Fantastic Metropolis

“Today, I weep for my country,” US Senator Robert Byrd declared when the US and Britain began its illegal invasion of Iraq, a country that had neither attacked nor threatened them. “Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place.”

In every corner of this twenty-first century earth exist governments that ruthlessly oppress their citizens in order to advance and favor the interests of a privileged few; of these governments, many have engaged in atrocious and brutal repression, sometimes with the blessing or even assistance of the world’s leading arms merchant, the United States government. The Iraqi Ba’athist regime under the direction of Saddam Hussein must be included among the worst. In the 1980s, the US sold Saddam Hussein anthrax agents, and the British government built his chemical and munitions factories. Only when in 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and lost the friendship of the first Bush Administration did the US and British governments express outrage at the regime’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its lack of democratic institutions. Saddam Hussein is despicable. But photographs of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld glad-handing Saddam Hussein in the 1980s illustrate the hypocrisy of the second Bush Administration’s claim that its intervention is intended to “liberate” the very people it is now bombing.

In refusing to abide by the UN charter, which the US helped write and to which it is a signatory, the US government violates not only international law, but its own constitution, which requires the President of the United States to abide by the treaties which only Congress has the power to enact. By using depleted uranium ammunition against Iraqi soldiers and civilians, the US violates a UN resolution which classifies the munitions as illegal weapons of mass destruction, as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Genocide Convention; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; the four Geneva conventions of 1949; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which expressly forbid employing “poison or poisoned weapons” and “arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering in armed conflicts.” The use of this illegal ammunition in the first Gulf War has already resulted in increased cancer rates in Iraq of between seven and ten times and an increase in birth defects in Iraqi children of between four and six times. Studies of Gulf War veterans have revealed the terrible fact that tens of thousands have uranium in their very bones. No one genuinely mindful of and interested in promoting the health and welfare of US troops would expose them to a poison known to have harmed the previous war’s troops simply to pursue an illegal and–as most religious leaders around the world have declared–unjust war.

“The case this Administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war,” Senator Byrd writes, “is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice.”

We, the editors of Fantastic Metropolis, oppose this war. We support the vigorous use of international diplomacy and unreserved respect for the basic principles embodied in the UN’s charter. Richard Perle, one of Donald Rumsfeld’s chief advisors, is happy to predict that after this war the UN will become nothing more than an organization for delivering food and medicine to the victims of war and natural disasters. As Sen. Byrd notes, because of the US’s unprovoked attack on a small, nearly defenseless country whose citizens had already been suffering grievously the burden of twelve years of murderous sanctions, the world has become a more dangerous place. Never has the world been in such need of an effective institution of diplomacy. We sincerely hope that Richard Perle’s prediction is wrong.

The Fantastic Metropolis team,

L. Timmel Duchamp
Michael Moorcock
Luís Rodrigues
Jeff VanderMeer
Zoran Živković
Mike Simanoff