By George Capaccio

During a recent visit to Iraq, friends and I closely followed the news from home. Would Iraq be next in Washington’s war on terrorism? Now that I am home, such an attack seems increasingly imminent. The drums are rolling. The pundits have fallen into line. The word goes forth: Iraq is a deadly menace that must be “stamped out” once and for all.

The United States has crushed an already devastated and defenseless Afghanistan. We may never know how many civilians died from our weapons of mass destruction. We can be reasonably sure their number exceeds the number of people who died in the World Trade Center. Even more appalling is the number of Afghan people who have already starved to death this winter or were forced to flee their homes and seek shelter in miserable refugee camps. How many of the Afghan dead might have survived the winter had there been no bombing? How many are on the verge of starvation, subsisting, as various witnesses report, on wild grasses? Will those who are responsible for the death and suffering of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians ever be brought to justice? No way. Not in this world.