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["David R. Matusiak" <dave AT matusiak.org>]

might be of interest if you live on this planet...

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> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 13:09:09 -0400
> Subject: 'An Open Letter to the Members of Congress' from The Nation
>
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> 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
>
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