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R E C E N T L Y

Second Thoughts: Rolling out the years
By Sallie Tisdale
No one has time to bake cookies. That's why you need to
(12/17/98)

Marriage among the mullahs
By Cynthia Joyce
The directors of "Divorce Iranian Style" speak out about unhappy marriages, Islamic law and the rights of women
(12/16/98)

The devil in your family room
By Fiona Morgan
A Texas group is offering "Marilyn Manson awareness training" for parents who fear for their subculture-adopting teens
(12/15/98)

The prisoner of Pennsylvania Avenue
By Margaret Talbot
The many ordeals of Hillary Clinton should make us ask: Is it time to retire the concept of the first lady?
(12/14/98)

My Advent adventure
By Anne Lamott
Trying to find the patience and faith of the season when all of God's spokespeople are in bad moods
(12/10/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK HOT FLASH ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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THE DEVIL IN YOUR FAMILY ROOM | PAGE 1, 2
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The West's great crimes in Iraq are not the latest bombings, but the years of inaction: ignoring the use of poison gas in the theaters of the Iran-Iraq war; ignoring it again in Halabja and other rebellious Iraqi cities; ignoring the vast human and environmental devastation since the Gulf War in the mostly Shiite regions of southern Iraq, where the ancient wetlands of Mesopotamia and the unique culture of the marsh Arabs have been wiped out by a series of dams and diversions designed to starve a minority into submission.

Just after the Gulf War, apologists for its inconclusive ending claimed that it barely mattered that Saddam had been left in power. The metaphor of choice was the piece of rotten fruit: Saddam would fall from the tree under the weight of his own decay. Instead, the tree may be dying from the effects of sanctions, but Saddam is holding as tight as ever to its desiccated branches.

Opponents of the bombing say that dealing with Iraq should be left with the United Nations and its gentle leader, Kofi Annan. But Annan is a peacemaker, and a peacemaker isn't necessarily what's required in Iraq, any more than it was in Bosnia. Sarajevans will tell you of the agonies caused by the U.N.'s "evenhanded diplomacy" -- the pressures to accept any kind of unjust peace the Serbs happened to offer. The history of the United Nations has shown that the organization is most useful in keeping peace between belligerents who have decided they no longer wish to fight. But recent experience has shown that the organization is both inept at, and degraded by, its insertion into conflicts where one or both parties have no wish for peace.

After I left the Middle East, I spent some time covering the United Nations at its headquarters in New York and in the field in Bosnia and Somalia. During that time, I learned that people who go to work for the United Nations often do so because they believe that war is the greatest evil and that force is never justified. In Somalia, one U.N. staffer broke into sobs in front of me because instead of keeping peace, her job had become the administration of a war.

It is impossible to imagine the bureaucrats of the United Nations accepting the kind of harsh conclusion that may be necessary in the case of Saddam Hussein: that the bombs should continue to fall until he does. Iraqis will die. But they are dying now, by the scores and the hundreds, in horrible pain, in the dark security prisons with the blood on the walls and the excrement on the floor.

I wish I still believed, as I used to, that the United Nations was always the world's best chance to avert bloodshed. I wish I could join, as I once would have, the placard-waving peace protesters outside the U.S. Consulate here in Sydney.

I wish I'd never seen the piece of ear nailed to the wall.
SALON | Dec. 18, 1998

Geraldine Brooks covered the Middle East and the United Nations for the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of "Foreign Correspondence" and "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women."