By Jonathan Metzger Santa Monica
This letter was sparked out of three opinion articles I read, although not all information came from those pieces over the last two weeks. For the longest time George Bush has been accused of being a liar. How is it that Bill Clinton thought Saddam was developing nuclear weapons? And how is it that Bill Clinton signed off the Saddam regime change in Iraq in 1998? And now senators and congressmen are calling George Bush a liar.
Did they have the right to see the same information that both George Bush and Bill Clinton saw? Having now been in a war, not how do we get out but how do we win?
Wasn’t it Jimmy Carter who made it illegal to murder a head of state? But now that 25 million people in Iraq have put their lives on the line, do we cut and run? More than 2,000 American soldiers have died. I’ve seen the photos of the flags and coffins north of the Santa Monica Pier attesting to this. Are we as a nation going to say, “not in my name?” But when Osama was offered up to Bill Clinton, and he refused to take him in, might that have stopped 9/11? Did you see any posters of him with Hitler-type facial hairs on it? Or when on Bill’s watch the towers were bombed the first time, or how many embassies were bombed or how many other terrorist attacks? Does the press write how Bill Clinton gutted the intelligence community? How many more people died during his presidency due to his inaction or action. They call him “Teflon Bill,” that naught better be “Roll over Bill.”
Do we as a people steer our German cars and hold onto our glasses of French wine because we don’t want to offend 1 billion of the world’s people? During the Second World War, 8,000 G.I.s died on the sand in one day on an island held by the Japanese. Do we read their names on the Ted Koppel show? Do we print their names on the front page of a newspaper? Do we quit an “unwinnable war,” because 1 billion people don’t like us? Or are we being held hostage like the French and those images of masked men cutting the heads off of American businessmen? What is it going to take to wake up that we are in World War III? Do we know they bombed hotels in Jordan and tourist resort islands? They blew up trains in Madrid, Spain. Bombed a bus and subways in London. Stopped attacks in Australia or killed a film-maker on the streets of Stockholm? Saddam has 300,000 bodies buried in Iraq, but George Bush not Saddam, is called the evil one. Did anyone tell J. Rockefeller not to go to Syria and tell them George Bush was going to attack? No, but in 2002 Senator J. Rockefeller went to Syria and told them George Bush was going to attack. All Saddam had to do was say, “come on in, look for weapons of mass destruction. I have none.” Didn’t he have enough time during his interview with Dan Rather to say, “I have none.”
Two last things. The Constitution is a living document. You change it by amending it, not by whole cloth invention. There’s nothing in the Constitution that gives you a right to privacy. And you know what that issue is and I don’t want to state what that is. There is a Ninth Amendment to the Constitution that states, “all which is not written in the Constitution (my contract with the United States) shall be left to the States.” And the United States is a Republic, where all men vote to give one man his freedom. Not a democracy where one vote over fifty percent wins. Not a mass rule.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 8, 2005. Read the original PDF.