Those of you who embrace and support these pre-emptive, aggressive war policies of the Bush administration do not seem to recognize the effects on you personally that result from your empowerment of the Bush administration. You post your defenses, justifications, rationale for invading and occupying Iraq under false or at least circumstances misleading to the point that no argument can be made that it was necessary for our national security. None of you has apparently experienced a personal loss or the shedding of the blood of someone close to you because of this war.
You have suffered other losses, because you have crossed a threshhold of opinion and belief that permits and supports the conduct of the Bush administration. You no longer require sincere disclosure or justification by the CIC of the U.S. military before he orders the sons and daughters of other Americans into harms way. That is a big leap for you to make, and I have to ask you, <h4>How dare you? How the fuck do you dare to support, and as a result, empower the current president, or any president, to send a son of my family into harms way, telling him and all of us that he is risking his life to quell a threat to our national security, when it is not fucking true?</h4>
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<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=savoy"> The Moral Case Against the Iraq War</a>
.......The problem opponents of the war have had in responding to President Bush's claim of moral legitimacy, as University of California linguistics professor George Lakoff suggests, is that they have addressed the moral issue in the terms the President has framed it rather than reframing the issue in their own moral terms. Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being "better off" avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war. As the late Robert Nozick cautioned in his classic work on the moral basis of freedom, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, we should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.....................
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You do yourself, your countrymen, and all of our brave young Americans who wear, or contemplate wearing the uniform of a branch of the U.S. military a grave disservice. Your support for this has helped to diminish the collective resolve of all of us to volunteer to defend our country, as a civilian or as a member of our military. In the weeks after 9/11, President Bush and his government had the nearly universal support of Americans and of the western world. Bush and the officials he selected to administer the policies that they determined and declared to be the most timely and effective to keep America secure in a post 9/11 world, do not have much to show for their efforts in terms of successes, 44 months later.
44 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. found itself in August, 1945. Germany had been defeated by then, and two Japanese cities had been bombed by nuclear weapons that on Dec. 7, 1941, were only on the drawing boards, with no existing process to refine the fissionable material that made their unprecedented destructive force compact and cost effective enough to be delivered on an enemy from the air.
In comparison the policies that you support have resulted in dividing the nation, slowing recruitment of volunteers to fill our military's manpower requirements, turned the outpouring of foreign sympathy for America post attack, and the sentiment to ally with Bush's intially declared "war on terrorism", into distance and disdain, and a measurable decline of foreign trust of the word of our president, state department, or of our military leaders.
Our military commanders just this week describe our presence in Iraq as <a href="http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/11693778.htm">Iraq outlook bleak, U.S. generals say</a> , even as CIC Bush spins their pronouncements in his own misleading way. <a href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=bush+progress+iraq&btnG=Search+News">http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=bush+progress+iraq&btnG=Search+News</a>