November 22, 2002

NIMBY strikes against Iraq

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

Have you ever heard of the NIMBY syndrome? It's an acronym that stands for "Not In My Back Yard." It seems to be the factor at work against Iraq in recent days.
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has blinked in his standoff with President Bush by agreeing to a United Nations deadline to allow weapons inspectors into Iraq. Why the sudden change from his refusal to allow inspectors since their 1998 withdrawal?
NIMBY gets the credit. Two of Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Turkey, probably supplied the straws that broke Saddam's back. Syria made the U.N. vote unanimous that demanded Iraq admit weapons inspectors to prove it has no weapons of mass destruction. A fellow Arab nation voting with the U.S. is a pretty plain message.
And over the past weekend, Turkey's newly elected Islamic party leader supported allowing U.S. aircraft to use Turkish air bases to launch attacks on Iraq as long as the military action is supported by the U.N. And if there is any military action against Iraq by the U.S., support by the U.N. is already a foregone conclusion.
Syria and Turkey were no doubt motivated by NIMBY. It's one thing to have a nasty dictator with weapons of mass destruction in a faraway country. It's another thing entirely to have him as a neighbor. They both said "Not In My Back Yard."
Saddam is a vicious dictator, but he's not too blind to read the handwriting on the wall, particularly when it's written in block letters 12 feet high: "The end is near."

Bible history repeating itself in Iraq?

I wasn't thinking about Bible history when I used the handwriting on the wall analogy, but in reflection, it's a pretty apt one. Biblical Babylon was the setting for that particular event, when an ancient Chaldean king saw the finger of God write a message on the wall. The message was translated for him by the prophet Daniel in Daniel 5:27, "You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting."
Iraq is modern-day Babylon and perhaps Saddam is about to become a modern day Belshazzar, whose doom was sealed by the message Daniel delivered. "That very night Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was slain. And Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about sixty-two years old," Daniel 5:30-31 concludes.
But while hoping for the first repeat of history, I hope the second doesn't follow. Modern-day Mede is Persia, now known as Iran. And in case you've forgotten, Bush in his "axis of evil" speech on the State of the Union address in January, named Iran along with Iraq and North Korea as the three top threats to peace in the world.
Anybody who can remember the Iranian takeover of our American embassy in 1979 won't argue the point over Iran. And Bush's call on North Korea has certainly been vindicated by their admission in recent days to a secret nuclear weapons program.
If Saddam is overthrown in Iraq and the Iranians take over, that would not be an improvement. If you recall your recent history, back during the Iran-Iraq war of the '80s, we backed Iraq as the lesser of two evils. In hindsight, that seems a bit ironic. We would have been better off to decide we didn't have a dog to back in that fight.
And I predict before it's over, we will have to finish what we started under the first President Bush. Saddam is going to stall as long as he can, but in the end, he's not going to give up his chemical, germ and maybe nuclear weapons without a fight.
He's not worth even one American life, but then Hitler wasn't either. And like Hitler, Saddam has got to go before he brings his evil to our shores, like bin Laden.