The day when the United States invades Iraq awaits us all. It is simply a matter of time. When and how are the only real questions left.

As that day approaches we see more and more news articles examining the issue of whether or not we should go to Iraq.

Any uninformed student who might have read “Students would feel impact of war on Iraq” on the front page of Tuesday’s Daily is probably a bit wary about us taking military action. But what the “experts” said in this article is the furthest thing from the truth.

The second source, Joanna Courteau, adviser to Amnesty International, was the most outrageous. She starts off criticizing the Bush administration for getting us into something the entire world is against.

“Our government has decided to engineer a war and nobody else in the world is in favor of this war,” said Courteau, university professor of foreign languages and literature.

The fact of the matter is over 80 countries have told us they will stand by our side in Iraq, including our closest ally, Great Britain.

This is nothing – it could just simply be that she was misinformed. But she then starts talking nonsense.

“For a long time, we’ve been trying to dehumanize Saddam,” she said of the government trying to get support from the rest of the world.

Am I missing something? It doesn’t take much to “dehumanize” this guy. He used chemical weapons on his own people, murdered innocent citizens to get his way, and let’s not forget that he tried to conquer another country.

Courteau is also worried about how to explain an invasion to the student body.

“I think if we in fact go to war in Iraq, there is no way to explain it to students.”

There are a number of ways to explain this. How about Saddam’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Or how about him trying to get a nuclear bomb?

These weapons of mass destruction are dangerous enough without somebody like Saddam being the finger on the trigger.

Some argue, “We have no proof, we have no proof.”

Think about it – he has not let U.N. inspectors search for weapons of mass destruction. Why could that be?

He also admitted to the United Nations that he has tons of anthrax and other ingredients in biological weapons. I hate to “dehumanize” the guy, but he is not someone the world wants in possession of these materials.

But, weapons of mass destruction are only part of it.

An article titled the “Iraqi Connection” ran last November in the London Observer that makes it hard to argue that Saddam doesn’t have ties to al-Qaida.

The article tells of several meetings between Iraqi intelligence officials and the actual hijackers from Sept. 11 in the spring of 2001.

A top U.S. analyst, a serving intelligence official who was not named, said “You should think of this thing on a spectrum: With zero Iraqi involvement at one end, and 100 percent Iraqi direction and control at the other. The scenario we now find most plausible is somewhere in the middle range – significant Iraqi assistance and some involvement.”

The article also tells the story of a Mukhabarat colonel, codenamed Abu Zeinab, and his experiences at one of Iraq’s terrorist training facilities, Salman Park.

He said the camp had an isolated area specifically set up for Muslim extremists, many of whom had ties to Osama bin Laden. He spoke of the culture clash between the radicals and Saddam’s Baathists, who did the training, referring to the relationship as a “nightmare.”

He also spoke of one of Salman Park’s specific highlights where extremists were trained to highjack airplanes with small knives and bare hands.

Sound familiar?

It doesn’t take much more explanation then that. We have a man in possession of some of the world’s most dangerous weapons and he has ties to an extremely threatening terrorist organization. That’s not a good combination.

Courteau also told the Daily that a war in Iraq will affect the student body by stripping funds used for grants and other forms of financial aid.

President Bush has spent more on education than any other president in the history of this country. It was his number-one priority before Sept. 11. It is highly unlikely that someone who puts such an emphasis on education is going to just start stripping its funding to have fun at war.

Courteau was simply using scare tactics to get students to buy into her ideology.

Maybe the next time an expert is used in the Daily, they will know a little bit more about the issue they are discussing to ensure they are not blatantly misinforming the student body.

Zach Calef is a junior in apparel merchandising, design,

and production from Cedar Rapids. He is a member of the Daily’s editorial board.