Do unto others . . .

I was on a business trip with a Princeton classmate in South Florida a few days before Hurricane Ivan struck. After our business was done I got back on a plane to New York, but he drove 100 miles north to try to persuade his elderly parents to evacuate. They refused, and so he decided to stay with them through the hurricane.

"This was really scary stuff," he reported to me later. "We lost electricity and telephone on Saturday. Through Saturday night, it felt like the roof was going to fly off the house, or the windows were going to explode. The noise and the shaking were constant."

Multiply that fear 100-fold, and you can begin to appreciate the trauma we have visited upon the men, women and children of Samarra since last Friday, when President Bush embarked upon his campaign to subdue that city. It is 60 miles north of Baghdad with a population of 100,000.

"Residents cowered in their homes as tanks and warplanes pounded the city," MSNBC News Services reported early Friday morning. "The sound of shelling mixed with the crackle of automatic gunfire continued into the morning." Houses have been flattened and water and electricity have been turned off, residents said.

"We are terrified by the violent approach used by the Americans to subdue the city," Mahmoud Saleh, a 33-year-old civil servant, told MSNBC. "My wife and children are scared to death, and they have not been able to sleep since last night."

A physician at Samarra General Hospital reported that 80 bodies and more than 100 wounded were brought in after the first few hours of the assault. An army spokesman said 96 insurgents were killed, but the hospital's doctor said that women, children and the elderly were among the dead.

The American military has 1,000 dead and 8,000 wounded so far in Iraq, but it is important to remember that the Iraqi death toll from our invasion and occupation so far is estimated at 25,000. How many more civilians have been maimed is anyone's guess. The Bush administration does not report on Iraqi casualties. But we ought not to forget the appalling toll Bush's preemptive war has already taken on the civilian population that Bush says he is fighting to liberate.

Now, immediately after the conclusion of the first debate on Iraq and foreign policy, our president has begun to implement his decision to ratchet up the violence with which he is prepared to wage war in the streets of the towns and cities of Iraq. The nightmare that Colin Powell warned the President about — an urban guerilla war — has come to pass, and Bush feels he has no choice but to persevere because he would lose too much "face" if he were to do otherwise.

Maybe all this makes some Americans feel safe, but whether it is really making America safer or not is the fundamental issue in the election next month. Lost in the discussion is the enormous cost we are imposing upon the Iraqi people, none of whom attacked us on 9/11 and none of whom asked us to come and visit this kind of death and destruction upon them. Their electrical, water and sewage systems, already stressed before the war, are now broken. Public health is threatened by cholera and other diseases of mass destruction.

It is a mess of the administration's making, but it is being done in our name.

If we had to endure it ourselves, would we so cavalierly inflict it upon others? Robert L. Herbst '69 can be reached at rlherbst1@aol.com.