Blogswarm: War in Iraq

This is a copy of a letter that I sent into the newspaper. If I have time to write another post abuot the war and elaborate on some points, I will be more than happy to. However right now I am unable to do this because I am in the middle of class.

Thanks,
Chris.

Dear Mr. Editor:

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 marks the five-year anniversary of the beginning of Mr. Bush’s war. I find it loathsome, appalling and shocking that the American people have let the terror-inducing “War on Terror” continue for the duration of one year, much, much less five.

Those responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center were identified as being of Arabic decent. I have no doubt that today’s bigotry and discrimination towards all people who simply look Arabic. In comparison, note that throughout the duration of World War II and for decades afterwards, Oriental people and particularly Japanese people were subjected to the same unwarranted discrimination, including the American version of a concentration camp, set aside only for Japanese-Americans.

Speaking in terms of just probability, the hijackers behind the 9/11 attacks represent a small percentage of the Arabic people. The same percentage of extremists that can be seen in almost every culture. But probability and statistics do little to curb the appetite for vengeance that such an attack procures.

The war on terror was started as a backlash against the travesty that occurred on 9/11. It was started to help prevent something like that from ever happening again. Instead of fighting terror, we have been fighting terrorism and terrorists. These are quite different from each other. While terror is a state of mind, an emotion, terrorism is an idea that uses that emotion to make people do what you want them to do. And terrorists are any people who use terrorism to their own means.

How can we fight a war against an abstract concept? How can we win a war against a state of mind? Is there any way to possibly succeed in our hopeless undertaking? This writer thinks not. This writer would venture to guess that the purpose of a War on Terror is not to win it, but to fight it forever.

But what instills terror into the hearts of people more than physical attacks, like the kind that happens during a war? There are very few things that this writer can think of. Rather than using negotiations and peace talks to their best end, this country has prematurely drawn its sword towards someone who might have been an ally. Instead of extending the open hand of reason and negotiation (principles that this country was founded upon), this country has closed its hand and driven a punch.

We are in a war that cannot be won, but do we have the dignity to admit that it was a fruitless endeavor from the beginning? Do we have the strength to admit that we were wrong? Or will we continue fighting; continue signing away our precious freedoms that are not rivaled around the world to empower the Executive Officer with ways that we are told will hasten the end of this
impossible war? Will we continue this until we become the very thing we deposed in Iraq?

If current legislation, like the hypocritically named Patriot’s Act, continues to take our rights away and continues to empower a new government that is founded upon a war, will we not come closer and closer to that which we opposed in Iraq; a dictatorship? This writer sincerely hopes that the American people will awaken from their American Dream so that they can see what horrors they have wrought.

The train we are on as a country is heading towards despotism and every citizen has a ticket, do we really want to go there, or should we change directions at the next station?

Chris
Canton

Media, Conservatives and Terrorists ! Oh My!

I'll start this post with the note that my grandmother is a die-hard conservative. She knows that I am liberal, but not that I am an atheist. She knows how I feel about a good number of issues because we frequently discuss them. She and I recently went out to lunch together. We got into a discussion about the presidential election, as is bound to happen these days. The Primary is Tuesday here in Georgia, so she is really coming down to whom she wishes to go and vote for. I, unfortunately, will be too young to vote in both the primary and the real race this year. Next year, I will be old enough to vote in local elections, and I will definitely be old enough to vote in the next presidential election. She is backing Mike Huckabee because she agrees with him because he is a "moral and honest man" and because "he's a Baptist preacher". I really do not like him because he wishes to shred the Constitution for his own ideals.

But she said something about Mitt Romney that amused me quite a bit. We were talking, and she was giving her short synopsis of all of the different candidates. She said, "And Romney, well he's strong on the military issue. We need a president who will be strong on the military issue like he is. I mean, we have all these terrorists running around."

And that struck me as a little odd. How is it that the conservatives have so swallowed the media that poor old grandmothers can be convinced that there are terrorists lurking in the shadows of everywhere that they go? Or, as my grandmother would say, how have the terrorists so swallowed the media that their deeds run rampant on every channel you turn to?

It is just a little odd, I think, that the conservatives are running out of methods to make people support their war. They have had to resort to two methods that I've seen. The first is the "Well, if you don't support the war, you're not patriotic" method. This method is a mud-slinging and uninformed method. (How is killing people patriotic?)

The second method that I have seen them use is to grapple with the media and to resort to scaring people about the war. If people are convinced that terrorists are everywhere, they are more likely to support the War Against Terror. Well I'm not convinced of either.

I believe that terrorists have existed since pretty much the beginning of the human race. We just called them priests to begin with. As long as someone is willing to die to further his or her cause, there will be terrorists. ("Imagine.... nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too.") Since terrorism has always existed and likely will always exist, it seems foolish to declare a war against it, doesn't it? I personally think that the War on Terror will be just as successful as the War on Drugs and Abstinence-Only Sex-Education.

A country cannot declare war against a material object. The object firstly has no will to fight back, but secondly has no means to fight back. You can declare war against the users of drugs, but I agree with Mike Gravel in his saying that drug-addicts are not criminals, they are people with problems. They should be treated as people with problems, not as criminals.

If you declare a war against terror and then the media uses terror to rally support against the terrorism, do we still call it hypocrisy? Not in America, we call it the “American Dream”. (And like George Carlin said, they call it the American Dream only because you have to be asleep to believe it.)

Please leave comments of your own opinion. If you wish for me to talk about something in a future post, please be sure to email me at billvoltage@alltel.net. Please include the words "Tolerance and Peace" in the subject line, so that it is not kicked back by my SPAM filter. Thank you.