For The Record

A brief history of editorials against the invasion of Iraq

From the moment the invasion of Iraq became a possibility, as associate editor and then as editor of the Haleakala Times, I published the editorial opinions linked below. They are offered here as a small bit of evidence – if I had access to this information working at a small bi-weekly newspaper on Maui, then elected officials with offices in Washington and direct access can't claim to have been ignorant of the truth...
Rob Lafferty

February 19, 2003
The Crusade of the Shadow Men

March 5, 2003
The truth shall set you free - if you can find some...

August 6, 2003
Orwell would be proud, as Bush perfects “newspeak”

May 19, 2004
Welcome to Baghdad – you can see Tehran from here

January 19, 2005
“The tragic results of war...”

The Crusade of the Shadow Men

Haleakala Times editorial
February 19, 2003
by Rob Lafferty

Decades ago, about a week or so after the US-supported Shah of Iran was overthrown by fundamentalist Muslims, the American government - the real one, the shadow men backstage who make the rules and own the actors who front for them - began cozying up to the Iraqi government.

When Saddam Hussein took control of Iraq and started a war against Iran, the shadow men supported Hussein. They helped Iran, too, just in case things went badly for Hussein. But Iraq got most of the technology for making chemical, biological and nuclear weapons from US-based multi-national corporations, with US government approval.

Canadian Dimension magazine recently ran a political cartoon that showed a reporter asking an American official, "What proof do you have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?"

The official replies, "We kept the receipts."

Those would be receipts held by companies such as Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Tectronics, Bechtel, International Computer Systems, Unisys, Sperry, Eastman Kodak, TI Coating and a dozen others.

Other receipts from sales and information exchanges are held by the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture, plus nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia.

Those companies and agencies quietly helped arm Iraq. They trained Iraqi nuclear scientists and supplied material and technology used in the construction of weapons. Russia and Germany are just two of the countries that helped as well, profiting from deals with a known brutal dictator and madman over the course of his political career.

Then Hussein used poison gas against Iran. The shadow men didn't have a problem with that, it seems. They probably disapproved, but not strongly enough to stop selling equipment to Iraq. They got their profit from arms sales, as the shadow men always do when there's a war. But they didn't get their share of the usual spoils of war, as the conflict ended in a truce. There can be no pillaging when there is no official loser.

It wasn't until Hussein used poison gas against Iraqi citizens that some - but certainly not all - companies and governments backed away from supplying weapons to Iraq. Yet the shadow men still took no action to condemn that second use of "weapons of mass destruction."

It wasn't until he invaded Kuwait that the flow dwindled away to a trickle. Even then, the choice was not to force a "regime change" in Iraq after their army was trounced by the UN coalition in "Operation Desert Storm."
So why is our president saying now that time has run out for Hussein?

Because more than a decade ago he actually used weapons that were sold to him? Because he might use them again, or sell them to someone who will?

Time has run out for Hussein because things have changed. They have changed over here, not in Iraq. Our current president is a wanna-be Texas oil man, from an extended family with financial interests in the Middle East, and he blames Hussein for an attempt on his father's life a few years back.

He also owes much to the shadow men who brought him into the oil business, and propped him up when his ventures failed.

George W. Bush is a man with no experience or apparent talent for foreign policy. He believes the oil business is a necessary component of America's strength. He has a personal motive for revenge, and he can see a chance for his family and his friends to become quite wealthy. With all of that external influence and internal pressure working on his ingrained belief system, it's not surprising that he acts like a man obsessed.

And it's no wonder he called the war on terrorism "a crusade" - a choice of words that caused anyone with a basic knowledge of Western history to cringe. Bush speaks as a pious man, just as the old Crusaders did. He's just as sure as they were that the regrettable killing of innocent bystanders during the hunt for "evildoers" is something God has sanctioned.

Citing a moral imperative regarding "weapons of mass destruction" can be effective when people ignore history. The shadow men know that people don't remember when both sides in World War I used chemical weapons against their foes. They count on us to forget Vietnam, where US bombardments of napalm and defoliants - chemical weapons - poisoned and killed soldiers and civilians from both sides.

For forty years the shadow government sent CIA-trained teams to assassinate leaders of other countries. Since WWII the US has led the world in the production, sale and distribution of every imaginable weapon. And America is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons - on civilians, in cities far from the battlefield. Twice.

The nuclear attack on Japan ended the War in the Pacific and probably saved the lives of many American soldiers. The shadow men use that as justification for sending the innocent children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a fiery death.

Iraqi children will be among the dead when "smart bombs" fall in the streets of Baghdad. Their deaths will be much harder to justify than those children doomed in Japan in 1945.

But as God is his witness, George W. Bush is gonna try... and this time, the shadow men will get their chance to share in the spoils of war.

The truth shall set you free - if you can find some...

Haleakala Times editorial
March 5, 2003
By Rob Lafferty

There's a huge amount of talk coming out of Washington lately about the administration's plans and justifications for war in Iraq. Sadly, the nature of the language being used and the way information is being presented - and repressed - are textbook examples of the ancient practice of propaganda.

When the government of a republic lies to its people in order to promote a particular agenda, then the true republic ceases to exist. America is now under the rule of a central authority group that believes it can say and do whatever it chooses. Deception and secrecy are two of its primary choices.

Although the people still have the right to voice opinions about the way their country is governed, don't expect anyone in the White House to listen to disagreement. And best be careful what you say.

President George W. Bush made that clear when he dismissed the anti-war protests by saying, "Size of protest, it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group," Bush said. "The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security - in this case, the security of the people."

It seems that the role of a leader in Bush's mind also includes lying, evasion and secrecy. That kind of behavior has become the centerpoint of his administration. Some examples:

There will be no investigation into the events that surrounded September 11, 2001. Why? Because, in Bush's words, "It would take resources away from the war against terrorism". The one faint hope for an official inquiry died after plans to appoint former Admiral John Poindexter, a convicted liar, were announced.

We don't know who helped shape the current energy policy, never mind what kind of advice was given. Why? According to Vice-President Dick Cheney, if the public knew who was advising him, those advisors wouldn't be able to speak freely. It's a better thing, in his mind, to set policy in secret and announce it later. An open discussion would be counterproductive.

Colin Powell went before the U.N. to gain support for the invasion of Iraq, and mentioned the anthrax attack in the U.S. during his speech. He didn't mention that the anthrax was an American product, most likely sent by someone with access to government supplies. Neither Iraq nor Al-Qaieda had anything to do with that deadly episode, but both have now been publicly - and falsely - linked to it.

Multi-national companies that supplied weapons to Hussein are named in a document sent to the UN by Iraq, but we aren't supposed to see that list. A U.S. official (who asked not to be named) said, "The issue is not so much who the suppliers are. The issue is making sure that Iraq declares what it has.

Donald Rumsfeld supported a proposed Office of Strategic Influence to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations, to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries. The plan was stopped due to public outrage, but Rumsfeld got his project anyway.

In his own words, last November, "I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done - and I have."

Bush's recent statement that a new survey by "Blue-Chip economists" predicts substantial economic growth if Congress passes his proposed tax cut has a small problem - that forecast doesn't exist.

"I don't know what he was citing," said Randell E. Moore, editor of the Blue Chip Economic Forecast, a newsletter that surveys 53 of the nation's top economists each month. "I was a little upset. It sounded like the Blue Chip Economic Forecast had endorsed the president's plan. That's simply not the case."

World opinion has shifted dramatically against Bush partly because, after agreeing to resolve the Iraq issue through the United Nations last fall, he now claims the U.N. is irrelevant.

Bush's earlier position "now appears to have been an elaborate con job," says Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Other leaders feel manipulated and deceived."

The U.S. is considering direct military intervention in Colombia following the murder of an American and the kidnapping of three others, all suspected CIA agents. Washington has refused to release any information about the men, which strengthens the belief that they were agents on a surveillance mission.

In 1979 James Bath of Houston, a family friend, gave Bush the Younger $50,000 for a five percent stake in Arbusto Energy. Bath was the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, a brother of Osama bin Laden. Shortly after the September 11 tragedy, in conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged the relationship - and said that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests. He never mentioned the name bin Laden .

Despite a long history of this kind of behavior, we are being told to simply trust that the government has evidence which justifies an invasion of Iraq. No one outside the halls of Washington will ever see that evidence because the American people are now officially on a need-to-know only status.

And we'll be told only what the authorities think we need to know. Welcome to the New World Order of the 21st Century, as promised by Bush the Elder. Welcome to Amerika.

Dying for the truth...

Orwell would be proud, as Bush perfects “newspeak”

Haleakala Times editorial
August 6, 2003
by Rob Lafferty

You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you’ve seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war…
~ Jackson Browne, 1985

As individuals, our actions are the true measure of our values. What we say doesn’t really matter; what we believe is not that important, either. It’s what we actually do that counts – it’s our choices that reflect our philosophy and reveal the quality of our heart.

Governments are much like people in that way – politicians being humans, after all. The patterns of behavior by an administration tell us more about its agenda and priorities than all the public speeches and statements of every member combined.

A classic example is the difference between the statements and actions of the George W. Bush administration regarding Iraqi nuclear weapons and facilities. The public was repeatedly told that the lack of accountability within Iraq’s weapons programs and nuclear power plants posed a genuine, imminent threat to our national security. The deadly potential of nuclear materials in the wrong hands was used as the primary cause to wage war.

Oil was not a reason, they said. Access to the abundant, cheap oil under the desert sand was never a factor in the decision to invade a rogue nation and depose its evil dictator, we were told.

Yet before the invasion began, plans were in place to secure the oil fields as a first priority. After the invasion was underway, the Oil Ministry buildings and pipelines were secured by the U.S. military as quickly as possible.

During planning for the invasion, there were no specific orders issued to organize a search for nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. While the oil fields were being secured a nuclear reactor was left unguarded for six weeks, allowing unknown amounts of material and equipment to be stolen from the site. Even the metal drums used to store radioactive waste were taken from the facility, emptied, sold on the streets and used as water storage containers for thirsty families.

More than a month after bombs stopped falling on Baghdad, Time magazine reported on a meeting in Qatar in which neither the president, his top military commander, or the man in charge of rebuilding Iraq, had any idea who was leading the search for “weapons of mass destruction”. They had to be told by aides that a Defense Department official back in Washington D.C. had been handed the task.

At that same time, thanks to a well-executed, comprehensive plan, oil had once again begun to flow out of the desert through the pipelines.

That reality reveals the true priorities of those who initiated this war, and it gives credibility to what Paul Wolfowitz actually said two months ago – “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everybody could agree on.”

The Internet has made it easier to track and compare statements made by public officials to their subsequent actions. Now more than ever, the difference between political rhetoric and political reality can be brought sharply into focus. With that information laid out on a page before you, it’s easy to see a pattern of evasion, denial, obsessive secrecy and outright lying by the President and members of his administration.

Reporting on a January 17 Presidential visit to Walter Reed Army Hospital, the Washington Post quoted Bush as saying, “We are, should and must provide the best care for anybody who is willing to put their life in harm’s way.” Two pages later in that same newspaper, there was an article announcing that the Bush administration was immediately cutting off access to the federal health care system for approximately 164,000 veterans.

In June of 2002, Bush went on a tour of a HUD housing project built under the HOPE VI program. Along with a lot of praise for the project, Bush said “Part of being a secure America is to encourage home ownership.” Eight months later his administration phased out the HOPE VI project, shutting it down entirely.

And on April 24, 2002, at a South Dakota ethanol plant, Bush stated “I said when I was running for President that I supported ethanol, and I meant it.” The Bush budget proposal for 2004 proposed eliminating all funds for the program that runs that very same facility.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood before a Senate committee recently and was asked if he knew of American involvement in providing Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons materials in the 1980s. His reply to Sen. Robert Byrd’s question was “I have never heard of that, I don’t know where you heard of that, and I doubt it.”

Dozens of US-based corporations sold a wide variety of weapons to Iraq for many years. Many of those sales were approved by the administrations in office at the time. Some of the biological weapons recovered from Iraq after the first Gulf War were either made in America or made from American stock material.

Those are solid facts that have been documented in official records and reported openly in the media for the past ten years. Rumsfeld would have to be incompetent or a fool not to know those facts. He’s neither of those things – but he is a proven liar, as are his co-workers Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney.

Although government in America wasn’t begun as a democracy, it was formed from a belief in honesty and open behavior. The Founding Fathers were mostly upper-class citizens who feared the instability of a democracy. They preferred a republic, so they designed one based on their personal ideas of honor and justice. It was an elitist system that was doomed to fail, but it worked fairly well at first and lasted for several decades.

A democratic system did evolve and operate for a short time in America, and it lived up to the best and worst of the democratic potential – much in the way that the Founding Fathers feared. That system was absorbed during the growth of Big Business; now the largest corporations control the process. They’ve replaced political campaigns with a marketing program to sell the new CEO of the country to the people.

In that sales campaign, truth is secondary to perception. All that matters is getting a message across to the consumer – if a lie serves that purpose better than the truth, then the lie gets promoted and the truth is denied, minimized or simply ignored. By the time the campaigning is over and one group assumes power, that attitude of deception will have grown from a habit into a working philosophy.

The Bush administration has a grand vision for this country, just as their predecessors did over 200 years ago. They are at the top of the human social pyramid - and they plan to stay there while they manifest their vision, just as those Founding Fathers intended.

But this administration was born out of lies and deception. Its members seem to have no moral restraint against using deceit as a tool to accomplish their goals. The truth is not in them, unless it happens to serve their purposes.

The long history of an American government deliberately lying its own citizens doesn’t make that behavior acceptable today, not when many of our people suffer and are in need – and not while soldiers are dying in battle during a questionable war in a distant land.

The behavior of the Bush administration is simply unacceptable.

Welcome to Baghdad

You can see Tehran from here...

Haleakala Times editorial
May 19, 2004
By Rob Lafferty

A major criticism of the invasion of Iraq is that no exit strategy was in place before the fighting began. Even today, no workable exit strategy has been developed. Bush administration officials aren’t concerned about that – and weren’t concerned before the occupation – because they know we won’t be leaving. They’ve known that for at least twelve years.

A vital element in our current government’s long–term strategy is the creation of permanent military bases in Iraq to maintain a strong presence the Middle East. That plan is spelled out clearly in the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” a document President Bush released on September 20, 2001, just nine days after the Twin Towers were brought down. That statement of American policy is a close match to an earlier report issued by the Project For A New American Century. In many places, it uses the same language.

“Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century” was written in 2000 by the PNAC, a Washington–based think tank created in 1997. Vice President Dick Cheney is a founding member of PNAC, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, National Security Advisor Lewis Libby and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

The 2000 report directly acknowledges its basis in a still-earlier document known as the “Defense Policy Guidance” drafted in the aftermath of the Gulf War by the Defense Department. The main authors of that 1992 policy paper were Wolfowitz and Libby. The Defense Secretary in 1992 was Cheney.

That once-secret document describes itself as a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” It features the United States creating world peace by using military and economic power. When leaked to the press, however, the ambitious proposal drew so much criticism from Congress that the first President Bush refused to support it.

Cheney responded to the criticism by having a Pentagon spokesman dismiss the document as a “low-level draft” and claim that Cheney had not seen it – even though one section stated that it contained “definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense.”

The 2000 PNAC document that came along eight years later describes itself as “a blueprint for shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” It says that “even should Saddam pass from the scene,” bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently as “Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has.”

The Plan revealed in those three documents shows that Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Donald Kagan, a co–chairman of the PNAC project, wants permanent military bases in Iraq to make sure the oil flows. “You saw the movie ‘High Noon’?” he once asked. “We’re Gary Cooper. We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time. That will come at a price, but think of the price of not having it. When we have economic problems, it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.”

All three documents speak of protecting “American interests” in the Middle East. America has only three significant interests in the Middle East – the nation of Israel, the royal House of Saud and those vast deposits of oil within easy reach under the sands of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The invasion of Iraq was carried out to establish a forward post in the battle to create an American Empire. Those who dream of Empire haven’t overlooked the rest of the world, either. The 2000 document mentions China as being ripe for “regime change” and says, “It is time to increase the presence of American forces in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.” According to the plan’s architects, this will lead to “American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratization in China.”

The United States is undergoing an historic change in who we are as a nation. There has already been a fundamental shift in how we operate internationally. Candidate George Bush certainly did not advocate such an ambitious Grand Plan while he was campaigning. During his foreign policy debate with Al Gore, Bush spoke of his commitment to a far more humble foreign policy.

Instead, he and his administrators have denounced entire countries – and the United Nations – for not going along with the Plan. They have encouraged “regime change” in Cuba and Venezuela and imposed sanctions on Syria. Bush even used much of the same language in his comments towards Syria that he once used in building a case for the invasion of Iraq.

“Despite many months of diplomatic efforts to convince the Government of Syria to change its behavior, Syria has not taken significant, concrete steps to address the full range of U.S. concerns,” Bush said in a message to Congress. He declared a “national emergency” to address the “unusual and extraordinary threat” posed by Syria.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? Haven’t we heard those phrases before?

Meanwhile, Pakistani officials have been openly selling nuclear weapons technology to anyone with the necessary cash. North Korea brags openly about their nuclear weapons and willingness to use them. And despite invading Iraq for allegedly having chemical and biological weapons, the Bush administration may seek to develop more for American military use.

In the future, according to an especially chilling passage in ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’, the PNAC envisions that “…new methods of attack – electronic, ‘non–lethal’, biological – will be more widely available. Combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes. Advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”

It also urges the development of small nuclear warheads. This year the House of Representatives gave the Pentagon approval to develop a “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator”. As of this writing, the Senate has refused to take that step.

Bush and his people didn’t suddenly get tough after 9/11. They are implementing the early phases of their Plan and using the “War On Terror” as justification for any action they choose to take. They have committed the full resources of the US military and reserves in pursuit of their vision. And they expect the American people to sacrifice thousands of lives and pay the hundreds of billions of dollars it will cost to try and turn those dreams of Empire into reality.

“The tragic results of war...”

Haleakala Times editorial
January 19, 2005
by Rob Lafferty

This past holiday season, nearly 900 children in America found more grief than joy in their homes. Each one had a parent killed in Iraq. Ten of those children lost their mother. Forty are infants, too young to understand their loss because they have never met their fathers. Now they never will.

Why did their mother or father die? For what cause did their parent sacrifice their family’s future? We cannot stop asking ourselves those questions, because these children will spend all their lives asking the same questions.
They will hear many justifications for the military action that caused their loss. Most of those reasons are based on known lies and tragic incompetence by the Bush administration, but they are still being used.

Other answers they will hear have a patriotic ring to them, but are meaningless phrases – “Your father gave his life for freedom,” or “Your mother died fighting terrorism.”

All of the ever-changing excuses given by George Bush for invading Iraq end with his mantra that “America will be safer” because of his illegal and immoral act of war. Anyone who believes that false promise is either naive about, or complicit in, one of the greatest crimes in American history.

The hard, true answer is a simple one. We, the American people, allowed our soldiers to be sent off to fight and die in a foreign land for no acceptable reason. Collectively, we are just as responsible for the destruction of Iraqi cities, and for the death of both soldiers and innocents, as the men and women who made the plans and issued the orders.

We elected a president and vice- president who have been privately planning a military invasion and occupation of Iraq for more than a decade. When that truth became known, not enough of us spoke out in opposition of their quest for geopolitical glory.

We went along with the horrible concept of asking American military personnel to kill and die in pursuit of Empire and a New World Order.

We elected senators and representatives who sanctioned this carnage with their votes. Like us, many of them believed the lies we were told, lies that put fears for personal safety into our hearts, and the fear of losing their positions of privilege into our elected officials.

So we sent our soldiers off to die, in blind support of our “leaders” and to ease our own nameless fears. We carry that guilt together as a sovereign people.

Adding to the tragedy, soldiers who come home from war are still treated poorly by the government that ordered them into battle. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless. Most of them Vietnam vets; many fought in the Gulf War as well.

Some soldiers returning from Iraq suffer from the effects of depleted uranium; others from post-traumatic stress disorder. Many find they have no place to live; others cannot live with the memories of what they experienced.


In a recent interview with Democracy Now!, Herold Noel, who served in Fallujah last year, left the Army and is now homeless in New York City, described his personal view of the nightmare in Iraq.

“There was just a lot of slaughter and death. That’s all. Children would be on the streets getting caught in the crossfire. I seen children get run over by tanks,” said Noel.

“The minute we hit Iraq, we knew we wasn’t welcome. ‘Cause we were getting ambushed every day. We had kids shooting AK’s at us, even twelve-year-olds, eleven-year-olds shooting AK’s at us, rushing our trucks, trying to get food off the trucks. It was – it’s hard for me to talk about it.”

During a December 20, 2004 press briefing, President Bush spoke of the impact that violent resistance aimed at the US military and those who work with them was having on the Iraqi people. “Car bombs that destroy young children or car bombs that indiscriminately bomb in religious sites are effective propaganda tools,” he said.

He didn’t speak of the impact that American bombs dropped from airplanes have had on Iraqi families. Neither he nor any of his official spokespersons have ever truly acknowledged the death of many thousands of innocents in any way, except to describe them as “collateral damage” or “the tragic results of war”.

They will not admit that most of the human beings who died as a result of American bombs falling on residential neighborhoods did not deserve such a fate.

Immoral acts of war don’t happen only on the battlefields. Late last month, the editors of the Washington Post accused the Bush administration of committing war crimes in the military prisons of Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. They insist that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lied when he said the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was an isolated event.

Citing government documents, the Post editors said, “The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false,” and added, “The documents also confirm that interrogators at Guantanamo believed they were following orders from Mr. Rumsfeld.”

Although many people criticize Rumsfeld for his apparent insensitivity, and for making arrogant statements regarding his own policies and conduct towards the soldiers he sends into battle, George Bush continues to defend him as “...a good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes.”

Even if Bush has the true measure of Rumsfeld’s feelings, it doesn’t really matter what is in a person’s heart – their behavior is what counts. The deliberate act of sending soldiers into battle for no good cause and without proper support is what matters, not how anyone claims to feel about doing so.

All of this behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people – in your name, in mine, in the name of our children. Much of the responsibility for the continuing death and destruction in Iraq is being laid at America’s feet by the people of that land, and rightly so.

If we refuse to sanction any more killing, we can stop this madness. For the sake of our nation, we must.