The opinion of La Voz

Secretary of State Colin Powell walked into the United Nations building last Tuesday like a gunslinger making his way to a high-noon confrontation with Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

When he was done giving his presentation to world diplomats, he was not holding a smoking gun.

The taped conversations between Iraqi military officials were interesting, but it is difficult to place faith in these recordings in the absence of any justification besides “our intelligence sources.” Powell is asking us to believe a government whose track record of telling the truth in times of war is dubious at best.

The vaunted link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was shown, but it was not as strong as Powell inferred. The extent of his evidence was that a cell of nearly two dozen people associated with al-Qaeda was able to establish a training camp in northeast Iraq. This same cell, Powell said, has been operating in Baghdad since May.

If a government’s ties to al-Qaeda are cause for concern, shouldn’t we pay more attention to Pakistan? Some of the scientists involved with the country’s nuclear program, in a country that has developed nuclear weapons, are sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

The rest of the presentation was the standard Bush administration boilerplate on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Powell presented evidence that Iraq was actively looking for weapons of mass destruction, or had weaponry that violated U.N. restrictions, or had lied about the nature of its weapons.

Nearly everyone agrees Saddam has a pattern of lying. That is without question. Left to his own devices, he has shown repeatedly that he will try to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

However, Powell’s presentation didn’t show a piece of evidence that demanded a declaration of war. If anything, his presentation showed that there most certainly needs to be more weapons inspectors, numbering in the hundreds if at all possible.

What was interesting about Powell’s presentation was in the questions he didn’t answer.

In its attempt to make the case for war, the Bush administration has failed to answer two important issues: civilian casualties and post-war strategy. On both of these counts, the administration need only look to Afghanistan for a brutal object lesson as to what happens when these issues are ignored.

Even though our television screens didn’t show it, an estimated 3,000 Afghans died during the United States’ bombing and proxy war campaign in a mostly rural country.

This stands in stark contrast with a war in Iraq, which would most certainly involve an attack on Baghdad, a city of roughly 5 million people. Should the United States prosecute a war with Iraq with nothing but the utmost concern for the lives of Iraqi citizens, the death toll could be one or two orders of magnitude above what was seen in Afghanistan.

If President Bush is willing to stomach that reality, has he thought of what would happen in a post-war Iraq?

After United States forces removed the Taliban from power, some semblance of peace reigned in Afghanistan. However, it did not taken long for the war-torn country to return to the tribal struggles that marred the nation throughout the last decade. It was this sort of fractious civil war that allowed the Taliban to take power and permitted Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as their personal playground.

If we are to topple Saddam Hussein, are we prepared to stay five, ten, twenty years to make sure the same does not happen in Iraq?

Powell did not answer these questions last Tuesday. Someone needs to before our government declares the first preemptive war in American history.