Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot.
In his state of the union address President George Bush said that Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction on whole villages “leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured”.
The president failed to mention that the United States supplied tonnes of VX nerve gas to Iraq in the 1980s--back when Iraq and the U.S. were buddy-buddy. On the very day that the UN confirmed Iraq's use of chemical weapons the U.S. envoy to Iraq, none other than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was in Baghdad to normalize diplomatic relations with Iraq, offer support for the war against Iran, and subsidies on preferential trade with Iraq.
In his state of the union address President Bush said:
International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq... If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.
He was absolutely right. However, according to Amnesty International, the Philippines, an ally of the U.S. in the war against terrorism, uses techniques of torture such as electro shocks and the use of plastic bags to suffocate detainees. Members of the poor, or marginalized communities, including women and children who are suspected of committing criminal acts are particularly vulnerable.
Will we bomb the Philippines and any other nation that tortures its citizens? While we should be addressing these issues, bombing innocent people and further victimizing them is not the answer.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said the UN would lose all credibility if it did not support an attack on Iraq and that it would go the way of the League of Nations, and become irrelevant and die. I do not believe the U.S. administration wants a restructured and stronger UN as Canada and many other countries do. It has consistently refused to pay its dues and undermines the UN in countless other ways.
The U.S. administration does not believe in taking a multilateral approach to international problems. It refuses to support the International Criminal Court and the ratification of the treaty that would ban landmines that kill and maim thousands of innocent civilians every year.
When I hear the U.S. administration say it would hold the oil fields in trust for the Iraqi people I question what this proposed war is really all about. Would it be so intent on taking control of Iraq if recent reports had not indicated that Iraq has more oil than Saudi Arabia. I do not think so.
In his attempt to persuade the Security Council to authorize an attack on Iraq Secretary of State Colin Powell heaped praise on a British intelligence document which, he said, described in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.
An embarrassed British government admitted last Friday that large parts of the intelligence dossier on Iraq were copied from published academic articles, some of which were several years old, and some of the words were deliberately changed to strengthen the argument for war. That means the secretary of state for the most powerful nation on earth based part of his last ditch argument for an attack on Iraq on plagiarized information based on documents that were more than 12 years old.
Saddam Hussein is a despot and a tyrant. He is that and more, but bombing and killing innocent people is not the answer. I said bombing and killing, not collateral damage as the Pentagon describes it. If America were to attack Iraq real flesh and blood, children, mothers and fathers would be bombed to bits. What happened to the war against al-Qaeda and the war against terrorism? We were going to root them out of all of their cells. We knew this would be a long and arduous task. Perhaps it is easier and more high profile to attack Iraq.
Senator Edward Kennedy recently said that America cannot expect the international community to salute the American flag and march with it to war when the administration has failed to make a convincing case for doing so. The Democrats and the majority of the American people do not support an attack on Iraq. Many Americans agree with Senator Kennedy that the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda and North Korea's nuclear capability require more immediate attention than Iraq.
We know George Bush wants to get rid of Saddam, but there must be a way to deal with that without killing innocent people. If regime change is what the Americans want, I am sure they know how to go about that without killing innocent civilians. War, with or without the UN, is not the best answer.
Even if the UN eventually does say yes to war, that would be because it is being bent and twisted to accommodate the demands of the U.S. administration. There are other voices offering better solutions and those voices must be heard. We should be focusing our attention on bringing about peace in the Middle East, not aggravating the hostilities in that region, as I believe an attack on Iraq would do.
In closing, I want to speak on behalf of families in Iraq who could be bombed to bits by U.S. warplanes before the end of this month. They bear no responsibility whatsoever for whether the government of Iraq is or is not complying with UN resolution 1441. They have no say whatsoever on what their government does or does not do on the world stage or in the immediate region. All their energies are focused on surviving as best they can in a land devastated by non-stop wars and the life-crippling sanctions that have been imposed on their country.
I have neither seen nor heard anything over the last few months of debate that would justify taking the life of a single Iraqi citizen. I can see no basis on which the House, the Government of Canada, the United Nations Security Council, or the United States and its allies can justify burying entire families beneath the debris of bombed apartment buildings.
I urge all members of the House to keep their mind's eye on the families in Iraq. Let us think of a young girl playing on the dusty street outside a rundown apartment building. Let us think of her growing up, getting married and having children, sons and daughters. Then let us think of her young life being snuffed out before the end of this month by a bomb dropped from an American warplane. Let us think of that young girl. She deserves to live. Do not let her die.