Laughter, tears, hopes and fears

It's six o'clock on a pleasant Wednesday evening in Orlando. The war with Iraq will supposedly begin in two hours. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in a leisurely-paced boat in the middle of the Magic Kingdom while a mechanized legion of multicultural children sings the lyrics to "It's a Small World" gaily around me.\nIt's a world of laughter.\nBehind me on the ride, a group of real kids are playfully teasing each other and giggling. Somewhere in Baghdad a group of real kids are nervously anticipating an American bombing campaign. Many will not understand that the massive explosions that are about to rock the city will one day make it possible for them to laugh as freely as the children behind me. These Iraqi kids are stuck between a fear of their leader and a fear of their potential liberators.\nA world of tears.\nThe residents of Iraq have suffered immensely under the current dictatorship. In March 1988, Saddam Hussein, busy fighting a war with Iran, solved a looming Kurdish resistance problem by dropping chemical warheads containing a mixture of mustard and cyanide gases on the northeastern Kurdish town of Halabja. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Kurds were either choked to death or had their lungs burned by the deadly cloud of gases.\nIt's a world of hopes.\nVaclav Havel said "hope is a state of the mind, not of the world." In Baghdad, however, hope isn't even allowed to be a state of mind. How can hope reside in a place which is ruled by a man who killed his close personal friend Husayn al-Hamdani, among many other political "allies," to consolidate his power shortly after becoming "president"? How can hope exist where a whisper of dissension can result in horrifying torture?\nAnd a world of fears.\nHussein rules by the infamous Machiavellian concept of fear. David Scheffer, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, reported that photographic evidence showed Iraq used acid baths during the invasion of Kuwait. Victims were hung by their wrists and gradually lowered into acid. Another terrifying means of torture applied was a room in which acid is dropped from random places on the ceiling to ensure the person must keep moving or be burned.\nThere's so much that we share ...\nToward the end of the ride we pass a tree. On one side of the tree sits an American child in cowboy get-up and a British child in soldier get-up. The other side of the tree features a solitary Arab child. This sobering picture of smiling children reminds us that even though the Western world may be separated from the Middle East culturally and politically, we still share the same tree.\nThat it's time were aware ...\nWar is never pleasant. War is atrocious, disgusting and bloody. However, war is sometimes the only method available to rectify a horrendous situation and liberate an oppressed people. The government could very well have a hidden agenda in all this, but the greater good to the Iraqi population is what matters to me. Almost any kind of government is better than the one now being imposed on Iraq. I support our soldiers and what they are trying to accomplish. Now is not the time for isolationism. It is a time to help those sitting on the other side of the tree while a maniacal leader attempts to cut the branch out from underneath them.\nIt's a small world after all.