From: Douglas Lain (douglain@yahoo.com)

I've been working with a friend in New Zealand (Tim Jones) on a petition against the war on Iraq, and we've come up with one and placed it online at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Aawii/petition.html

The Aawii bit of gibberish in this URL stands for "Artists Against War In Iraq" but really everyone is welcome, encouraged, begged to sign the petition. Still, we are especially targeting fiction writers and artists of all types to take a stand against the escalation of violence against Iraq. More specifically we are asking you to sign this petition. Please take a look and consider it.

I moved this question up the queue because of its timeliness--but I'm not sure I'm going to sign this petition. I'm not sure I'm not going to sign it, either. I just don't know. The reasons for my reluctance are complicated but I'll try to explain.

In my opinion, one of the reasons we have wars is failure of communication. Soundbite news and politics don't help much because they tend to polarise positions. When someone takes a position, generally they stop making an attempt at honest communication and start trying to find a way to defend that position and then to win the argument. I believe, instead, in talking and thinking and understanding. Understanding doesn't necessarily lead to agreement but it rarely if ever does any harm.

So a petition, for me, is putting the cart before the horse. I don't want to sign anything whose implications I don't fully understand, and there's a great deal about the potential for war with Iraq that I don't understand. I honestly have no idea what's going on in Iraq; my guess is that hardly anyone does, even those who live there. Similarly, although I keep myself fairly well informed (not extraordinarily so, but reasonably) and I'm not stupid, I can say with confidence that I haven't any real idea of what's going on in Washington D.C. I haven't the first clue why Bush seems to think we should attack Iraq. Nothing he says makes sense to me--and I don't mean that dismissively. This is not a kneejerk reaction: I literally don't understand. How will removing a head of state help anything when there are endless replacements? What's the real truth about bioweapons in Iraq--do they have a military capability in that arena or not? My feeling is that they don't really have a programme anymore--oh, they might have a few tubs of stuff lying about (enough to kill a zillion people) but their production and industry is broken. At least that's what I think--I don't really know and I have no way of finding out for myself because everything I have been able to find out is contradicted by something else.

And then there's the whole issue of wanting to bomb a country just because it has the potential to use the weapons it has. Since when has potential ever been an excuse for war? The UK has bioweapons, and nuclear capability, and a big armed force. It also has plenty of admitted terrorists on its soil. So why isn't Congress passing a resolution to give the president the authority to bomb the UK (apart, that is, from the fact that the UK is lining up to do whatever the US wants--another thing I don't understand)?

Nor do I understand why Iraq appears to be acting the way it is. I don't understand why the press isn't digging deeper into the Bush administration's patently contradictory and illogical assertions about Iraq's intentions. I don't understand why Congress allowed itself to be stampeded into passing the resolution. I don't understand why Congress has allowed itself to be buffaloed (a Wall Street Journal phrase that I think is apt) into giving this administration more power than the executive branch has had in fifty years.

There appears to be a general belief that terrorism stems from desperation: from poverty and hopelessness and having nothing left to lose. If that's the case (I don't believe it is, but more on that in a minute), then why embark on a course of action that will lead to poverty, desperation and hopelessness for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people? Why be willing to pay two hundred billion dollars (according to the Wall Street Journal, a figure they say came from a member of the current administration) to remove Saddam Hussein from power when it will only pay half of one billion to do something positive about the poverty, corruption and desperation in Africa? What will the administration do after it removes Hussein from power? What is it doing in Afghanistan?

This War On Terrorism makes no sense to me. It's as ill-conceived as the so-called War Against Drugs. Terrorism, in my opinion, is not a direct result of poverty, nor of hopelessness. It is the result of resentment. Its growth requires the proto terrorist to already have certain interior and exterior resources, plus a belief in the potential for change. Those who plan bombings and assassinations and gas attacks are not homeless undeducated people, they are not shell-shocked refugees, they are middle-class and usually reasonably well fed. They are frustrated: they have a certain amount but they want more. They want to be important, to make an impact, but they have no way to achieve this except to subscribe to an impossible ideal. All terrorists are fanatics. Most of them, frankly, would be as happy fighting for the opposite side as long as they got to do so with fanatical zeal. It's not a coincidence that if you look at history, many zealots of one political or religious stripe switch sides. Look at Saul/Paul. Look at Soviet/American defectors. Terrorists are a personality type; they're not a nation.

A basic tenet of self defence (which I spent five years teaching in the UK, and which I still think about a great deal) is that there is no perfect security. There is no system solution; there is no magic bullet. In self defence, what you do is learn how potential assailants act and what to do when they attack. You don't carry a gun and...