Letter to the editor

Herewith is a letter I sent to the SB News-Press this evening. Nothing new in it, just thought I'd shake the readership up a bit. Not easy to do with a 250-word limit. If you stumble across it in the paper, let me know since I rarely read the thing and I'd like to cut it out for my memoirs.

To the editor:

Bush’s "war on terror" has doomed Americans to endless conflict, the continuation of which benefits both the terrorists and the Bush administration. The terrorists of course gain from our ongoing turmoil; but so does Bush, as evidenced by his reliance on repeated chants of fear come midterm-election time, in the hope that Americans will once again vote for his party out of reaction rather than for the opposition through reason.

Indeed, the administration’s chants have lately taken an insidious, demonic twist, with Bush/Cheney/Rummie drawing parallels between this conflict and World War Two and calling those of us who demand our troops’ withdrawal from Iraq "appeasers"; while Condi likens us to those who opposed engaging the South in the Civil War.

Enough.

A handful of crazed men attacked us before 9/11, twenty more on 9/11. A few hundred men trained to do so, perhaps a thousand, five thousand tops. But now, because of Bush’s rampant warmaking, those who aspire to kill Americans number in the hundreds of thousands and are spread around the globe. His policies have ensured that their enmity will last lifetimes: the lifetimes of the children of thousands of the people he’s killed—and the lifetimes of our children, too.

The resultant eternal, world-wide “war on terror” is therefore more the product of Bush’s actions than it is of Osama bin Laden’s; and so it is correct to say, as many Americans—and others—have concluded, George W. Bush is the world’s most dangerous terrorist.