[internetworkers] Fwd: 'An Open Letter to the Members of Congress' from The Nation
Chris Hedemark
chris at yonderway.com
Thu Sep 26 16:19:13 EDT 2002
If you actually want to send an opinion on this matter to your elected
representatives, I might suggest being shorter and to the point.
Perhaps even make the first sentence "I want you to vote $OPINION on
the President's proposal for initiating war against Iraq." Usually
these letters are read by staffers, and tallied either for or against
an issue. Very few letters actually make it in front of congressmen,
and I am inclined to think that a long letter such as this one would
have an especially hard time getting that kind of attention.
The KISS policy works well with this sort of thing.
FWIW I am personally on the fence on this issue. I have no love for
Hussein. But at the same time, I believe the U.S. should take the
moral high ground when it comes to bullying weaker nations. I'm
inclined to want to come up with a creative solution, like dumping
billions into revamping our transportation infrustructure to
alternative & renewable fuels on an aggressive timetable. It makes
good sense on many levels.
On Thursday, September 26, 2002, at 04:05 PM, David R. Matusiak wrote:
> might be of interest if you live on this planet...
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 13:09:09 -0400
>> Subject: 'An Open Letter to the Members of Congress' from The Nation
>>
>> If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at
>> special discounted rates. You can order online
>> https://ssl.thenation.com
>> or call our toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536.
>>
>> please, if you believe in true freedom and peace on earth, send this
>> email to everyone you know - especially to those you think won't
>> agree.
>> let's start the debate - why aren't we all talking about this now, all
>> day, every day? because of this administration, their words and
>> actions,
>> i fear for my future, my child's future, and the future of the entire
>> human race. what our president hopes to do is wage an unjustified
>> war, a
>> "war on terror" that itself borders on terrorism. war without end is
>> a
>> life without hope. peace now, i say, in our hearts and in our hands.
>> peaceforevermore. pass it on.
>>
>> An Open Letter to the Members of Congress
>> by The Editors
>>
>>
>> Soon, you will be asked to vote on a resolution authorizing the
>> United States to overthrow the government of Iraq by military
>> force.
>> Its passage, we read on all sides, is a foregone conclusion, as if
>> what the country now faces is not a decision but the disclosure of
>> a
>> fate. The nation marches as if in a trance to war. In the House,
>> twenty of your number, led by Dennis Kucinich, have announced their
>> opposition to the war. In the Senate, Robert Byrd has mounted a
>> campaign against the version of the resolution already proposed by
>> the Bush Administration. He has said that the resolution's
>> unconstitutionality will prevent him from voting for it. "But I am
>> finding," he adds, "that the Constitution is irrelevant to people
>> of
>> this Administration." The Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to the
>> Washington Post, oppose the war. Telephone calls and the mail to
>> your
>> offices run strongly against it. Polls and news stories reveal a
>> divided and uncertain public. Yet debate in your chambers is
>> restricted to peripheral questions, such as the timing of the vote,
>> or the resolution's precise scope. You are a deliberative body, but
>> you do not deliberate. You are representatives, but you do not
>> represent.
>>
>> The silence of those of you in the Democratic Party is especially
>> troubling. You are the opposition party, but you do not oppose.
>> Raising the subject of the war, your political advisers tell you,
>> will distract from the domestic issues that favor the party's
>> chances
>> in the forthcoming Congressional election. In the face of the
>> Administration's pre-emptive war, your leaders have resorted to
>> pre-emptive surrender. For the sake of staying in power, you are
>> told, you must not exercise the power you have in the matter of the
>> war. What, then, is the purpose of your re-election? If you
>> succeed,
>> you will already have thrown away the power you supposedly have
>> won.
>> You will be members of Congress, but Congress will not be Congress.
>> Even the fortunes of the domestic causes you favor will depend far
>> more on the decision on the war than on the outcome of the
>> election.
>>
>> On April 4, 1967, as the war in Vietnam was reaching its full fury,
>> Martin Luther King Jr. said, "A time comes when silence is
>> betrayal."
>> And he said, "Some of us who have already begun to break the
>> silence
>> of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a
>> vocation
>> of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility
>> that
>> is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."
>>
>> Now the time to speak has come again. We urge you to speak--and,
>> when
>> the time comes, to vote--against the war on Iraq.
>>
>> The case against the war is simple, clear and strong. The
>> Administration calls it a chapter in the war on terror, but Iraq
>> has
>> no demonstrated ties either to the September 11 attack on the
>> United
>> States or to the Al Qaeda network that launched it. The aim of the
>> war is to deprive President Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass
>> destruction, but the extent of his program for building these
>> weapons, if it still exists, is murky. Still less clear is any
>> intention on his part to use such weapons. To do so would be
>> suicide,
>> as he well knows. Democratic Representative Anna Eshoo of
>> California
>> has reported that in closed session Administration officials have
>> been asked several times whether they have evidence of an imminent
>> threat from Saddam against the United States and have answered no.
>> She elaborated, "Not 'no, but' or 'maybe,' but 'no.'" On the other
>> hand, if he does have them, and faces his overthrow and possible
>> death at the hands of US forces, he might well use them--or, more
>> likely, give them to terrorist groups to use after his fall. He may
>> be doing so even now.
>>
>> Some observers have likened the resolution under discussion to the
>> Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964 authorizing President Johnson to
>> use force in Vietnam. But that was passed only after a report was
>> received of two attacks on US naval forces. (We now know that the
>> first attack was provoked by a prior secret American attack and the
>> second was nonexistent.) The new resolution, which alleges no
>> attack,
>> not even a fictional one, goes a step further. It is a Tonkin Gulf
>> resolution without a Tonkin Gulf incident.
>>
>> Even if Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction and wishes to
>> use them, a policy of deterrence would appear perfectly adequate to
>> stop him, just as it was adequate a half-century ago to stop a much
>> more fearsome dictator, Joseph Stalin. It is not true that military
>> force is the only means of preventing the proliferation of these
>> weapons, whether to Iraq or other countries. An alternative path is
>> clearly available. In the short run it passes through the United
>> Nations and its system of inspections, now more promising than
>> before because Iraq, responding to US pressure, has opened itself
>> unconditionally to inspectors. At the very least, this path should
>> be fully explored before military action--the traditional last
>> resort--is even considered. Such a choice in favor of
>> multilateralism, diplomacy and treaty agreements should be part of
>> a
>> much broader policy of nonproliferation and disarmament of the kind
>> that has already enjoyed great success over the past several
>> decades. Under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
>> Weapons, for example, 182 nations have agreed to do without nuclear
>> weapons. The larger issue is whether proliferation--not just to
>> Iraq
>> but to many other countries as well--is best addressed by military
>> or political means.
>>
>> But the decision to go to war has a significance that goes far
>> beyond
>> the war. The war is the product of a broader policy that has been
>> spelled out in the clearest possible terms by the Bush
>> Administration. Two other countries with nuclear programs--Iran and
>> North Korea--have already been identified by the President as
>> potential targets for military attack. The Administration's
>> recently
>> published "National Security Strategy of the United States" sets
>> forth even larger ambitions. It declares a policy of military
>> supremacy over the entire earth--an objective never before attained
>> by any power. Military programs are meanwhile forbidden to other
>> countries, all of whom are to be prevented from "surpassing or
>> equaling" the United States. China is singled out for a warning
>> that
>> by "pursuing advanced military capabilities," it is following an
>> "outdated path" that "threaten[s] its neighbors." The new policy
>> reverses a long American tradition of contempt for unprovoked
>> attacks. It gives the United States the unrestricted right to
>> attack
>> nations even when it has not been attacked by them and is not about
>> to be attacked by them. It trades deterrence for pre-emption--in
>> plain English, aggression. It accords the United States the right
>> to
>> overthrow any regime--like the one in Iraq--it decides should be
>> overthrown. (The President would like international support and he
>> would like Congressional support but asserts his right to wage war
>> without either.) It declares that the defense of the United States
>> and the world against nuclear proliferation is military force. It
>> is
>> an imperial policy--more ambitious than ancient Rome's, which,
>> after
>> all, extended only to the Mediterranean and European world. Nelson
>> Mandela recently said of the Administration, "They think they're
>> the
>> only power in the world.... One country wants to bully the world."
>>
>> A vote for the war in Iraq is a vote for this policy. The most
>> important of the questions raised by the war, however, is larger
>> still. It is what sort of country the United States wants to be in
>> the twenty-first century. The genius of the American form of
>> government was the creation of a system of institutions to check
>> and
>> balance government power and so render it accountable to the
>> people.
>> Today that system is threatened by a monster of unbalanced and
>> unaccountable power--a new Leviathan--that is taking shape among us
>> in the executive branch of the government. This
>> Leviathan--concealed
>> in an ever-deepening, self-created secrecy and fed by streams of
>> money from corporations that, as scandal after scandal has shown,
>> have themselves broken free of elementary accountability--menaces
>> civil liberties even as it threatens endless, unprovoked war. As
>> disrespectful of the Constitution as it is of the UN Charter, the
>> Administration has turned away from law in all its manifestations
>> and
>> placed its reliance on overwhelming force to achieve its ends.
>>
>> In pursuit of empire abroad, it endangers the Republic at home. The
>> bully of the world threatens to become the bully of Americans, too.
>> Already, the Justice Department claims the right to jail American
>> citizens indefinitely on the sole ground that a bureaucrat in the
>> Pentagon has labeled them something called an "enemy combatant."
>> Even
>> the domestic electoral system has been compromised by the debacle
>> in
>> Florida. Nor has the shadow cast on democracy by that election yet
>> been lifted. Election reform has not occurred. Modest campaign
>> reform
>> designed to slow the flood of corporate cash into politics, even
>> after passage in Congress, is being eviscerated by executive
>> decisions. More important, this year's Congressional campaign, by
>> shunning debate on the fundamental issue of war and peace, has
>> signaled to the public that even in the most important matters
>> facing
>> the country neither it nor its representatives decide; only the
>> executive does.
>>
>> Members of Congress! Be faithful to your oaths of office and to the
>> traditions of your branch of government. Think of the country, not
>> of your re-election. Assert your power. Stand up for the
>> prerogatives of Congress. Defend the Constitution. Reject the
>> arrogance--and the ignorance--of power. Show respect for your
>> constituents--they require your honest judgment, not capitulation
>> to
>> the executive. Say no to empire. Affirm the Republic. Preserve the
>> peace. Vote against war in Iraq.
>>
>>
>> This article can be found on the web at:
>> http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021014&s=editors
>>
>> Visit The Nation
>> http://www.thenation.com/
>>
>> Subscribe to The Nation:
>> https://ssl.thenation.com/
>
> ---
> Come and play at the InterNetWorkers Web site!
> http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/
> You are currently subscribed to InterNetWorkers mailing list
> To unsubscribe visit
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/internetworkers
>
Chris Hedemark
Professional Computer Consulting & Videography
Hillsborough, NC
http://yonderway.com
More information about the InterNetWorkers
mailing list