Our Two-front War: A Letter in Opposition

Dear Senator Merkley,

I am pleased with your positions on several issues about which I've emailed you.

One issue remains that concerns me most: spending more money on the war in Afghanistan. Although I understand the complexity of this war that should never have happened and then should not have initially been under-funded and under-manned, I do not believe that more war is the answer.

The Afghan people represent a very different culture, much of which has been destroyed. They have suffered terribly, first from the Russians and now for the nine years of the U. S. invasion. They have also suffered, particularly women, under the Taliban. But, I don't believe that we should spend more money on war, since we have borrowed so heavily from both China and Japan, to finance further destruction of the Afghan culture.

I recently spoke with a young loan officer at a local branch of OCCU. He had served in Afghanistan and, though it may be for reasons different from mine, opposes the wars--as do many former Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan veterans.

War should be the answer of last resort. Diplomacy, economic aid for education and the people of any given country seem to me to be better choices for our tax dollars--if we can truly get such money to the people, unlike so much foreign aid that ended up, particularly in the 20th Century, in the pockets of the corrupt.

Unfortunately, thanks to a conservative Supreme Court, we had the wrong president foisted upon us in 2000 and 2004--two stolen elections and two wars of aggression, which the Founding Fathers would have condemned out of hand.

Please do not vote to fund anything beyond what it takes to withdraw our troops safely and pay reparations to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. I remember several stories and images over the years: an Iraqi girl living in an open shell of a house who had her leg removed without anesthesia and enjoyed no hope of a prosthesis; a boy who was severely burned and was the only survivor from his large family; a wife and mother whose Iraqi husband was trained in the U.S. but whose car was blown up by one U. S. tank while the husband tried to explain to the crew of another U. S. tank why he was taking his family out of the city--the children in the back seat were afraid of U. S. bombs. Only the mother survived somehow when she was thrown from the car. Then, too, our damaged service members at home need better VA care. By all accounts, many VA programs are underfunded, resulting a lack of proper treatment for our veterans.

Abroad, we owe those whose homes have been destroyed, those who are injured, and for the infrastructure which Haliburton and other contractors failed to provide, though tax dollars were allocated and have since disappeared into no-bid corporate coffers. We especially owe our own troops and their families for their losses and the suffering they have endured.

Would Sadam or the Taliban have killed more people than we are guilty of having killed in collateral damage? Somehow, I doubt it.

Bush left us with a the mess of a two-front war, from which only the corporations will ever emerge as winners. We need to end both now. Our government has no business trying to tell others how their lives should be, particularly when we have been responsible for the damage to and the deaths of so many innocents, including, perhaps, that young serviceman poignantly hugging a giant teddy bear as he sat on his cot before the Iraq ground war began.

As one U. S. mother said, "I sent the Army my son; they gave me back a murderer." Among many American artists, Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried have demonstrated that war destroys lives--both the lives of the dead and the living.

No more, please.

Sincerely,
Terry L. Barber