My February 2, 2006 Letter to the Editor
(about Bush II's State of the Union Speech)
by Tim Horrigan
February 2, 2006
Here is a letter which I wrote in the wee hours of the morning on February 1, 2006, in response to President Bush's State of the Union speech. It was published by my local paper— Foster's Daily Democrat of Dover, NH— on February 2.
Feb. 2 letters page URL from the paper's website
(registration
required):
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060202/NEWS1302/102020087/-1/NEWS13
Bush's speech misses the
point
To the editor:
In his State of the
Union Speech, President Bush gave a simple rationale for the war in
Iraq: "On September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems
originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could
bring murder and destruction to our country. Dictatorships shelter
terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of
mass destruction."
However, the dictatorship whose
problems actually led to 9-11 was Saudi Arabia (a U.S. ally.) Another
U.S. ally, Pakistan, was the dictatorship which was seeking weapons
of mass destruction. And it was the United States itself which
harbored the 9-11 hijackers (most of whom entered the country
legally) while they put together their terrorist plot.
Admittedly,
it is true that Saddam's Iraq was a dictatorship. But this alone does
not justify the violence we have done to the Iraqi people, any more
than Bush's own tyrannical tendencies justify the violence done to
thousands of innocent Americans on 9-11.
Timothy
Horrigan
Durham
See also:
