Deadline Day in Persian Gulf
On Jan. 12, after many hours of debate and lots of macho posturing for the TV cameras, both the House and Senate voted in favor of war. It is no coincidence that only two of these 532 voting legislators have sons in the military. Needless to say, none have daughters there, either. But plenty of poor and middle-class Americans do. And it is these sons and daughters who are now being asked to risk their lives for the sake of cheap oil in America and the restoration of the obscenely rich and loathsome monarchy in Kuwait. Are these truly the “vital interests” that demand we let loose the entire force of our troops and potentially annihilate tens of thousands of human beings?
President Bush and company have gotten carried away with their own foreign-policy rhetoric and their desperate need to get our nation’s domestic crises off the front page. In the process of obfuscation, America has become a war-maker, not a peacemaker.
As we celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday, so ironically on the brink of war, it is all the more important that we stand up for peace before it is too late. He would have.
ANNE FARRELL, Del Mar
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