Author: Laurence Vance

I don’t often agree with Democratic congressmen, but Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) had the right response after listening to Bush’s December 14th speech on Iraq:

“The President now says he is responsible for the war in Iraq. I agree with the President. He is responsible. He is responsible for attacking a nation that did not attack us. He is responsible for the 2,151 American troops killed in Iraq. He is responsible for the 15,881 U.S. troops injured in the war. He is responsible for at least 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed since the start of the war. He is responsible for draining $250 billion from U.S. taxpayers to pay for the war. And he is responsible for the failed reconstruction and for the continued occupation.”

and he is the president of Iran, according to conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage. Just a few years ago it was Saddam Hussein who was Hitler. Will Republicans, conservatives, the Religious Right, and hawkish Democrats be fooled into war again? You can bet money on it.

According to the Center for American Progress, the war is Iraq is costing $177 million per day, $7.4 million per hour, and $122,820 per minute. The Center has available a Cost of Iraq War Ticker that can be added to websites.

when he wrote in The Education of a Christian Prince: “It happens sometimes that princes enter into mutual agreements and carry on a war on trumpted-up grounds so as to reduce still more the power of the people and secure their own positions through disaster to their subjects. Wherefore the good Christian prince should hold under suspicion every war, no matter how just.”

We have too many veterans. Mainly because we have had too many wars and interventions. On this Veterans Day let us not remember those in the military who “defend our freedoms” by invading other countries. Instead, let us never forget that it began as Armistice Day, which commemorated the end of the the monstrous evil known as World War I. Let us also never forget how wars result from the lies of politicians. After Woodrow Wilson campaigned on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” he said to the U.S. House: “There will be no war. This country does not intend to become involved in war. It would be a crime against civilization for us to go into it.”

So what happened to the war crime trial for Wilson? The same thing that will happen to the war crime trial for Bush for lying us into another war. When will Congress get the backbone to cut off funding for the monstrous evil in Iraq? I hate to be so pessimistic, but probably when Wilson and Bush are tried for war crimes.

Writing in 1968, Will Durant, in his The Lessons of History, says that “in the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.”

And then this gem: “When the states of Europe freed themselves from papal overlordship and protection, each state encouraged nationalism as a supplement to its army and navy. If it foresaw conflict with any particular country it fomented, in its people, hatred of that country, and formulated catchwords to bring that hatred to a lethal point; meanwhile it stressed its love of peace.”