Just substitute Iran

Letter to the Editor Re Iraq:
01/29/03 (Note Date)

I would have the people of the Eastern Shore consider the following:

There are 9,864,000 children in Iraq under the age of 15. These children are innocent of any crime. These children are in danger of being killed; nay, murdered. Already, sanctions against Iraq have caused an estimated 500,000 childhood deaths (~5%), the result of poor sanitation, disease and starvation. When even one child dies in our community, we grieve immensely. Consider yourself in the shoes of Iraqi parents who have lost their child to a cruise missle launched from hundreds of miles away. To them this is a weapon of mass destruction and, being human, they grieve.

I wanted to say that America has never been known as an aggressor nation; then I remembered what my brother told me about being in Vietnam. It was brutal. And I remembered the invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

As a nation we have power, immense power, but we are not using it wisely. Those of us over 50 remember when America was a good nation. We find that increasingly hard to say about ourselves now.

We must stop this impending war. There is no justification for it and it is clearly a grab for oil. The plans for its taking place were on the table before the dust of the World Trade Center settled. It will cause untold hardship for many millions of people, some of who may be Americans. It is not in keeping with our Constituion or our Spirit.

And it will result in the death of innocent children. Many, many children.