders are
transient – more or less. The
people will be held accountable for the darkest hours in history. How tolerant can history be, and indeed
should it be? The people should
demand that the voice of reason and justice prevail. If Americans wish to be a law-abiding
nation, then they must protest the use of tactical nuclear weapons on a
non-nuclear armed NPT member signatory.
The use of these weapons will be
defined as war crime under the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva
Conventions. An indiscriminate
attack in which the attacker does not take measures to avoid hitting
non-military objectives, that is, civilians and civilian objects. There is no doubt that the radiation
from these nuclear weapons would kill civilians!
The U.S. citizens
must determine their future. Will
Americans be knows as a nation that put out the lights of civilization by
enabling its elected officials to commit heinous crimes and kill en masse in
their name? Will we stand by and
allow mushroom clouds be the legacy
that this administration will leave our children, or will we realize that we
should put a stop to genocide and call on this administration to recall its
despicable policy of nuking innocence.
Although the
US has not ratified the Additional
Protocol I, this provision is considered to be part of customary law and
therefore binding upon all parties to a conflict.